Yuet-Sim Chiang’s study Insider/Outsider/Other? is subtitled “Confronting the centeredness of race, class, color and ethinicity in composition reserach,” a description which reveals the larger questions–and target audience–of an author who identifies herself as “the Other” (p. 151) early on in her survey. Chiang highlights more specific concerns in her very next paragraph, setting out to address “the particularities and situatedness” of the variables listed in her subtitle as they apply to theory and praxis vis-a-vis the field of English composition. The context of the present work (taken from Under construction) was drawn from Chiang’s earlier ethnographic research experience in a small Nebraska university, where the participants comprised white students and teachers from whom the author could easily distance herself: she was merely “analyzing” them (p. 153). She compares this situation with her stint as a Ph.D. professor on first professional assignment, teaching a class made up entirely of non-native English students in a writing workshop based on the “process” model. Autobiographical, at times in a profoundly personal way, Chiang is not afraid to impart to her readers the depth and range of her emotions, going from someone whose primary language was English, whose entire linguistic world “was centered on Western-oriented epistemologies,” from the “professor”–to a person who found herself at the last admitting: “I could not merely study these ‘non-native’ English speakers whose linguistic history and lived realities painfully echoed my own literacy journey” (pp. 152-153). Later sections of Insider/Outsider/Other? address subsequent research projects (such as Chiang’s 1994 summer class at UC Berkeley with native-born “ethnic” students), peppered with vignettes concerning the author’s personal reactions at key points along the way.
Turning now to her closing segment, a topos of “the Personal” comes to mind as a suitable construct for addressing\evaluating the present survey. Writing consistently in first person, and not especially intent on sticking to “elevated” discourse, Chiang nonetheless makes effective use of academic lingo without coming across as “compy” or stilted. Yet it is her more direct, situational diction–wherein she openly reveals emotional and moral responses–which seizes the reader’s attention: Chiang succeeds in a difficult feat, that of discussing a topic inherently professional and educational while emphasizing the personal; to wit, sharing her own inner reactions and overall growth as an individual throughout the journey to identify with and reach her participants. Whereas at an earlier point in her career the author saw herself in primarily occupational terms, she finishes her study having somehow become, well, a human being, a fellow traveler with her students on that “road [almost] not taken” to self-discovery and acceptance of her own racial, class, and gender roots.
