Dislocating Cultures

Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism

Uma Narayan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135025052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Dislocating Cultures takes aim at the related notions of nation, identity, and tradition to show how Western and Third World scholars have misrepresented Third World cultures and feminist agendas. Drawing attention to the political forces that have spawned, shaped, and perpetuated these misrepresentations since colonial times, Uma Narayan inspects the underlying problems which "culture" poses for the respect of difference and cross-cultural understanding.Questioning the problematic roles assigned to Third World subjects within multiculturalism, Narayan examines ways in which the flow of information across national contexts affects our understanding of issues. Dislocating Cultures contributes a philosophical perspective on areas of ongoing interest such as nationalism, post-colonial studies, and the cultural politics of debates over tradition and "westernization" in Third World contexts.

Notes /

One / Contesting Cultures

1. A shorter version of this paper, entitled “A Culture of One’s Own: Situating Feminist Perspectives Inside Third World Cultures,” was presented at the American Political Science Association Meeting, Washington, D.C., September 1993.

2. Original quote from Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). Quoted, with changes of the “he’s” in Bakhtin’s text to “she’s” by Norma Alarcon, “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 119.

3. Fred Pfeil, “No Basta Teorizar: In-Difference to Solidarity in Contemporary Fiction, Theory and Practice,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 222–223.

4. See, for instance, Barbara Smith, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983).

5. Christina Crosby further criticizes this assumption for being an assumption that “ontology is the ground of epistemology.” “Dealing with Differences,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 137.

6. I have no desire to reify the category of “Third-World feminist” by implying that all feminists from Third-World backgrounds confront these dismissals. Nor do I wish to suggest that all Third-World women who engage in women-centered politics embrace the term “feminist.” The term “feminism” has sometimes been questioned and sometimes rejected by Third-World women because of its perceived limitations. See for instance, Madhu Kishwar, “Why I Do Not Call Myself a Feminist,” Manushi 61 (Nov.-Dee., 1990). Others refuse to surrender the term. See Cheryl Johnson-Odim’s reasons for this position in “Common Themes, Different Contexts: Third World Women and Feminism,” in C. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

7. bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as Space of Radical Openness,” Framework 36 (1989), p. 16.

8. See the essays in Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective, Valentine M. Moghadam, ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994).

9. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, “Organizing Against Violence: Strategies of the Indian Feminist Movement,” Pacific Affairs 62, 1 (1989), p. 69.

10. I have no desire to portray my mother as a perennially passive “victim.” I was born within a year of my parents’ marriage, so the mother I knew when I was young was a relatively “new” wife. A few years into her marriage, my mother did in fact both implicitly and explicitly contest her mother-in-law’s treatment of her, a fairly common pattern. It is interesting to me, however, that the articulate and formidable woman my mother became continued to be “proud” of her earlier “innocence.”

11. Pointing to the problematic implications of the use of the figure of the Mother to symbolize the Nation, Nalini Natarajan asks, “How does the figure of Mother cement nation?” Natarajan answers, “She suggests common mythic origins. Like the land (which gives shelter and ‘bears’), she is eternal, patient, essential. During moments of ‘national’ resurgence, the land is figured as a woman and a mother…. Thus, ‘Mother India’ is an enormously powerful cultural signifier, gaining strength not only from atavistic memories from Hindu epics, Sita, Sati, Savitri, Draupadi, but also its use in moments of national (typically conflated with Hindu) cultural resurgence.” See Nalini Natarajan, “Woman, Nation, and Narration in Midnight’s Children” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). As a result of such conflations of Mother and Nation, there is some risk in my use of the term “mother-cultures.” But I think there is an interesting difference in comparing the cultural contexts in which one was raised to a particular mother, rather than to an idealized Mother. Particular mothers not only differ from other mothers, but also deviate in many interesting ways from the idealized Mother.

12. This is a cultural awareness that seems to carry over into communities of the Indian diaspora. I found it interesting that a number of the selections in Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora, edited by The Women of South Asian Descent Collective (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1993), address women’s problems in the context of marriage.

13. For accounts of problems faced by women of color and women in immigrant communities in the United States who are victims of domestic violence, see Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, 6 (July 1991); and Uma Narayan, “’Male-Order’ Brides: Immigrant Women, Domestic Violence and Immigration Law,” Hypatia 10,1 (Winter 1995).

14. Ibid.

15. In some cases, coming together in feminist groups or participating in consciousness-raising sessions have been crucial to bringing about the recognition that some problems faced by women, such as domestic violence or job discrimination, were not rare and random, but more frequent and systematic than previously assumed. I am suggesting that, in other cases, the widespread nature of some particular problems affecting women is well known and acknowledged in a particular cultural context. In these cases, what feminist political participation contributes is not so much a recognition of the frequency of the problem but the political terms in which to understand these problems and to challenge the structures that contribute to their frequency.

16. See Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, eds., In Search of Answers: Indian Voices from Manushi (London: Zed Press, 1984). Also see Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, “Organizing Against Violence: Strategies of the Indian Feminist Movement,” Pacific Affairs 62, 1 (1989).

17. As Charlotte Bunch puts it, “Feminism has been ridiculed and stereotyped worldwide, and the issues we have raised have usually not been taken seriously by the media. But, remarkably, despite this bad press, feminism has continued to grow. Women’s groups all over the world, but especially in the Third World, are taking up issues ranging from housing, nutrition, and poverty to militarism, sexual and reproductive freedom, and violence against women.” See her “Global Feminisms: Going Beyond the Boundaries,” speech given in 1985, reprinted in Frontline Feminism 1975–1995: Essays from Sojourner’s First 20 Years (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1995), p. 456.

18. Inderpal Grewal, “Autobiographic Subjects and Diasporic Locations: Meatless Days and Borderlands” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity, and Transnational Feminist Practices, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 244.

19. This was usually in fact a partial rejection, as I make clear later in the essay.

20. Partha Chatterjee quotes Bhudev Mukhopadhyay’s “Essay on the Family,” published in Bengali in 1882, as saying, “In the Arya system, the wife is a goddess. In the European system, she is a partner and companion.” See his “Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonized Women: The Contest in India,” American Ethnologist, (1989), p. 626.

21. Sucheta Mazumdar, “Women on the March: Right-Wing Mobilization in Contemporary India,” Feminist Review 49 (Spring 1995), p. 4.

22. Ibid.

23. For instance, see Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on SATI in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique 7 (1987), pp. 119–156.

24. Richard Shannon, The Crisis of Imperialism, 1865–1915 (St. Albans: Paladin, 1976), p. 13.

25. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), P. 99.

26. Karl Marx, “On Imperialism in India” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 578–79.

27. See the chapter on “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity, and Indian Food” in this volume.

28. Andre Beteille, “Some Observations on the Comparative Method,” Economic and Political Weekly, October 6, 1990.

29. The line between “traditionalists” and “modernists” is a blurred rather than a sharp line, and one that often shifted over time.

30. Partha Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonized Women: The Contest in India,” American Ethnologist (1989), p. 623

31. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), P. 35.

32. Ibid., p. 45.

33. Ibid., p. 211. Burton’s book deals with British feminists in England. For a complex account of how various Western women “in the colonies” related to political issues of local women’s status and empowerment, see Kumari Jayawardena, The White Women’s Other Burden (New York: Routledge, 1995).

34. Burton, Burdens of History, p. 20.

35. Ibid., p. 31.

36. Indian women made significant contributions to the Independence movement. Of their nationalist activities, Suruchi Thapar says, “Within the home, they spun and wove khadi, held classes to educate other women and contributed significantly to nationalist literature…. Shelter and nursing care were also provided to nationalist leaders who were in hiding from British authorities…. In addition, they held meetings and demonstrations, took part in satyagraha, picketed toddy and foreign-cloth shops, went to prison and also suffered brutalities at the hands of the British police.” Suruchi Thapar, “Women as Activists; Women as Symbols: A Study of the Indian Nationalist Movement,” Feminist Review 44 (Summer 1993), p. 81.

37. Sucheta Mazumdar, “Moving Away From...