Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices

by Inderpal Grewal (Editor), Caren Kaplan (Editor)

Softcover Book

Genres: Feminism, Gender, Race, Gender and Sexuality, The United States Of America, Theory, Sociology

272 pages, Paperback

First published March 9, 1994

About the author

Inderpal Grewal is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms and Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel, and coeditor of Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism, all also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

[Laura]

This was published in 1994 but feels very modern, in that perhaps we didn't listen super well to their warnings and analyses and we're still making the same mistakes. Standout points for me are:

--> An overestimation of the hegemony of the West, in the sense that there are non-Western hegemonies that are pretty powerful and toxic too. This struck me in the essay about the rise of Chinese nationalism at the end of the Qing dynasty and leading into the 1911 revolution which started the Republic of China.

--> The way nationalism gives "poor village males" a new identity and how in the decolonization process women service the psychic needs of men (this last from the essay on Midnight's Children).

--> A really interesting analysis of a now-obscure short story about a Cypriot woman who has a relationship with an invading Turkish soldier and how it's read as rape but is not rape -- and how, "Contrary to what we might expect, it is not the shadowy threat of the Turkish soldier that leaps out of the darkness at Evtuxia [the main character] but her own memories of five Greek Cypriot men justifying why they did not--could not, they claim--marry her." It's the reaction to and culture around the harm that causes trauma not always the harm itself. I'm not sure how far this can be read as a metaphor for colonization/decolonization because to do so risks minimizing the harm of colonization and placing blame on the colonizer. Yet, yet, yet ... the writers of this collection would know how to treat this with nuance.

The first half is about nation-building which I confess I struggled with even though it's obviously a very relevant value and practice today. But it's not foremost in my mind as someone who grew up as a colonizer, in a nation whose genocide is quiet and ongoing, and is not being responded to with counter-nation building, in the way that it is in some of the other post-British colonies. The ways in which the colonizers are countered here are different.... Need to think more on this.

The second half has some really compelling pieces, including the one by Caplan on a critique of Adrienne Rich's "politics of location" or basically when she was first articulating the racism and homophobia within the feminist movement and the danger of now including 'difference' or 'creating space' without "historicizing the relations of exchange that govern literacy, the production and marketing of texts, etc. Most important, feminists with socioeconomic power need to investigate the grounds of their strong desire for rapport and intimacy with the 'other'."

And then a lot from the Pfeil essay, which, like the Caplan quote above, is starting to see the dangers of identity politics. Soooo many good quotes but I'll stick to one:

"The concern is that a tonic admonition to Western feminists to 'hold back while other people recover their own history' may become a warrant for disengagement from the struggles of nonwhite and/or non-Western others for their liberation from the multiple oppressions that afflict them--that the properly ethical concern for serious consideration for other determinate points of view may devolve into an apolitical aesthetic of postmodern delectation in masquerade costume as politics."

--> He talks about "the fetish of difference as an unbridgeable distance between differently constituted individuals or groups"

And his response to this is to try to paint a picture of solidarity as against identity politics. As, he would say, anyone on the ground knows, this is how it has to be done, if you want to actually get stuff done. Something something about that British film Pride showing the gays for miners rights ... it's hard to picture that happening in a big city today, and I'm not exactly sure if it's because of identity politics or because of a widening class divide. Would love others' thoughts on this!

And, finally, Grewal's idea of a subject as one who 'negotiates' is very helpful. It's opposed to anti-postmodern feminists who are more about self-making and self-determination. She calls this nostalgia and says that "such nostalgia suggests the threat and power of discourses of modernity that assert themselves in easy reaction to the uncertainties of their deconstruction, especially for those who wish to oppose dominant power structures." And then:
"It is not the resolution of identity that is necessary for political action, but oppositional mobilization and coalition, transnational, feminist practices. For, after all, many immigrants or diasporic subjects ... are not automatically oppositional; it is the consciousness of the linkages between the specific and multiple hegemonies under which these minorities live that makes them so."

[Raina Isabela]

Love the numerous references to multiple feminist theorists