Introduction: Feminism and the Critique of Colonial DiscourseIn
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 exthnography
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.