Postcolonial Feminism

11 Key excerpts on "Postcolonial Feminism"

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  Ireland and Postcolonial Studies

  Theory, Discourse, Utopia

  • Eóin Flannery(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  What postcolonial feminist thought accents is the fact that comprehensive critiques and comprehensions of 148 Ireland and Postcolonial Studies the relationships between the local and the global, between the national and the international, between prosperity and poverty will always be partial without factoring in issues of differential gendered lives and contexts. In many ways the trajectories mapped by feminist scholars within the field of postcolonial studies match those etched by the edi- tors of the volume Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. In their editorial Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl and Antoinette Burton explicitly link the future responsibilities of postcolonial studies with the political, eco- nomic and social deformations of global capitalism: Indeed this constitutes the most significant challenge facing demo- cratic thought: what visions of a postcolonial world can we as human- ists offer that will interrogate, perhaps, even interrupt, the forms of globalization now dictated by politicians, military strategists, cap- tains of finance and industry, fundamentalist preachers and theolo- gians, terrorists of the body and spirit. (2005: 13) Under the machinations of the neo-Orwellian cast list convened here, the project envisioned by Loomba et al. cannot be complete without a requisite attentiveness to the vagaries of gendered disparity and dis- location. It seems that under such muscular regimes of acquisition, women in developing societies are qualitatively, and quantitatively, more exposed to their excesses. The representation of women’s histories is a constituent element of the cultural politics of postcolonial studies. Similarly, postcolonial cri- tique is itself one of a range of discursive modes through which femin- ine voices, texts and practices are represented. Feminist literary history, women’ s history, oral history and subaltern historiography are neither discrete discursive strategies nor reducible one to the other.

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  Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations

  Reading Race, Gender and Class

  • Chowdhry Geeta, Sheila Nair, Chowdhry Geeta, Sheila Nair(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Despite the focus on race and the imperial juncture in early postcolonial critiques, little attention has been paid to the question of gender. In critiquing the neglect of gender in postcolonial theory, and the lack of sustained attention to race and imperialism, particularly in mainstream and some strands of postmodern and Marxist feminist theory, postcolonial feminists make gender and race central to their analyses (Spivak 1986, 1987; Mohanty 1991a). Confronting the simplified and homogenized constructions of Third World women, Mohanty attempts two major tasks: deconstructing hegemonic Western feminist knowledge about Third World women, and reconstructing locally grounded knowledge and strategies (1991a: 51). She thus draws our attention to the “simultaneity of oppressions,” and grounds “feminist politics in the histories of racism and imperialism” (Mohanty 1991a: 10). Spivak is equally critical of Western hegemonic knowledge and suggests that Western feminism, despite its critique of androcentricity, is grounded in the “imperialist vision of redemption” (Spivak 1986, 1987). For instance, according to Moore-Gilbert, Spivak sees Western feminisms, influenced by the “liberal humanist vision” and the anti-humanism of Foucault and Gilles Deleuze as embodying a vision, similar to “imperialist narratives, promising redemption to the colonized subject” (1997: 76–7). Postcolonial feminists are thus skeptical of notions of global sisterhood that are premised on the universality of shared or similar oppressions, and seek to contextualize feminist struggles and critiques in specific historical, geographical, and cultural sites (Mohanty 1991a). By identifying its key referents, this brief genealogy of postcolonial studies assists in situating a postcolonial approach to international relations.

  Central themes of the volume

  Although there have been some important efforts to relate postcolonial theory to the study of world politics (e.g., Krishna 1993, 1999; Darby and Paolini 1994; Darby 1997b, 1998; Grovogui 1996; Ling 2001a), its impact on IR until recently has been minimal. Consistent with the complex genealogy of postcolonial studies, these contributions, however, draw our attention to the variety of ways in which IR is informed by postcolonial theory. Darby and Paolini (1994), for example, discuss three “overlapping but nevertheless distinct movements” in postcolonial scholarship that are useful to the study of IR. The first movement, originating in the study of Third World fiction, interrogates representational practices in the service of colonialism, where colonialism signifies “a continuing set of practices that are seen to prescribe relations between the West and the Third World beyond the independence of the former colonies” (Darby and Paolini 1994: 375). A focus on the projects of “resistance and recovery,” highlighted in the works of Memmi and Fanon among others, constitutes the second movement. The third movement in postcolonial studies, the “one world” movement according to Gandhi, engages with the “postcolonial desire for extra- or post-national solidarities and considers) concepts and terms such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘diaspora’ which have come to characterize mixed or globalized culture” (Gandhi 1998: 123).

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  Feminism

  A Beginner's Guide

  • Sally J. Scholz(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Oneworld Publications

    (Publisher)

  Postcolonial Feminism traces many of the problems of less developed countries back to the histories of colonialism. Colonialism exploited not just natural resources; it also hijacked cultures, educational systems, beliefs about race and gender relations, and languages. Postcolonial Feminism analyzes sexist ideologies and practices within this context. Postcolonial feminists are a widely diverse group. They may reside either in the former colonies or in Europe or America. They might be descended from the colonizers or the colonized. Regardless, their analytical framework is the history of colonialism and its enduring effects.

  Of course, not every colony experienced colonialism in the same way. Imperialist regimes treated the peoples within the nations they colonized quite differently. This diversity of experience is important in thinking about Postcolonial Feminism as well. Many postcolonial feminists see remnants of colonialism in the universalizing claims of other feminists. When first and second wave feminists, for instance, argued from the basis of oppression in women’s shared experience, they overlooked or ignored the numerous ways that women did not and do not share similar experiences. Postcolonial feminists highlight the ways some feminist schools of thought and projects repeat dominant relations or reinscribe oppressive identities. When feminists impose Western models of liberation on the two-thirds world, they engage in a sort of neocolonialism that echoes the historical experience of colonialism by trying to make the ‘colony’ more like them.

  Although colonialism in the form of political appropriation of territory is for the most part a thing of the past, a new form of colonialism is targeted by postcolonial thinkers. Multinational corporations and global businesses, largely centered in Western nations, bring their own colonizing influence through business models, hegemonic culture, exploitation of workers, and displacement of traditional trades. Whereas traditional forms of colonialism entailed the colonizer assuming the privilege of ruling in the colony, this neocolonialism rules indirectly through the power it creates and enjoys by bringing manufacturing jobs to an area or providing consumer goods to a people – often Western inspired consumer goods as well. Old style colonialism often killed or displaced indigenous peoples; the new style of colonialism impoverishes a culture by swamping societies with Western values, products, or ideals.

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  Women in Culture

  An Intersectional Anthology for Gender and Women's Studies

  • Bonnie Kime Scott, Susan E. Cayleff, Anne Donadey, Irene Lara, Bonnie Kime Scott, Susan E. Cayleff, Anne Donadey, Irene Lara(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Despite the disciplining tone of many of the occasions for such scholarship, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a postcolonial feminist approach harnesses the wisdom of many differ- ent critical strands; a coalitional scholarship, it is indebted even as it contributes to scholarship in a range of fields that extend feminist discourse beyond any simple notion of the literary or of gender. I use the term “postcolonial” in this essay to refer to a critical framework in which literary and other texts can be read against the grain of the hegemonic discourse in a colonial or neocolonial context: this framework insists on recognizing, resisting, and overturning the strictures and structures of colonial relations of power. It takes its inspiration from and constantly refers to the intellectual work that contributed to the end of Europe’s colonial occupation of the globe, from the mid‐twentieth century to the present. But the postcolonial critical framework is more than a condensed theory of decolonization. Rather, it is a methodology especially invested in examin- ing culture as an important site of conflicts, collaborations, and struggles between those in power and those subjected to power. While colonial control over far‐flung empires was largely accomplished through use of force, the “superiority” of the col- onizer was crucially reinforced through cultural “persuasion.” British colonizers spread the secular scripture of English literature through the colonial education Introduction to Feminist Concepts and Issues 41 system as a means of establishing the “innate” superiority of British culture (and therefore of British rule) in the minds of the native elites.

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  Women, Gender, and World Politics

  Perspectives, Policies, and Prospects

  • Peter R. Beckman(Author)
  • 1994(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  I call this combination "Critical/Feminist Theory," or a "gender-in-International-Relations" per- spective. Liberal feminists have underscored the absence of women from both the practice and study of international relations. This absence has been used in the past to defend the supposed gender neutrality of the study of world politics. Criticizing it is therefore important. Liberal feminists challenge that claim and effectively give voice to women scholars and previously si- lenced practitioners of world politics, as well as expand the boundaries of the field. Similarly, Radical feminism not only challenges the assumption that mainstream International Relations theory has been produced in a value- neutral way, but also points to the importance of expanding the arena of legitimate inquiry in world politics beyond its traditional focus on war and peace. Along with other critics of this tradition, Radical feminism insists on exploring the constitutive elements of all international activity, not merely the surface appearance of interstate rivalry, which has been privi- leged through Realism. Finally, Feminist Postmodernists have emphasized the ways in which identity and meaning are contingent and socially constructed. This is im- portant in International Relations because it underscores the ways in which the topics that are considered important, the ways of posing questions, and the approach to studying them, are created rather than natural. A Critical/Feminist account of world politics that is sensitive to gender relations should attempt to incorporate many of the insights of the above types of feminist theorizing while overcoming their limitations. Like Lib- eral feminists, we are interested in documenting the underrepresentation of women in particular spheres, or describing the unfair burdens borne by women as a result of particular legislative practices.

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  Challenging the NGOS

  Women, Religion and Western Dialogues in India

  • Tamsin Bradley(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  35 Chapter 2 Feminist Politics n this chapter I seek to understand how various discourses within feminism and gender studies have constructed a category of Woman that symbolically represents the subjectivities of all women. Women in the developing world find their personhood lost within this category and the unique identities and experiences of women cross-culturally are hidden by the hegemony of this term. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first is a review of the various approaches taken by feminist scholars who are concerned to highlight and challenge the patriarchal structures that limit the freedom of women. However, it is argued that in seeking to address the imbalances that constrain women many of these feminist academics and activists have in fact perpetuated the hegemonic power structure outlined in the last chapter. The singular political objective held by these scholars (to free women from the grasps of patriarchy) enables them to position themselves as those who ‘know’ and ‘understand’ the oppression all women suffer. The Western feminist, typically white, well educated and upper or middle class, is the expert whose self-imposed role has become that of liberator. Scholars within feminist postmodernism have challenged and deconstructed the hegemony of this kind of feminism. Their efforts to replace the homogenous category of Woman with a notion of difference are reviewed in this chapter, with the implications of their critiques for a purposeful feminist scholarship considered in detail. Further critiques can be found in postcolonial studies, which have forged an approach to scholarship that possesses both a means of deconstructing the hegemony embedded in many academic narra-tives while also offering approaches to recording the voices of others. Scholars who position themselves in postcolonial studies are concerned to examine the roots of this binary opposition that divides ‘Third World’ women as Other from ‘Western Liberated’ women.

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  Postcolonizing the International

  Working to Change the Way We Are

  • Phillip Darby(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  States were once again in the foreground. Hard interests appeared to be the name of the game. Power was being exercised openly, indeed ¶agrantly. The lesson I wish to draw is that criticism cannot content itself with operating on a single plane. It needs to confront the distinctive issues raised by both mani-festations of power. Few of us would doubt that postcolonialism is well placed to reveal the workings of dominance when politics increasingly comes to reside in the personal and the subjective, and processes such as consumption and com-modi¤cation appear to have more purchase than calculations of statecraft and na-tional interest. By working along these lines we may be led to an enlarged and transformed sense of the political. I have attempted to pursue some material of this kind in the ¤nal subsection of this chapter. But the more immediate face of dominance—the one that has preoccupied us all since 9/11—calls for a rather different repertoire of knowledge skills. If postcolonial criticism is to help reshape public thinking about contemporary glo-bal power, it will have to engage directly with established disciplinary formations 52 postcolonizing the international concerned with the international that presently make the running, and seem likely to continue to do so. Universities are now attempting to cash in on the pre-vailing interest by offering a proliferation of courses on terrorism, security studies, and disciplinary international relations. It is pertinent to note that, his-torically, international relations comes up trumps when things look bad. And I would assert that the international relations that gains visibility at such times is mostly hawkish—and perhaps this will be even more likely now with university courses increasingly tailored to market requirements. To this point, postcolonialism has treated both international relations and strategic studies discourses with disdain.

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  International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism

  Defending the Discipline

  • D. S. L. Jarvis, Darryl S. L. Jarvis(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University of South Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  The only objective evident in the new identity politics seems to be the “transgression of boundaries,” where everything no matter how disparate is assumed to be related to international politics and where the purview of our disciplinary lenses are counseled to have no focus but be encompassing of all things social, political, and economic. Feminist (Re)Visions of the Facts Apart from the problematic nature of identity discourse as a theoretical avenue germane to International Relations, there is much else in postmod-ern feminist writings that are also questionable. Adam Jones, for example, is concerned about the exclusivity with which women are made the onto-logical essence of gendered analyses, creating skewed commentaries that, rather than frame the important question of gender in more inclusive ways, tends to imprison it amid a radical matriarchal discourse. 122 Unfortunately, this all too often leads to narratives and modes of analysis whose treatment of the facts in international relations is, at best, suspect. One of the recur-rent themes in feminist analyses of international politics, for example, is that women everywhere suffer more violence, intimidation, torture, mutilation, and abuse than do men who otherwise perpetrate these crimes. When Ann Tickner attempts to draw attention to the “particular vulnerabilities of women within states,” for instance, “the phrase ‘particular vulnerabilities’ suggests not just an analytically separable category, but a disproportionate degree of vulnerability.” 123 Yet, if we look at the facts the contrary is true: 170 International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism men direct the overwhelming majority of their violence toward other men.

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  Discrepant Dislocations

  Feminism, Theory, and Postcolonial Histories

  • Mary E. John(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  These notes—or, rather, "field notes"—are questions that await their transcription in India. Postcolonial Feminists 19 One of feminism's central demands has been to break out of universalistic assumptions and realize that it takes a very particular perspective, "trained on a determinate and particular field of expe- rience," 32 to render visible the contradictory statuses of women and men. It would, however, be extremely misleading to claim that it is women, and not men, who perceive the effects of patriarchy be- cause they are so directly affected by them, as though knowledge of oppression bore some natural relation to its experience. Being and knowing have never been immediately connected; as Donna Hara- way has put it in a related context, "[t]o see from below is neither easily learnt nor unproblematic, even if 'we' 'naturally' inhabit the great underground terrain of subjugated knowledges." 33 . Far from being a priori, the connection between women and knowledges about them is a result, struggled for, constantly renegotiated and learned anew. Perhaps another way of posing this is to say simply that feminism is a politics as much as it is an epistemology—where questions of representation must deal with who speaks for whom, along with what is being said. Indeed, from among a host of other descriptions, feminism could be described as a narrative about the discovery of representation itself—from the prior moment, when women's iden- tity as women was either largely accepted or disregarded, to the present, in which we make it our subject, politically and inter- pretatively. Men need to cultivate the necessary vision "to learn how to see faithfully from another's point of view"; 34 this may even be the only way to recognize their own implication and accountabil- ity within the gendering process. Such considerations still make men's place within feminism an ambiguous, if not "an impossible one," as Stephen Heath has claimed.

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  Cultural Diversity and the Empowerment of Minorities

  Perspectives from Israel and Germany

  • Rosemarie Mielke, Majid Al-Haj(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Postcolonial Feminism and the Liberal Bargain — 193 — Mohanty, Chandra T. 1991. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism , ed. C.T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ——— 1999. “Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity.” In Feminist Approaches to Theory and Methodology , ed. S. Hesse-Biber, C. Gilmartin, and R. Lydenberg. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Connor, J. 1993. “Gender, Class and Citizenship in the Comparative Analysis of Welfare State Regimes: Theoretical and Methodological Issues,” The British Journal of Sociology 44: 501–18. Okin Moller, S. 1991. “John Rawls: Justice as Fairness – For Whom?” In Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, ed. Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carol Pateman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pateman, Carol. 1988. The Sexual Contract . Cambridge: Polity Press. Rekhess, E. 1989. “Israeli Arabs and the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza: Political Affinity and National Solidarity,” Asian and African Studies 23: 119–54. Rich, Adrienne. 1984. “Notes towards a Politics of Location.” In Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985 . London: Little Brown & Co. Rosenhek, Z. 1998. “New Developments in the Sociology of Palestinian Citizens of Israel: An Analytical Review,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21: 558–78. Russo, A. 1991. “‘We cannot live without our lives’: White Women, Antiracism, and Feminism.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism , ed. C.T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Sa’ar, Amalia. 2000. “‘Girls’ and Women: Femininity and Social Adulthood among Unmarried Israeli-Palestinian Women.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University. Sa’ar, Amalia. 2005.

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  Decolonization Agonistics in Postcolonial Fiction

  • C. Okonkwo(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2 Decolonization Agonistics in Postcolonial Fiction (iv) the empowerment of those marginalized peoples and cultures by asserting the validity of their historical experience, cultural products, and world views in opposition to the universalist claims of imperial Europe. There is a superficial attractiveness in this argument, for, as Rajeswari Mohan has rightly argued, 'whether a text is read as a Commonwealth, third world, or postcolonial text makes all the dif- ference to its meaning and status, the prefixes activating different genealogies, emphases, and, inevitably, politics'. 2 In the particular case of postcolonial literature, however, the terminological change is purely cosmetic, for it has deviously consolidated the old negations under a new rubric that submerges the experiences and concerns of the ex-colonized peoples in a welter of Western ideological or strat- egic priorities. All prevailing definitions of 'postcolonial literatures' are vari- ations on the formula offered by the Australian trio of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, and each variation has merely served to entrench the theorist's or critic's priorities as a member of a social, political, ideological, or racial group. Ashcroft et al. define 'postcolonial cultures' as 'all the cultures affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day', and 'postcolonial literatures' as all those literatures that 'emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre'. 3 There is a fundamental conflict between these defi- nitions.

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