"politics of location" : Provocative extracts from bell hooks's writing

Thinking of our discussion yesterday, I was very excited when reading these extracts as follows this morning, which may be helpful in terms of clarifing our research identities and place/space/location. Here I would like to share with you all since I really like it though the label of "postmodernity" might remain an ongoing issue open to debate.

It is actually quoted by E. D. Soja in his "Planning in/for Postmodernity"(pp.247-8) from this book

"Postmodern culture with its decentered subject can be the space where ties are severed or it can provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding. To some extent, ruptures, surfaces, contextuality, and a host of other happenings create gaps that make space for oppositional practices... A space is there for critical exchange...[and] this may very well be "the" central future location of resistance struggle, a meeting place where new and radical happenings can occur.

As a radical standpoint, perspective, position, the "politics of location" necessarily calls those of us who would participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic cultural practice to identify the spaces where we begin the process of re-vision oneself there is diffcult yet necessary. It is not a "safe" place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.

There is a definite distinction between the marginality which is imposed by oppresive structure and that marginality one chooses as a site of resistance, as a location of radical openness and possibility. It was this marginality that I was naming as a central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives. As such I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose, to give up, but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one's capacity to resist. It offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and to create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.

This is an intervention. A message from that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity to erase the category colonizer/colonized. Marginality is the space of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there."

Isn't the last paragraph inspiringly covering what we were grappling with yesterday? :P