{"id":19236,"date":"2011-12-25T20:06:50","date_gmt":"2011-12-25T20:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19236"},"modified":"2016-06-24T19:57:43","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T19:57:43","slug":"michelle-cliff-and-the-authority-of-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19236","title":{"rendered":"Michelle Cliff and the Authority of Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michelle Cliff and the Authority of Identity<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association<\/a>
\nVolume 28, Number 1<\/a>, Identities (Spring, 1995)
\npages 56-70<\/p>\n

Sally O’Driscoll<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of English
\nFairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut<\/em><\/p>\n

Michelle Cliff<\/a> has gained critical acclaim as a novelist in the United States and England; her position as an expatriate Jamaican writer is not called into question. Yet when she is read against the background of Caribbean literary criticism, her authorial identity moves into the foreground. In this perspective, Cliff, as author, becomes problematic as soon as we try to define what she “is” as a Caribbean writer: a very light-skinned woman who identifies herself as black, a product of the Jamaican upper class (she came from a family of landowners with slave owners in their past), an expatriate (who has lived in Europe and the United States since 1975), a lesbian, a feminist, and an academic. The reception of her work indicates that Cliff herself-her embodiment as an author-has been an important factor in the evaluation and classification of her writing. As author, Cliff stands at the point of connection-or rupture-between two major non-congruent constructions of identity: third-world postcolonialist and first-world postmodern. Also relevant are debates about “race” as social construction (and its different operations in an American or a Jamaican context), and about gender and sexuality as constituent components of identity.<\/p>\n

It is not only Cliff’s authorial embodiment, of course, that raises these questions. Her work has always been overtly concerned with questions of identity, from the 1980 Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise<\/em>, through essays, short stories, poetry, and criticism, and three novels: the partly autobiographical Abeng<\/em><\/a> (1984); No Telephone to Heaven<\/em><\/a> (1987); and Free Enterprise<\/em> (1993). In this essay I shall focus on No Telephone to Heaven<\/em> as a site where familiar notions of identity based in race, class, gender, and sexuality are questoined; it is in critiques of this novel that we can examine how Cliff’s authorial self is implicated in evaluations of her work.<\/p>\n

The authority of identity is a central issue for a writer who straddles first world and third world, colonizer and colonized, the postmodern and the postcolonial\u2014the word “postcoloniai” itself being a symbol of disagreement between the two worlds. The tension arises because western post-…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Cliff and the Authority of Identity The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association Volume 28, Number 1, Identities (Spring, 1995) pages 56-70 Sally O’Driscoll, Associate Professor of English Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut Michelle Cliff has gained critical acclaim as a novelist in the United States and England; her position as an expatriate Jamaican […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,21,666,125,1196,8,10,20,25],"tags":[8873,2755,8871,8872],"class_list":["post-19236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-gaylesbian","category-identitydevelopment","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-uk","category-usa","category-women","tag-journal-of-the-midwest-modern-language-association","tag-michelle-cliff","tag-sally-odriscoll","tag-the-journal-of-the-midwest-modern-language-association"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19236"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47942,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19236\/revisions\/47942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}