Trinh T. Minh-ha's Essayistic Ethics Examined in Afterall

Joshua Fausty's essay in Afterall Journal 48 (published July 1, 2019) analyzes Trinh T. Minh-ha's essayistic writing as an ethical practice. Trinh, born in 1952 in Vietnam and educated in Vietnam, the Philippines, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is Professor of Women's Studies and Rhetoric (Film) at UC Berkeley. Her work in theory, poetry, and experimental film centers on language and identity. Fausty argues that Trinh's writing performs a self-in-process, embracing partiality and openness to alterity. Drawing on Derek Attridge, Michel Foucault, and Stanley Cavell, the essay connects Trinh's strategies to a broader tradition of essayistic ethics that transforms the self and reader through writing. Key examples include Trinh's texts 'Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box' (from Woman, Native, Other, 1989) and 'The Other Censorship' (from When the Moon Waxes Red, 1991), which model critical intervention as performance and dialogue. Fausty contends that Trinh's criticism, unlike much literary criticism, can claim to be ethical because it enacts otherness through literariness and self-conscious staging of language.