To be the cultural, racial, or ethnic other who exists on the margins of society and

to have others' definition of oneself thrust upon one is traumatic. As Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak observes, the concept and state of marginality work by the "principle of

identification through separation."28 The other is an ideational construct, or the dark

shadow of the self, which the self-centered, tendentious logic of hegemony creates by

various mechanisms of identification through separation, such as splitting, projection, and

displacement. Emphasizing the imaginary nature of identification, Judith Butler explains

how the social symbolic compels its subjects into performative acts, which take place in

relation to societal demands, prohibitions, and fear: "[Identifications] are phantasmatic

efforts of alignment, loyalty, ambiguous and cross-corporeal cohabitation; they unsettle

the 'I'; they are the sedimentation of the 'we' in the constitution of any 'I.' they are

that which is constantly marshaled, consolidated, retrenched, contested. ." 29 A sad

truth is that for the minority subject, the "sedimentation of the 'we'" in his or her

"constitution of the 'I'" involves elements of abjection, denigration, and

disempowerment. Consequently, if he or she internalizes the self-denigrating rhetoric of

the dominant society long enough, he or she becomes a stranded subject in the long

perfidious history, which is constructed and engineered by the self-serving hegemonic

ideology.

 Identity and the Narrative Function of Healing and Defiance

 Victims of trauma, like the victims of other kinds of calamities and social injustice,

are, Homi Bhabha asserts, the ones who are "signified upon," and thus in order to be free

from the debilitating grip of helplessness, it is necessary for them to "unspeak."30 Those

studying the close relationship between identity and narrative agree on the constitutive

role narrative plays in the development and maintenance of identity. "Identity essentially