I'm Here: An Asian American Woman's Response

Abstract

AS ONE who has been working intensively and almost exclusively in the most basic and practical aspect of feminist scholarship, namely the unearthing and reclaiming of forgotten women writers, I initially felt flattered (They want to know what I think!), then somewhat peeved (They only want to know what I think because they want a token Chinese), and finally sobered (Well, and what do I think?) to be invited to comment on Ellen Messer-Davidow's theoretical essay, The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary Criticisms. First, I'm grateful to be nudged in this way to lift my head from the part of the garden in which I have been so intently digging -namely, searching for women of Chinese ancestry who have written in English and published in the United States-to see what my sister scholars are doing. I see that they are well aware of and have been debating extensively the same problems I have been struggling with, specifically, the dilemmas between politics and aesthetics, between self as central and self as other, between empowering one's self and one's people by retrieving one's past while negotiating with the powerful, and often hostile, outside forces that control our very survival. Or, put another way, how can I write about books that are important to me personally, as a Chinese American woman, and yet maintain a position in a traditional department of English that considers my writers not only third rate but third world and therefore extraneous to the discipline? It may be true that negritude has analogues with women's aesthetic practices, as Rachel DuPlessis writes in For the Etruscans,1 following a tradition dating back to the mid-nineteenth century when white feminists saw a parallel between their own social situation and that of the black slaves. But white feminists do not have the