Learning from Experience ─ Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles

"Paula Moya's Learning from Experience is a work of critical intelligence that redefines entire areas of contemporary literary studies, ethnic studies, and feminist studies. Her analyses genuinely illuminate rather than simply reflect an assimilation to critical commonplaces."--Jose David Saldivar, author of Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies

"In this volume, Paula Moya provides a comprehensive and astute reading of Chicana literature and literary criticism, as well as an important critique of postmodern theory as it bears on literary criticism and especially the debates over experience, social identity and multiculturalism. Moya is one of the most original and powerful new voices in feminist and postcolonial theory today, offering a needed corrective of some of the current dogmatisms in social theory. Learning from Experience offers a refreshing new take on the debates over experience, . . . I doubt its importance can be overestimated."--Linda Martin Alcoff, author of Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory

"Learning from Experience is a refreshingly provocative and incisively written work that challenges fashionable dismissals of identity politics. In so doing it reaffirms the primacy of discursive and socio-political contexts and the epistemic value of experience. Moya's stimulating work has much to offer."--Rosaura Sanchez, author of Telling Identities, and most recently co-author with Beatrice Pita of Conflicts of Interest: The Letters of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton

Paula M. L. Moya is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University and coeditor ofReclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (California, 2000).