Feminism and Post-colonialism

(From Post-colonial Studies Reader by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin) In many different societies, women, like colonised subjects, have been relegated to the position of ‘Other’, ‘colonised’ by various forms of patriarchal domination. They thus share with colonised races and cultures an intimate experience of the politics of oppression and repression. It is not surprising therefore that the history and concerns of feminist theory have paralleled developments in post-colonial theory. Feminist and post-colonial discourses both seek to reinstate the marginalised in the face of the dominant, and early feminist theory, like early nationalist post-colonial criticism, was concerned with inverting the structures of domination, substituting, for instance, a female tradition or traditions for a male-dominated canon. But like postcolonial criticism, feminist theory has rejected such simple inversions in favour of a more general questioning of forms and modes, and the unmasking of the spuriously author/itative on which such canonical constructions are founded. Until recently feminist and post-colonial discourses have followed a path of convergent evolution, their theoretical trajectories demonstrating striking similarities but rarely intersecting. In the last ten years, however, there has been increasing interest not just in their parallel concerns but in the nature of their actual and potential intersections—whether creatively coincident or interrogative. Feminism has highlighted a number of the unexamined assumptions within post-colonial discourse, just as post-colonialism’s interrogations of western feminist scholarship have provided timely warnings and led to new directions. Early problems raised by the attempts to accommodate these similar but sometimes conflicting agendas are described by Kirsten Holst Petersen in ‘First Things First’. It is significant that this problem is articulated as a dilemma for African women writers whose representations of their societies, and of patriarchal oppressions within them, are seen as conflicting with the processes of decolonisation and cultural restitution, not just in terms of images presented to the former colonisers, but more significantly in terms of their own Euro-interpellated populations. African cultural values systematically denigrated by colonialist ideologies and institutions demand positive representation, and this restitutive impulse has frequently been seen to conflict with feminist reformation. The notion of ‘double colonisation’—i.e. that women in formerly colonised societies were doubly colonised by both imperial and patriarchal ideologies—became a catch-phrase of post-colonial and feminist discourses in the 1980s. But it is only recently that ‘double colonisation’ has begun to be adequately theorised. Ketu Katrak (like the East and West African writers Petersen discusses) reminds us of the inescapable necessity of situating a feminist politics within particular colonised societies. Using the example of the Jamaican Sistren Collective’s work, she grounds a decolonising feminist restitution in the local particularities of class and race. The Jamaican writer Erna Brodber’s short essay ‘Sleeping’s Beauty and Prince Charming’ (1989) suggests another way of actually theorising the concept of a double colonisation. Texts—the ‘fairy tales’ of Europe—have not only subjectified Jamaican women, but through cultural interpellation effected the erasure of the black female body within Jamaican male culture. Hence the black ‘Prince Charming’ of Brodber’s fable can sense his female counterpart, but when he looks for her he can see ‘no/body’. Sara Suleri examines a rather different refraction of the concept of ‘double colonisation’ in Pakistan through the recent institution of Muslim Law, a process facilitated by neo- colonial United States’ support of a male regime where laws against rape have recoiled horrifically on the bodies of women and children. Not surprisingly perhaps, the use of language in decolonising strategies forms the basis of Sistren’s (re)creative experimentation; and Trinh T Minh- ha, aware of the difficulties of, in Audre Lorde’s terms, using the masters’ tools to dismantle his house, nevertheless attempts to escape enclosure through complex linguistic/generic experimentation. Significantly, too, she refuses to be ‘ghettoised’ through the separate and/or combined essentialisms of gender, race or ethnicity, seeing these consolidating positions—politically strategic as they may at first appear—as new houses or rather out-houses of the ‘master’(s). Chandra Mohanty’s ‘Under Western Eyes’ (with Rachel Carby’s ‘White Woman Listen!’) is foundational in critiquing Western feminisms which too easily elide specific cultural difference and ‘naturalise’ all women’s oppression under widely differing manifestations of patriarchical domination to European models. As Gayatri Spivak demonstrates, what is a radically liberating piece of writing or politics in one arena can act as a colonising agent in another. Sara Suleri’s article, with which this section concludes, offers a useful critique of a number of the positions discussed above.  (From Post-colonial Studies The Key Concepts by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin) Feminism is of crucial interest to post-colonial discourse for two major reasons. First, both patriarchy and imperialism can be seen to exert analogous forms of domination over those they render subordinate. Hence the experiences of women in patriarchy and those of colonized subjects can be paralleled in a number of respects, and both feminist and post-colonial politics oppose such dominance. Second, there have been vigorous debates in a number of colonized societies over whether gender or colonial oppression is the more important political factor in women’s lives.This has sometimes led to division between Western feminists and political activists from impoverished and oppressed countries; or, alternatively, the two are inextricably entwined, in which case the condition of colonial dominance affects, in material ways, the position of women within their societies. This has led to calls for a greater consideration of the construction and employment of gender in the practices of imperialism and colonialism. Feminism, like post-colonialism, has often been concerned with the ways and extent to which representation and language are crucial to identity formation and to the construction of subjectivity.For both groups, language has been a vehicle for subverting patriarchal and imperial power, and both discourses have invoked essentialist argu- ments in positing more authentic forms of language against those imposed on them. Both discourses share a sense of disarticulation from an inherited language and have thus attempted to recover a linguistic authenticity via a pre-colonial language or a primal feminine tongue. However, both feminists and colonized peoples, like other subordinate groups, have also used appropriation to subvert and adapt dominant languages and signifying practices. The texts of feminist theory and those of post-colonialism concur on many aspects of the theory of identity, of difference and of the inter- pellation of the subject by a dominant discourse, as well as offering to each other various strategies of resistance to such controls. Similarities between ‘writing the body’ in feminism and ‘writing place’ in post- colonialism;similarities between the strategies of bisexuality and cultural syncreticity; and similar appeals to nationalism may be detected (Ashcroft 1989). In the 1980s,many feminist critics (Carby 1982;Mohanty 1984;Suleri 1992), began to argue that Western feminism, which had assumed that gender overrode cultural differences to create a universal category of the womanly or the feminine, was operating from hidden, universalist assumptions with a middle-class, Euro-centric bias. Feminism was therefore charged with failing to account for or deal adequately with the experiences of Third World women. In this respect, the issues concerning gender face similar problems to those concerned with class. Mohanty, for instance, criticizes the assumption that all of us of the same gender, across classes and cultures, are somehow socially constituted as a homo- geneous group identified prior to the process of analysis. . . . Thus, the discursively consensual homogeneity of ‘women’ as a group is mistaken for the historically specific material reality of groups of women. (Mohanty 1984: 338) Domatila Barrios de Chungara’s Let Me Speak demonstrates how the material reality of different groups of women can lead to very different perceptions of the nature of political struggle. When she was invited to the International Women’s Year Tribunal in Mexico City in 1974, the difference between the feminist agenda of the tribunal and her own political struggle against oppression in the Bolivian tin mines became very clear. In her view, the meeting’s World Plan of Action ‘didn’t touch on the problems that are basic for Latin American women’ (Barrios de Chungara 1977: 201). The overlap between patriarchal, economic and racial oppression has always been difficult to negotiate, and the differences between the political priorities of First and Third World women have persisted to the present. Such differences appear to be those of emphasis and strategy rather than those of principle,since the interconnection of various forms of social oppression materially affects the lives of all women. More recently, feminism has been concerned that categories like gender may sometimes be ignored within the larger formation of the colonial,and that post-colonial theory has tended to elide gender differ- ences in constructing a single category of the colonized. These critics argue that colonialism operated very differently for women and for men, and the ‘double colonization’ that resulted when women were subject both to general discrimination as colonial subjects and specific discrimination as women needs to be taken into account in any analysis of colonial oppression (Spivak 1985a, 1985b, 1985c and 1986; Mohanty 1984; Suleri 1992). Even post-independence practices of anti-colonial nationalism are not free from this kind of gender bias, and constructions of the traditional or pre-colonial are often heavily inflected by a contemporary masculinist bias that falsely represents ‘native’ women as quietist and subordinate. One illuminating account of the connections between race and gender as a consequence of imperial expansion is Sander L. Gilman’s ‘Black bodies, white bodies’ (1985), which shows how the representation of the African in nineteenth-century European art, medicine and literature, reinforced the construction of the sexualized female body. The presence of male or female black servants was regularly included in paintings, plays and operas as a sign of illicit sexual activity. ‘By the nineteenth century the sexuality of the black, both male and female, becomes an icon for deviant sexuality in general’ (228). Furthermore, the ‘relationship between the sexuality of the black woman and that of the sexualized white woman enters a new dimen- sion when contemporary scientific discourse concerning the nature of black female sexuality is examined’ (231). Notorious examples of prurient exoticism, such as the Hottentot Venus displayed on tour in England, provide material examples of the ways in which signs of racial otherness became instrumental in the construction of a (transgressive) female sexuality. In settler colonies, although women’s bodies were not directly constructed as part of a transgressive sexuality, their bodies were frequently the site of a power discourse of a different kind.As critics like Whitlock have argued, they were perceived reductively not as sexual but as reproductive subjects, as literal ‘wombs of empire’ whose function was limited to the population of the new colonies with white settlers.