Problematising Unity through Ex-centricity and Difference

Abstract

The previous chapter discussed how authorised versions of history exclude or privilege one group over another. This chapter considers how individuals are marginalised by hegemonic discourses of society which privilege unity and, in turn, advance homogeneity and consensus over heterogeneity and diversity. Adherence to a discourse which favours homogeneity over heterogeneity can lead to the marginalisation of those alienated from dominant discourses by virtue of their race, gender, sexual preferences, class, ethnicity, education, social and other positionings. Hutcheon (1988) sees postmodern practices, such as parody, as a way to give space to these previously silent or marginalised individuals or groups to challenge the ‘normalising’ discourses of liberal humanist societies. Christopher Butler (2002, p. 46) argues that these normalising discourses actually bring into being what many postmodernists call the other. This concept of otherness, according to Hutcheon (1988, p. 65), has associations of: ‘binarity, hierarchy, and supplementarity that postmodern theory and practice reject in favour of a more plural and deprivileging concept of difference and the ex-centric’. As a result, postmodern fiction not only gives recognition to those on the margins and celebrates their difference, but simultaneously questions discourses which isolate the ‘other’.

Cultural homogenization too, reveals its fissures, but the heterogeneity that is asserted in the face of that totalizing (yet pluralizing) culture does not take the form of many fixed individual subjects […] but instead is conceived of as a flux of contextualized identities: contextualized by gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, education, social role, and so on. (Hutcheon, 1988, p. 59)