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Introduction: Feminism and the Critique of Colonial Discourse
In the Spring of 1987, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, two organized research activities--the Group for the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse and Feminist Studies Organized Research Activity--organized a day-long conference on Feminism and the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse. The conference was organized to bring feminism and critiques of colonial discourse to bear on each other and to explore the possible relations between these two sets of practices. We asked participants to consider the following texts as shared reference points for discussion: Teresa de Lauretis, ea., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1986), Critical Inquiry Vol. 12, No. l, special issue on "Race, Writing and Difference," and James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California, 1986). The papers presented at the conference were not limited to specific articles or debates within these texts but, in different ways, related to the issues raised in them. In our call for presentations we asked people to consider the general question of why feminist theorists should attend to critiques of colonial discourse and why critics of colonial discourse should consider feminist theories.
While feminism and the critical study of colonial discourse are in no way opposed to each other, neither can they be reduced to each other. The hope of the conference was not simply to work out the affinities and conflicts among them, but to make a discourse which takes both into account. We were interested in trying to create a dialogue out of a range of possible questions that have emerged in studying the intersection and multiple crossings of gender, race, class, sexual identity, and nationality in a world structured by both broad macro-dependencies and localized distinctions. Increasingly, feminist discourse and critiques of colonial discourse are intermixed and cross-fertilized as well as at times distinct. The conference was an attempt to both work off a space already in the making as well as to create dialogues that acknowledge that intermixing. The intertwining of these interests suggests neither a utopian void where conflict ceases nor complete opposition but a space of ongoing tensions and connections. We have published revised versions of the conference papers as well as excerpts from discussions which followed the presentations to provide a sense of that conflicted but potent space.
The essays in this issue are all concerned with "women," not as a homogenous subjectivity, but as multiple and shifting, "an identity made up of heterogeneous and heteronomous representations," in Teresa de Lauretis' terms. Each paper speaks from a specific historical location, at once political and academic. The first set of papers which were presented together at the conference are interested in the representation of women within both colonial and anti-colonial discourses. Kamala Visweswaran's paper on feminist ethnography examines the politics of canon formation in anthropology as a way to investigate the ethnographic relationship of Western, female anthropologists and Third World women. She challenges the standards of the anthropological canon as well as feminist anthropology and "experimental" ethnography to adequately formulate feminist representations of non-Western women. While Visweswaran draws on certain terms from writers and readers of experimental ethnography, she also critiques the exclusion of women's ethnographies from this newly emergent canon. Looking back to older ethnographies such as Jean Briggs' Never in Anger or Laura Bohannon's Return to Laughter and at recent works by Third World feminists such as Cherrie Moraga, Visweswaran offers a counter?experimental ethnography written by women about women. In her reading, women's experimental ethnography offers one set of resources for considering the practice of cross-cultural representation among women who are in different positions of global and historical power.
Deborah Gordon's paper complements Visweswaran's with a critical reading of Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, the recent collection of theory and criticism of ethnographic writing. Gordon argues that there is an historically-specific, masculine ambivalence toward feminism enacted in the collection. Feminist ethnographers and anthropologists can use that tension as a resource in building a decolonial feminist anthropology. The project here is focused less on women's experimentation than on the need to shift the theory and terms of experimentation. In addition, Gordon raises the issue of how different forms of ethnographic authority relate to different political locations and situations. John McBratney is interested in Rudyard Kipling's representation of Indian women, arguing that Kipling's writings were part of "Orientalism," that discourse connecting power and knowledge which Edward Said has analyzed in his seminal book, Orientalism. McBratney argues that while Said is interested in and raises the question of the relationship between the feminization of the "Orient" and Orientalism, he does not investigate the ways gender features in the discourse of the Orient. In McBratney's reading of Kipling, Indian women signify "dangerous hybridization, epistemological limits and the Indian as 'other'." They are doubly other, the site where masculinist and Orientalist discourses merge. In Kipling's work Indian men represent the possibility of bonding across race and culture, while Indian women represent a specific threat to British rule based on their cultural and gender difference. McBratney closes his paper with a more general discussion of studying the intersection of gender, race, and class.
The second set of papers examines, in different ways, the historical standpoints and positioning of women in decolonizing countries and circumstances. Trinh T. Minh-ha explores post-colonial women and the relationship between identity and difference in the constitution of subjectivity. She claims that identity has been conventionally understood within the West as an essential, authentic core of experience that has been lost and is in need of being retrieved. Different from this notion of identity is Minh-ha's concept of difference, an interdependence which is not, in her words, "mutual enslavement," but a relationality that is in between boundaries. Minh-ha asks us to see difference not as conflict but as a concept in which similarities and differences are negotiated in relationship to each other. She grounds this notion of difference in examples such as the movement of veiling and unveiling for certain women in Third World countries. Both veiling and unveiling may be liberatory for women depending on the context in which they're enacted. While Visweswaran's and Gordon's papers show how the critiques of colonial discourse found in discussions of experimental ethnography have been inadvertently masculinist, Aihwa Ong's paper critiques the "othering" of non-Western and Third World women within Western feminist scholarship. Her critique looks specifically at the discourse of "women and development" which includes not only liberal, neo?classical economic practices but also Marxist-feminist political economy. These studies have, according to Ong, been based on a dichotomy between modernization and tradition which leads Western feminists to view the undermining of "tradition" as either a "decline of women's status in a romanticized 'natural' economy, or as their liberation by Western economic rationality." Ong argues that the functionalism underlying views of Third World women as units of labor and reproductive power within the international division of labor denies Third World women agency and culturally-specific responses to multinational capitalism. Ong suggests that in working against this tendency within studies of non-Western women ethnographic texts need to "disclose a riot of social meanings embedded in the confrontation between tradition and modernity in Third World societies." She concludes her critique with a discussion of her own ethnographic work among Malay factory women.
The third panel of the conference was devoted to the teaching of feminist theory and methods in Women's Studies at UCSC. Donna Haraway and Teresa de Lauretis, both of whom teach courses in the program, discuss how they redesigned their syllabi in response to the intersections of feminist theory and colonial discourse. Haraway's essay explores how she taught students to see feminism as an open discourse, one of different participants with different stakes in its construction. In her essay, she juxtaposes three different interpretations of the work of novelist Buchi Emecheta in order to suggest the affinities as well as conflicts in creating a feminist discourse responsive to critiques of colonial discourse. Haraway's own reading of The Double Yoke argues that Emecheta's novel contains a political allegory in which historically-specific and concrete ambiguities do not resolve but make possible hopeful connections among people caught within global structures of multinational capitalism. Teresa de Lauretis provides a theory of feminist subjectivity which is conscious of being embedded in "diversified power relations." De Lauretis argues that while feminists have accepted the co-existence of axes of oppression such as race or color, ethnic or sexual identification along with gender, they need to grasp how these axes may affect each other. Feminist theory, in de Lauretis' analysis, emerges with feminist self-consciousness, when feminists question their own histories, terms of discourse and practices. De Lauretis discusses this self displacement in Monique Wittig's article "One is Not Born a Woman" and Minnie Bruce Pratt's political biographical essay, "Identity: Skin Blood Heart" as interpreted by Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty in their article "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do with It."
It is not easy to place these essays under some unified theme, but neither are they so disparate as to be unrelated. Read together they offer practices for the rethinking of culture, politics and subjectivity demanded by the intersection of feminism and the critical study of colonial discourse. The challenge that these papers exist within and speak to is a situation and problem of political pluralism that is not liberalism. This pluralism accepts that an effective decolonial and women's or feminist politics demands accountability to multiple audiences, interests and relationships while recognizing that pluralism does not mean formal equality among them. While living within this reality is a challenge, it is also an opportunity for recreating both feminist scholarship and the critical study of colonial discourse.
Deborah Gordon
Editor,
Santa Cruz, June
1988
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