SOURCE: "Evidence-cum-Witness: Subaltern History, Violence, and the (De)Formation of Nation in Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 249-87.

In the following essay, Sethuraman offers an "ahistorical reading of the plot structure, character development, and stylistic nuances" of No Telephone to Heaven in terms of Cliff's "ambivalent double articulation" of the relation between psychyoanalytic and postcolonial cultural discourse.

"At a time when the grands récits of the West have been told and retold ad infinitum, when a certain postmodernism (Lyotard's) speaks of an 'end' to metanarratives and when Fukayama talks of an 'end of history', we must ask: precisely whose narrative and whose history is being declared at an 'end'? Dominant Europe may clearly have begun to deplete its strategic repertoire of stories, but Third World people, First World 'minorities'—women and gays and lesbians—have only begun to...