Methodology of the Oppressed (Theory Out of Bounds (Paperback)) by Chela Sandoval

by Chela Sandoval

In a work with far-reaching implications, Chela Sandoval does no less than revise the genealogy of theory over the past thirty years, inserting what she terms "U.S. Third World feminism" into the narrative in a way that thoroughly alters our perspective on contemporary culture and subjectivity.What Sandoval has identified is a language, a rhetoric of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions. U.S liberation movements of the post-World War II era generated specific modes of oppositional consciousness. Out of these emerged a new activity of consciousness and language Sandoval calls the "methodology of the oppressed". This methodology -- born of the strains of the cultural and identity struggles that currently mark global exchange -- holds out the possibility of a new historical moment, a new citizen-subject, and a new form of alliance consciousness and politics.Utilizing semiotics and U.S. Third World feminist criticism, Sandoval demonstrates how this methodology mobilizes love as a category of critical analysis. Rendering this approach in all its specifics, Methodology of the Oppressed gives rise to an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on a theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Theory, Philosophy, Academic, Social Justice, Sociology

Unknown Binding

First published May 23, 2000

About the author

Chela Sandoval is a professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Reviews

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh dear. I had such high hopes. This book was published in the year 2000, but it was already at least 15 years out of date...

Wedded to Jameson, Foucault and Barthes (!!!!), there is no recognition that Jameson was actually wrong - completely wrong - in his theorization of the 'postmodern.' There is no understanding of Foucault's anti-statism. As to Barthes, he produced lovely and clear semiotics. But that was for lovely and clear times. We haven't lived in those times for decades.

The lesson I received from this book is the one I did not think I would receive, but has ended up being much more valuable.

I now understand - with poignant clarity - what happened to cultural studies. As US scholars colonized it, all its complexity and explanatory power was slopped into the bucket of identity politics.

Cultural Studies was never identity politics. It was always more. It demanded more of us than a fixation on our 'self' - even a disempowered self.

Until cultural studies moves beyond identity and 'representation' - the paradigm will not survive, let alone renew.

Time to get hard, get difficult, get complex. There was a pre-US Cultural Studies. Time to claim back this paradigm...

[Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of my dumb colleagues on graduate school described this book by saying, 'Her thesis revolves around saying Foucault is Eurocentric, I think"... totally not what was going on in this text at all. In fact, Chela Sandoval turns to several so-called 'Eurocentric' critical theorists to point out that Western Civilization is indeed colonialist at its heart. For instance, Frederic Jameson plays prominently in the first few chapters wherein we learn that it is indeed Postmodernism that IS behind the most illegible academese writing on the planet (in other words, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard can rot in hell for being bad writers).

Also, it was interesting when she turned to Foucault (and Roland Barthes) to make several obvious points that one would have figured out on their own simply by reading S/Z and Foucault's preface to Anti-Oedipus...somehow this is a brilliant tactical move to link these thinkers to postcolonial theory (duh, no need to do that, simply read their work and your mind will melt with self-loathing and existential nausea by simply being alive in the West, and purchasing a big mac several times a year) Yes, America and by extension most of Europe blows, most of the philosophers I enjoy reading only reaffirm this feeling in me... but, several points make me want to take notes so that the next time I teach, say, Sartre, I can go verbatim from her interpretation of Nausea "It was the first time in its history that the West looked inward, into the abyss of utopia" (and honestly, if the West looked inward we'd probably need to blow chunks into a nearby toilet out of sheer terror, the inner self of the West is that f-ed). I can only say, this is 'sort' of a great book merely because it is skimpy on original ideas, but serves as a nice reference piece for scholars such as myself to draw lecture notes and look all smarty pants when lecturing on some of the texts she provides ample sparknotes to and then passes off as 'scholarship' then again, that's not an easy thing to do in such a clear style - bravo!

[Hafsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insanely dense read, and one of those books where you have to read a sentence multiple times to get its full effect. But it's a magnificent contribution to feminist theory, especially with her notion of "differential consciousness." has a critical engagement with post-structuralist theorists. I feel like I could read this again and again and get something new out of it each time, since the time before I probably missed something.

[Jherane Patmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't read an academic book in a while and this managed to be very dense without being overbearing. I read this over a weekend and really enjoyed it. Once it clicks and you get deep in the theories you never want to put this book down.

I would not recommend this book to someone who doesn't like theories.

[aaamaaaliaaa · Rating 4 out of 5]

okay i'll bite: i got here by way of queer of color critique which attributes its method (& methodology) to "third world feminism"/"women of color feminism", which present their project as the attunement of knowledge, legible as experience, to method as the creation of counter-publics or survival strategies.

"it's all identity politics, bring back real cultural studies" womp womp i'm shivering from your ice cold dialectics. i mean seriously get real.

sandoval does what many great decolonial thinkers have done before her & says "postmodernism is not the death of the subject, bound to chaotic heterogeneity, nor the correlate to modernism's solitary subject, but rather a boomerang: the fractured subject of modernism, previously only discernable at a distance through the self-recognition of the other is no longer mediated by a clear relationship between the imaginary & symbolic--we are all now fractured, and this condition finds epistemic precedence in historical experience of non-being; READ: slavery, colonialism, "a third warzone", migration, displacement."

this cashes out as Sandoval's "differential consciousness" which she compares to Anzaldua's mestizaje (ew), strategic essentialisms, & hybridity (rip lol): we are conditioned into freedom not through qualities immanent to something easily recognizable as ourselves per se, but through our capacity to negotiate the ways in which difference structures our relationships to each other.

you know it was like 2001. we had to do something with difference. it's tough reading this like 25 years later. i think we've maybe started to get a grip. power seems to be something people are talking about, which is good. Jameson was right though about radical difference: all these heterogeneous positions do not produce a moving and articulated totality through which we can ascertain historical forms of abstract domination that divide us. but who needs totalities when you have forces, genealogies, and intensities, right?? maybe it was cope all along.

this is all to say: Sandoval is perplexed by how for a brief period--say the 1960s-1980s--meaning & matter smooched for just a second, so as to raise consciousness to the point of trans-national solidarity, struggle, and insurgency. to speak romantically of the moment, as much of the literature does, is to suggest that europe was exoticized, determined not by its own abstract universalisms but by the suggestions, love, & imagination of other worlds; europe was eavesdropping. maybe it was the organic conditions of capitalist accumulation... maybe it was the category of the human... whatever it was it certainly has nothing to do with ideology or whatever the fuck Althusser was on about. Perhaps it's really indebtedness & finance capital. maybe even late liberalism, which is what we're going with now.

recently, the poet rodrigo toscano has suggested that we are in a "post-post-Colonial" moment, impressing the need to abandoned the west. to read sandoval today is to disavow any radical potential of being an "inside outsider." radical mestizaje has been thoroughly captured by empire & capital (which is not to suggest it was not always already overdetermined by its own symptoms of racial democracy anti-indigeneity & anti-blackness). if there is any durable "methodology" of the oppressed it is found not in the disciplinary "apartheid" of academia, but in Jameson's "post-literate."

regardless, we'll get 'em next time girls, i promise <3

[Quin Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book based on a recommendation from a professor who I deeply respect, and I was not disappointed. To be sure, Chela Sandoval can be a difficult (I hesitate to say "dense" because that makes density sound like a bad thing) writer. Nonetheless, I was enchanted by this book.

In The Methodology of the Oppressed, Sandoval lays out the theory and practice of the "methodology of the oppressed." This is a set of technologies and practices, guided by a "differential consciousness" and embodied in "differential social movement," and which is guided by a commitment to egalitarian social change to become a "hermeneutics of love in the postmodern world." To put it in the simplest terms I can: the methodology of the oppressed is a unique theoretical contribution developed throughout multiple forms of oppositional social movement in the late twentieth century. These movements included the third world decolonization movements of the '50s and '60s, the cultural nationalist movements of the '60s and '70s, and -crucially- U.S. Third World Feminism in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. I say crucially because it is only in and through its encounter with U.S. Third World Feminism that the methodology of the oppressed begins to fully take shape and become developed into the comprehensive theory and practice put forth by Sandoval in this book. The methodology of the oppressed consists of five key technologies: semiotics (sign-reading), deconstruction (the critical interrogation and critique of ideology), meta-ideologizing (using ideology for other purposes, one example given was "strategic essentialism"), democratics (the moral commitment to egalitarian social change), and differential consciousness (the ability to move strategically throughout and outside of ideology). These technologies are deployed in and through the differential form of oppositional social movement. This form of differential social movement is a tactical engagement with the four other modes of social movement that Sandoval identifies: equal-rights, revolutionary, supremacist, and separatist. Rather that trying to assert itself alongside these other modes, differential social movement is described by Sandoval like the gear-shift in a car. This is to say that through differential social movement, all other forms of oppositional social movement become tactics towards egalitarian social change,. No one strategy is always already favored over the others, but neither is their application haphazard. Differential social movement, guided by differential consciousness and the methodology of the oppressed, is able to strategically maneuver and transform itself in order to best challenge dominant power relations and ideologies.

The methodology of the oppressed was developed by multiple groups of subjugated peoples in opposition across time and space, but was most fully developed by US Third World Feminists in the 1960s-1980s. Sandoval believes that because of the cultural conditions brought about by neocolonizing postmodernism, all citizen-subjects can now benefit from learning and deploying the methodology or the oppressed to bring out a more just and egalitarian social order.

I will definitely have to re-read this book to understand it in its entirety. This is a powerful text, and an inspiring call-to-action for social activists of all stripes. I found the Chapter 7 and the conclusion to be extremely clarifying, so if you get bogged down midway, I can reassure you that it is most certainly worth it to keep going.

[Shanti Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book helps me make progress in understanding and applying decolonization in my life. Sandoval's work with Fanon, Barthes, Anzaldua, Foucault, and other thinkers is profoundly generative -- I will keep expanding my critical lenses because of this amazing study.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won’t pretend that I fully understood all of the content that was presented in this book. But, I feel grateful for all that I learned. One of the big things that I took away from this was the idea of a kind of trans-theoretical model for what Sandoval calls ‘differential consciousness.’ She starts off by looking at previous philosophers and social theorists, particularly in the post-modern vein, who fall into a kind of despair about the inability to address systems of power because of a shift away from more modern structures. She argues that third-world feminism has already essentially addressed this problem, because of a need to shift rapidly between different lenses and strategies to take on shifting power.

Sandoval then spends time laying out the different strategies of theorists are are addressing oppression. She targets 5 views in particular that she believes makes up the realm of revolutionary thinking and action. After laying these out, she talks about the third-world feminist perspective, which shifts through each of these strategies. This is finally coalesced into a broader category of love.

I will certainly be returning to this text. I also recognize that it will be important to read many of the theorists that were engaged, in order to have a better understanding of her critiques, and ultimately, how she believes power can be resisted in a post-modern culture.

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I'm in favor for articulating a methodological practice that springs from being a citizen-subject in an oppressive environment, I think Sandoval's method of re-reading the work of the "classic" dominant (white) voices of Jameson and Barthes unhinges and stalls Sandoval's articulation for radical performative practices that could arise from the methodology of the oppressed. Now, I must admit that I think the burden of this critique relies heavily upon Sandoval's methodological use of postmodernism pre-9/11. Post 9/11 methodological and theoretical rhetoric has shifted radically and this singularity of practice/method doesn't hold as much resonance as it would have in 2000 and thus I think Sandoval's piece should be read as a relic of its time, not only that but it should be read in conversation with her article "Methodology of the Oppressed" that was published in 1991 as well as with Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto." Theses texts together linearly show how ideas shift, grow, and fluctuate over time.

[Jayden · Rating 5 out of 5]

hard. concentration required. and possibly some reading of Roland Barthes or Donna Haraway. definitely worth it if you are interested in the construction of language, post-modernism or "third world feminism." while sandoval uses the latter term, she is definitely critical of anything essentialist.

[camn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and original scholarship that takes a fresh look at Rolands Barthes and proposes that he is an anticolonial intellectual. Using Barthes as her foundation, Sandoval offers a much-needed methodology to resisting postmodern colonizing forces, which borrows from the survival strategies of the already oppressed. This book is suggested for students and scholars.

[F · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt a strong personal connection to this book, and not just because it was written by my wonderful professor, Dr. Chela Sandoval. It is a dense and theoretical book, but from my perspective it gets to the heart of what it means to be a Chicana.

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the densest books I've ever had to read. Was meant to be a research book, but very little research was actually presented that Sandoval performed herself. In actuality, this book was more a literary critique.

[Oren Whightsel · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is life changing...sandoval actually proposes ways of practice and not just theory...an amazing text. her critique of fredric jameson alone is worth reading.

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

hard to read . . . but i gotta represent cause I took this lady's class at ucsb and she was awesome.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense but brilliant.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Interesting ideas, but how a woman who writes this poorly ever got published is beyond me.

[Carla · Rating 5 out of 5]

so far enjoying Chela's "theory out of bounds".....

[Michele · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very tough read. Someday, I will return to it....

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply brilliant!

[Mara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved what I could understand, and plan on coming back to this book when I can wrap my mind around anything past Part I.

[Scott Neigh]

Reviewed here.

[XYZ · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had been on my "to read" list for quite a while, and I am glad that I did take the time finally to read it from cover to cover: after all, it is a key text in decolonial feminism, if not a modern classic. But as important and intelligent as Sandoval's work is, I cannot deny being disappointed. The book was published in 2000, but it reads as if it was written in the late 1980s (and much of it may have been, since the book largely consists of republished material). It's remarkable that Methodology of the Oppressed fails to discuss key developments in feminist theorizing that were well under way during the 1990s, such as the rise of intersectionality in Black feminist thought and the emergence of various feminist new materialisms that have both contested and transformed many of the traditionally poststructuralist assumptions that are reiterated throughout Sandoval's work. Put more simply, the book is clearly (and explicitly so) concerned with what Sandoval calls a "postmodern world", yet it was published in a time and space that cannot be adequately understood anymore through the moniker (and methods) of the postmodern. This unfortunately limits the contemporary relevance of many of the book's chapters. Nevertheless, there is also much in it that is still very much worth while reading today. For that reason, the book still stands as a classic in the field which will hopefully be taken up by others who will continue to develop Sandoval's worthy exploration of differential consciousness and global oppositional politics, as well as her affirmation of love as a technology of social change.

[Kitteh · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have no Goodreads account but I made one tonight especially for this. This book must have been the worst book I've read for the last 10 years. I hate it with passion. The other one was written by William Dunn. I kennat, these two. Both are unnecessarily convoluted and esoteric - and both are lacking original thought and meaning.

Now, back to this annoying hell of a book. I do not know what Sandoval was thinking when she wrote this book and peppered it with direct quotations from other authors (e.g., Derrida, White, Foucault, among others) - as if doing such thing would qualify her assertions. I am not saying her assertions lack quality; I am saying her extensive import of thoughts and direct quotations from other Western (read: colonial white men) thinkers annihilates the point that she is trying to make. Whatever that point is, sadly I will never know because she buried it in an avalanche of quotations that made the entire book look more like a hostage situation.

[Luisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

MEU DEUS, QUE LIVRO É ESSE!!!! 🤯

[Siobhan D · Rating 5 out of 5]

(r)evolution

My favorite theory book of the year! Not the most consumable ever but brilliant.

[Xoches aka Xochill · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the hardest Books I have ever read! ek!