Translation and Travelling Theory

Feminist Theory and Praxis in China

Dongchao Min

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138317062
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317007111
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Research has shown that feminist theory has flowed far more easily from North to South and from West to East, wheras travel in other directions has proved almost non-existent. While the hegemony of US feminist theory has been challenged in Europe, for example, there remain many 'invisible' discursive trajectories that link the development of feminist theories and movements across the world. This book brings together and engages with theories of globalisation, transnational feminism, travelling theory and cultural translation, exploring the travelling routes of feminist theory and practice to China over recent decades. With attention to the crucial questions of why and how knowledge travels or fails to travel, the forms that it takes and by whom it is sent, received, understood, translated, or even refused, the author examines the development and activities of different groups of women and women's organisations in China, thus developing an alternative form of travelling theory. A study of the cross-cultural translation of knowledge and practices that occur or fail to occur when different cultures interact, and their impact, this book will appeal to scholars of gender studies, sociology and cultural studies with interests in feminist thought and the travel and production of knowledge.

1 Introduction

How far does travelling theory travel? Questions for travelling theory and translation

This book is concerned with the question of why and how the ideas and knowledge of feminism travel from ‘here’ (the West) to ‘there’ (China). In what form and by whom has feminist theory and practice been sent, received, understood, and translated, or even rejected? I point to the impact of these travels; in particular, I focus on the ‘travelling theory’ and ‘translation’ of transnational feminist ideas and knowledge and the formulation of these ideas within Chinese women’s and gender studies, discourse, and practices, together with the perceived status of Chinese agency in the mediated processes of ‘translation’ occurring from the 1980s up to the present day.

As an important part of postmodern thinking, ‘travelling theory’ has been discussed since the 1980s, with Edward Said’s essay “Travelling Theory” (1984) being the centrally influential contribution on the topic. In this essay, Said discusses György Lukács (a participant in the struggle in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919) as used by Lucien Goldmann (an expatriate historian at the Sorbonne after World War II), and then Goldmann as used by Raymond Williams (an English cultural studies scholar at Cambridge in the mid- to late twentieth century). Said emphasises two main points: first, that theories lose some of their original power and rebelliousness when they travel to other periods and new situations; second, that this implies processes of representation and institutionalisation different from those prevailing at the point of origin (Said, 1984).

Based on these patterns, Said also suggested the insightful approaches to thinking through travelling theories. He addresses the importance of a historical approach to theory and ideas, stressing that both a theory’s origin and its later interpretation are of crucial importance. Proceeding from this historical approach, Said addresses the issue of ‘misreading’. He finds the assumption that the borrowings and re-interpretations of theory are the misreading. Misreadings (as they occur) should be treated as part of the historical transmission of ideas and theories from one setting to another (Said, 1984: 236).

Indeed, theories are always on the move as Said pointed out, but when I tried to use Said’s ideas to solve puzzles that I had with theory, his model of ‘travelling theory’ could not satisfactorily answer my questions. For example, the most influential feminist book of the second half of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, was published in France in 1949, and although it sold well and provoked some outraged comments along with positive response in France, it did not trigger an intellectual revolution in other parts of the world. It was not until the mid-1960s and the so-called second wave of feminist discussion that the book, in its English language translation, was taken up and proclaimed to contain an earth-shattering analysis: Kate Millett, Ti-Grace Atkinson, and Shulamith Firestone, all authors of important works of 1960s feminist theory, dedicated their books to de Beauvoir. This transatlantic connection turned a French intellectual’s book into a much wider feminist and political event (Braidotti, 1992). However, when The Second Sex travelled to China during the 1980s, quite a different story unfolded. This will be discussed in detail in a later chapter.

This example helps to reformulate my first set of questions about ‘travel’: Is there something inherently mobile in the nature of theory? If not, when, where, for whom and why do theories and ideas travel or not travel? Does feminist theory travel in the same way as other theories? Said’s ‘travelling theory’ consigns these questions to silence.

If this is not the same thing as arguing that there is something mobile in the nature of theory, that means there must be some power that encourages (persuades) some theories to travel. What is this ‘power’? Said put this question aside without giving a satisfactory answer.

Throughout contemporary Euro-American criticism from the late 1970s to the 1990s, a counter-concept of ‘creolisation’ or ‘hybridity’ has come to reflect what is often termed a ‘postmodern turn’ in cultural criticism (Kaplan, 1996). In his essay “Notes on Theory and Travel”, James Clifford offers some interesting questions and comments on the idea of travelling theory. He argues that theory is no longer naturally ‘at home’ in the West, or more cautiously, that this privileged place is now increasingly contested, cut across by other locations, claims, and trajectories of knowledge articulating racial, gender, and cultural differences (Clifford, 1989: 179). Clifford also points out that Said’s ideas about travelling theory need to be modified if they are to be extended to a post-colonial context. Its view of the Budapest, Paris, and London itinerary of theory is both linear and confined to Europe.

For Clifford, the metaphor of travel assists in de-essentialising both research and the subjects of research and it opens up a new field for discussion by problematising the conventional sense of the term. Nonetheless, Clifford’s theoretical discourse assumes the utility and applicability of related metaphors, such as that of the hotel as ‘a site of travel encounters’ – terms which are not innocent. Thus bell hooks has argued that travel, as read in Clifford’s work, is overdetermined and produced at the ‘centre’ of Western social and political power; she writes that

holding on to the concept of ‘travel’ as we know it is also a way to hold on to imperialism…. Travel is not a word that can be easily evoked to talk about the Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, the landing of Chinese immigrants, the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans, or the plight of the homeless.

(Clifford, 1992: 173)

Some additional questions need to be asked concerning the travelling of theory, such as: Where and how are theories produced? And by whom and for what purposes?

Perhaps the most basic question that needs to be asked concerns what is meant by theory in Said’s travelling theory. Said’s ideas about travelling theory are derived from the high humanist traditions of comparative literature and philology which have shaped his critical method as well as his choice of texts. The assumption is, as Aijaz Ahmad points out, that Said’s theory is Euro-American centred, and Said

speaks of the West, or Europe, as the one which produces the knowledge, the East as the object of that knowledge. In other words, he seems to posit stable subject-object identities, as well as ontological and epistemological distinctions between the two.

(Ahmad, 1992: 183)

In this case, theories from the East and South, from the periphery, have been excluded as theory and are simply not considered to be in the league of mainstream travelling theory to which Said belongs.

During the 1990s, transnational feminism voiced a powerful critique of travelling theory. A related issue here concerns power relationships, particularly what Foucault (1977) terms “power/knowledge”, something simply ignored in Said’s analysis of travelling theory. As Caren Kaplan points out:

Euro-American poststructuralist and postmodern critical practices have been slow to acknowledge this transnational material context. The subject position of the critic (or the multiplicity of subject positions available to the critic) has not received significant attention, either dismissed as vulgar and essentialist ‘identity politics’ or erased through the Eurocentric rhetoric of universality. Nor has the ‘travel’ of theories and theorists been fully considered as part of the legacy of imperialism nor as part of the politics of cultural production in transnational modernities and postmodernities.

(Kaplan, 1996: 103)

Therefore, the issue of the “politics of location”, initially addressed by Adrienne Rich (1987), has subsequently been discussed by a number of post-colonial feminists and become a wide-ranging debate, linking with the global and the local in feminist inquiry.¹

Furthermore, theories, especially feminist theory, do not just travel to and in academic circles; they also travel to larger social movements. What happens when they travel to and are accepted within society at large? The debates and research on transnational feminist praxis offer us even more important questions to consider when thinking about travelling theory.

Revisiting transnational feminism

Since the 1990s, the theories of transnational feminism have challenged the Eurocentric, colonialist perspective of knowledge production that disregards local knowledge and the power relations of travel as part of the knowledge production through which subjects are constituted. Focusing on the phenomenon of how feminism has flowed around the world, scholars of transnational feminism have argued that knowledge production takes place through multiple related contexts that acknowledge the roles played by and the interaction between different localities in the process of globalisation, and that flows of knowledge generate different meanings in different places (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Alexander and Mohanty, 1997). From this analytical perspective, feminisms in different places not only reflect but are also active and explicit participants in processes of globalisation, engaging with and producing cross-border cultural, political, and economic flows.

During the past two decades, feminist scholars studying the diversity of the geopolitical contexts of globalisation have focused their attention on the relations between feminist theories and practices. Some of them have followed the trail of travelling academic feminist theories and tried to understand their directions and their reception in distinctive political and cultural backgrounds.² Others have studied gender-based movements and have struggled to grasp mutual meanings in the conceptions of feminism that they have encountered, and have attempted to construct a strategy for movements.³

These feminist scholars have shown that feminist theory has flowed far more easily from North to South and from West to East (particularly from the United States to other parts of the world), whereas flows in other directions are nearly non-existent (Costa, 2000; Min, 2008; Thayer, 2010). In Europe, the hegemony of US feminist theory has been challenged (Davis and Evans, 2011). However, there are many other invisible discursive trajectories that link the development of feminist theories and movements around the world which have so far been ignored. The cross-regional interaction between China and the Nordic countries is one example of the effects of globalisation on transnational academic currents, yet there has been no (or very little) research into this important topic. The questions that have been asked have only scratched the surface and have thus failed to reveal some of the untold stories of the cross-regional flow of gender theory between China and the Nordic countries.⁴

In the context of China, feminists in the academy have been considering the power relationship between travelling theory and localisation since the late 1990s, when the asymmetrical distribution of knowledge was recognised. I wrote more than ten years ago that

if debates about postmodernism and post-colonialism in women’s studies in China are belated, then what other important feminist ideas have not yet travelled to China? For instance, works by women of colour (even Americans such as bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Davis) have not yet been heard nor read in China. Women’s studies and feminism in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa go almost unheard, not to mention Australian, Latin American feminism…. The power relationship behind this global flow of feminist ideas, publications and activism should be revealed and this is clearly one of the new areas of work that needs to be encouraged.

(Min, 2002: 233)

If we map the routes by which transnational feminism has travelled to China over the past decade, we see that US feminist theories are still in the lead. During this period, the books of bell hooks, Alison Jagger, and Nancy Fraser have been translated into Chinese, as have those of Judith Butler, who was regarded the new star in China for a few years. However, is this not just another example of academic fashion determining (who and) what is hot and (who and) what is not? Or have some theories been translated and published without ever travelling? This will be explored later.

If we look at the field of social movements, it may come as a surprise that transnational links to development funding played a crucial role in pushing Chinese women’s and gender studies into particular ways of connecting with the international community in the 1990s. The Ford Foundation played the most prominent role in the 1990s by funding the major women/gender studies conferences and seminars. In addition to significant women’s studies projects on reproductive health in China, the Ford Foundation also funded projects on rural women’s development, women’s education, the mobility of the female population, women’s legislation, and the women’s and gender studies curriculum in higher education. Chinese women’s and gender studies lacked funding resources within China, so relying on Western and international foundations was seen as the only option. In addition to funding, these foundations have also offered ideas of their own. Their support, which has been vitally important for many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in China, was thus ideological as well as financial.⁵

Women’s and gender studies scholars have noted that many of the projects, ideas, and funding come from abroad in the name of the ‘international community’. However, we are mostly in the dark, or are reluctant to question, what role the terms ‘gender’, ‘development’, and ‘NGO’ play in the neoliberal development agenda, and how this discourse has ensured that gender has achieved a place within international social movements. No doubt this has happened because development regimes target women for special consideration (Harcourt, 2009, 2010).

Confronted with this situation, the epistemological alternative voiced by some scholars is that “there is no global justice without global cognitive justice” (Santos, 2006: 14). In other words, the development of alternative thinking is a crucial task for confronting the predominant knowledge production on globalisation and achieving global justice. This radical thinking will be the starting point for my new approach to travelling theory.

Constructing an alternative travelling theory

My approach to translation and travelling theory is to develop an alternative way of thinking about travelling theory, which criticises and expands upon the work of Said and others in order to develop an interdisciplinary methodology for analysing theories and their possibilities for travel. It will contribute innovative approaches in the following ways.

First, travelling theory usually focuses on the travellers, that is, the travelling theories. An alternative travelling theory will also take into account both the people in the places where the theories are received and how these people either welcome, adopt, or are suspicious of the theories that travel.

For the people in the places where theories are received, the questions should be: Where are these theories produced? Where do they come from? What is the relationship between geohistorical location and knowledge production? What are their local histories? How are such theories expressed when they travel through regional differences? Are the theories just repeated in the new environment, or do they face limits here?

Second, most literature on travelling theory deals with the discursive issue. An alternative travelling theory will include the study of the links between discursive and material conditions, which means it will study not only the written translations but also the practices that follow from translation and the interaction between discourse and practice.

The conditions for travelling theories have been profoundly changed by the globalisation of economy, society, and culture, and by the rapid development of technical communication and media. As Gudrun-Axeli Kna...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: how far does travelling theory travel? Questions for travelling theory and translation
• 2 Awakening again: the 1980s
• 3 Duihua (dialogue) in-between: the process of translating the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘gender’ in China
• 4 Jiegui (connecting with the international track): the 1990s
• 5 The cases of two NGOs
• 6 That was the past, what is the future?
• References
• Index