Resistance and Reinvention of the Subject in Jackie Kay's Trumpet (Critical Essay‪)‬

In her work Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval claims that although inequities in material sources and subordination by race, class, nation, gender and sex continue to operate under the protection of law and order, a new kind of psychic penetration that respects no previous boundaries is evolving. She argues that "Mutation in culture, today, makes new forms of identity, ethics, citizenship, aesthetics and resistance accessible" (36.7). In short, the contemporary schizophrenia of cultural globalization opens up a liberating mode of consciousness for the scapegoated, marginalized, enslaved, and colonized of every community. These groups have taken this schizophrenia as an opportunity for re-cognition, as turning points in their life history. They have discovered that freedom and triumph have been forbidden to them and have turned toward something else to be, developing modes of perceiving, making sense of, and acting upon reality all of which are the basis of effective forms of oppositional consciousness in today's world.