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Taking up Kimberlé Crenshaw's conclusion that black feminist theorists seem to continue to find themselves in many ways “speaking into the void” (Crenshaw 2011, 228), even as their works are widely celebrated, I examine intersectionality critiques as one site where power asymmetries and dominant imaginaries converge in the act of interpretation (or cooptation) of intersectionality. That is, despite its current “status,” intersectionality also faces epistemic intransigence in the ways in which it is read and applied. My aim is not to suggest that intersectionality cannot (or should not) be critiqued, nor do I maintain that celebratory applications/interpretations are immune from epistemic distortion when it comes to interpreting intersectionality. Rather, my goal is to demonstrate that critiques of intersectionality are one important site to examine hermeneutic marginalization and interpretive violence; the politics of citation; and the impact of dominant expectations or established social imaginaries on meaning‐making. In so doing, I aim to consider more fully how entrenched ways of thinking are frequently relied upon to interpret and critique intersectionality, even as these are often the very frameworks that intersectionality theorists have identified as highly problematic tools of misrepresentation, erasure, and violation. This slippage away from intersectionality's outlooks, whether in critical or laudatory contexts, is a pivotal site of epistemic negotiation we must examine more closely.

Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night demonstrates how willful and strategic epistemologies of ignorance intertwine. By rejecting a compartmentalized approach to domination, Mootoo highlights the disjuncture between idealized images offamily, home, love, and the Caribbean and traumatic events of personal and cultural history. Mootoo not only asks readers to take up resistant questioning, argues May, but also to recognize that epistemology must acknowledge unspeakable and silenced stories to adequately account for multiple ways of knowing.To face the suffering of the Other, and to be prepared to heed the interpellations of the Other, requires that we liberate philosophy from its hubris by acknowledging its failures. -Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo MendietaCereus Blooms at Night, Shani Mootoo's 1996 novel, is set in the town of Paradise on the imaginary Caribbean island Lantanacamara. Colonized by the "Shivering Northern Wetlands" (SNW), its landscape is dotted with towns, sugar plantations, and missionary churches and schools created and named by Wetlanders. In setting the novel on a fictional, nonspecific Caribbean island, rather than on Trinidad where she grew up, Mootoo follows in the footsteps of other Caribbean women writers who have found a critical utility in crafting an imaginary space from which to remember identities and histories differently.' Rather than have the Caribbean be read as an already known space, a space imagined, named, and understood from a Wetlandish standpoint, Mootoo Hypatia VOI. 21. no. 3 (Summer 2006) 0 by Vivian M. May

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