Infiltrating culture

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The infiltrator may be a foreigner, a spy, a child, a cleaner, a woman. Like Donna Haraway's cyborg or Michel Serres' parasite, the figure of the infiltrator offers a powerful new way of articulating cultural difference and cultural practice. Issues of gender, race and age are all addressed in a subtle and forceful close reading of a series of texts - from Claire Bretecher's sharp-edged cartoons to Colette's recipes, from the diary of a Martinican cleaning lady to the James Bond thrillers. Mireille Rosello's analysis explodes the notion of binary oppositions: the insider/outsider, black/white, straight/queer, rich/poor, solid/fluid. The infiltrator, she argues, is an ambivalent figure, one who penetrates a closed territory only to expose the fantasy upon which power relations are founded. Rosello's lucid and passionate engagement with theories of multiculturalism and hybridity marks this as a major step forward in the field of cultural theory. As a critique of power, it is a seminal text and will be impossible to ignore.