Where I Come From

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor of Spanish Studies at Laurentian
University.

Agnew’s memoir is a candid personal journey of self-revelation and
self-realization as she looks back over some 30 years at the various
stages of her life: her childhood and adolescence in India, her first
experiences as a graduate student in Canada, her marriage to a Canadian,
the birth of their daughter, her struggle to build a career as a
professor of social science, and, of course, all the attendant issues of
being a non-white female from a Third World country. At the same time,
Where I Come From is an analysis of the construct of identity based on
the fundamental feminist principle that one’s identity is defined by
the characteristics that society ascribes to a person’s race, class,
and gender. The result is a complex description of how one woman’s
life can be shaped by societal expectations and responses in both
Eastern and Western cultures.

As Agnew points out, however, who she is now “is only one stage in a
lifelong process of becoming,” and who others perceive her to be is
not necessarily how she sees herself. The various labels that attempted
to fix her identity—“foreign student,” “Indian feminist,”
“Third World woman”—became part of her motivation to write her
story and resist the strictures of those definitions. The racism,
gender, and class discrimination that lie behind those labels also come
under scrutiny in her story, and may be a revelation to those who
believe that the broad umbrella of Canadian multiculturalism leaves
little room for such things.

Where I Come From makes an important contribution to feminist
literature as well as to cultural studies and women’s studies.