ABSTRACT
The act of reading is far from a passive process by which the reader absorbs the text like a sponge. Yet I can imagine a reading of texts that closely approximates such passivity, particularly when the world of the text is alien to the reader. But a passive reading like this, no matter how alien its subject matter, is not exempt from the de rigueur demand of a transnational feminist reading practice. In the postmodern epoch, postcolonial theorists of many disciplines make us aware that master narratives and nationalism fail to represent the nature of social and political movements. A reading practice that is not an aggressive pursuit of understanding multiple subjectivities will tend to rely on a myopic, ethnocentric narrative, and will fail to capture the nuances of experience that national allegory often masks. In the final analysis, there is no such thing as a passive reading. A reading that is not passionately engaged in “joining” with various subjectivities (particularly those hitherto obscured by canonical formations) can, at best, be described as passive. But such a reading of a text, however, may not be passive at all, but rather the conservative embrace of master narrative that works against postmodernist perspectives and interpretations of aesthetic expression.
