Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night demonstrates how willful and strategic epistemologies of ignorance intertwine. By rejecting a compartmentalized approach to domination, Mootoo highlights the disjuncture between idealized images of family, home, love, and the Caribbean and traumatic events of personal and cultural history. Mootoo not only asks readers to take up resistant questioning, argues May, but also to recognize that epistemology must acknowledge unspeakable and silenced stories to adequately account for multiple ways of knowing.

The question of authenticity centers in the lives of women of color to invite and restrict their representative roles. For this reason, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Uma Narayan advocate responding with strategic essentialism. This paper argues against such a strategy and proposes an epistemic understanding of the question of authentic- ity. The question stems from a kernel of truth—the connection between experience and knowledge. But a coherence theory of knowledge better captures the sociality and the holism of experience and knowledge.

: Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night demonstrates how willful and strategic epistemologies of ignorance intertwine. By rejecting a compartmentalized approach to domination, Mootoo highlights the disjuncture between idealized images of family, home, love, and the Caribbean and traumatic events of personal and cultural history. Mootoo not only asks readers to take up resistant questioning, argues May, but also to recognize that epistemology must acknowledge unspeakable and silenced stories to adequately account for multiple ways of knowing.

Naturalized moral epistemology eschews practices of assuming to know a priori the nature of situations and experiences that require moral deliberation. Thus it promises to close a gap between formal ethical theories and circumstances where people need guidelines for action. Yet according experience so central a place in inquiry risks "naturalizing" it, treating it as incontestable, separating its moral and political dimensions. This essay discusses these issues with reference to Margaret Walker's Moral understandings.

Realist fiction, which had a pivotal place in 19th. Century literature, has lost its central position in the contemporary literary scene as modernism, postmodernism and poststructuralism have raised some serious challenges against it, advocating experimentalism in fiction, instead. Still, in our age, when globalization and capitalism breed different forms of marginalizations and injustices in societies, it is the realist fiction that better than any other form can depict the struggles and pains of these marginalized lives. Thus, realist fiction deserves to (...) be considered a major genre of our time rather than a second-rater. This paper attempts to investigate into the present state of realist fiction in the literary scene, and it argues that, with the significant theoretical backing from the postpositivist realist critics, it can move toward reclaiming its position in literature today. Postpositivist realists base their defense of realist fiction on the notion that the representation of reality, identity and experience in realist fiction, in spite of being theory-mediated and affected by ideologies and discourses, is possible, as these objects of representation are real and important for being real. The paper maintains that the postpositivist support can favorably affect the present place of realist fiction. Still, the rightful realist fiction of our time, in tune with the developments in the theories of knowledge and fiction, unlike the 19th. century realist fiction, has patches of experimentalism, while keeping its realistic ethos, which further indicates that the contemporary fiction is the fiction of an era affected by postpositivist realist concepts. (shrink)

This essay examines the ways in which postcoloniality and autoethnography can be integrated to create a space of scholarly inquiry that disrupts the colonialist enterprise prevalent in the academy. By utilizing González's four ethics of postcolonial ethnography, this essay presents an ethics for postcolonial autoethnography as a mode to build a body of scholarly research that disrupts scientific imperialism.

The language of ‘experience’ in nursing research This paper is an analysis of how the signifier ‘experience’ is used in nursing research. We identify a set of issues we believe accompany the use of experience but are rarely addressed. These issues are embedded in a spectrum that includes ontological commitments, visions of the person/self and its relation to ‘society’, understandings of research methodology and the politics of nursing. We argue that a poststructuralist understanding of the language of experience in research (...) opens up additional ways to analyze the relationship between the conduct of nursing research and cultural/political commitments. (shrink)