Gender, Art and Literature: The Representations of Women in

Literary and Visual Discourse

• POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND FEMINIST THOUGHT
• THE CASE OF (POST)COLONIAL LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Granada, GEMMA, 9TH January 2019

María J. López, University of Córdoba, ff2losam@uco.es
OUR SESSION
1. Postcolonial studies and feminism
 Transnational feminism (Mohanty)

2. Discussion of five case studies

 Henry Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife”
(1892)
 Jean Rhys’s “Let Them Call It Jazz” (1962)
 Zoë Wicomb’s “There’s the bird that
never flew” (The One That Got Away,
2008)
 Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s
“Imitation” and “A Private Experience”
(The Thing Around Your Neck, 2009)
Feminism and Postcolonialism: The Twain Shall Meet

 “Both postcolonialism and feminism today are navigating through difficult conceptual
terrains in trying to make sense of the world. We need to have those difficult
conversations within and between them, which we have always avoided. We need to
ask probing questions of one another and ourselves. We need to facilitate intellectual
spaces where we can disagree, quarrel and yet recognise the commitment we have to
alternative discourses and knowledges that deconstruct traditional hierarchies and
hegemonies”
(Conversation with J. Ann Tickner and Phillip Darby)
FEMINISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM: Introductory Studies

 Ascroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies:The Key Concepts. Routledge, 2007, 2nd ed.
 Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford UP, 2005, 2nd ed.
 Bahri, Deepika. “Feminism in/and postcolonialism.” Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed. Neil Lazarus. CUP, 2004.
199-220.
 Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Routledge, 1998.
 Parashar, Swati. “Feminism and Postcolonialism: (En)gendering Encounters.” Special Issue of Postcolonial
Studies: Feminism Meets Postcolonialism: Rethinking Gender, State and Political Violence. 19.4, 2016. 371-377.
 Weedon, Chris. “Postcolonial feminist criticism.” A History of Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Gill Plain and
Susan Sellers. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. 282-300.
FEMINISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM: Some key texts

 Bahri, Deepika. “Feminism and Postcolonialism in a Global and Local Frame.” Vents d’Est, vents d’Ouest.
Mouvements de femmes et féminismes anticoloniaux. Genéve: Graduate Institute Publications, 2009.
 Carby, Hazel. “White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood” in The Empire
Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of
Birmingham, London: Hutchinson. 1982.
 McClintock,Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. Routledge, 1995.
 Minh-Ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989.
 Mohanty, Chandra Tapalde. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse.” Boundary
2 12(3), 13(1), 1984.
 Mohanty, Chandra Tapalde. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke UP,
2003.
FEMINISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM: Some key texts

 Smith, Barbara. (1984) “Black Feminism: A Movement of Our Own.” Front Line Feminism, 1975-1995:
Essays from Sojourner’s First 20Years. Ed. Karen Kahn.Aunt Lute Books, 1995.
 Spivak, G. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice.” Wedge (7) 8 (Winter/Spring),
1985.
 Spivak, G.“Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry (18) 4 (1985): 756–769.
 Stoler, Ann. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. U of California P,
2002.
 Suleri, Sara. “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition.” Critical Inquiry (18) 4 (1992):
756–769.
 Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. Routledge, 1995.
FEMINISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM
Common aspects

 Patriarchy and imperialism: analogous forms of domination.

 Relation between gender and colonial oppression as determining factors in women’s
lives.
 Concerned with theories of marginalization, construction of the ‘subaltern’, processes of
othering and silencing.
 Questions of representation, language and voice
 Language as vehicle for subverting patriarchal and imperial power.
 Identity, difference, and interpellation of the subject by a dominant discourse.
 Intersections between postcolonial theories & feminism (also poststructuralism and
pyschoanalysis):
 Questioned transparency of language, fixity of meaning, claims to universalism and singular
truth, Eurocentric gaze, untheorised appeals to global sisterhood and women’s experience.
Colonialism, patriarchy and gender
Political, historical and social
implications:
• Gender and sexuality as central to the
conceptualisation, expression and
enactment of colonial relations.
Discursive, imaginative and literary
level:
• Objectification of women in colonial
discourses
• Sexual and colonial relationships as
analogous to each other
• Equation between native women, their
body and the colonial land
• Feminization of the colonized under
empire
FEMINISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM
“an uneasy alliance” (Parashar)

 Conflicting claims of nationalism and feminism

 The nation as woman / mother
 Women marginalized by nationalist political activity and
by the rhetoric of nationalist address:
 Bankim’s Anandamath (1882)
 Peter Abrahams’s A Wreath for Udomo (1956)
 Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests (1960)
Literary, cultural and political action by women

 By the early 1970s, change in this gendered picture.

 Literature as a powerful medium through which self-
definition was sought:
 Elllen Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman (1985)
 Emma Mashinini’s Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life (1989)
 Mamphela Ramphele’s A Bed Called Home (1993)
 [Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story, 2000]
 Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1977)
POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST CRITICISM

 1980’s (Carby 1982, Mohanty 1984, Suleri 1992): against the universal category of woman or
‘women’s writing’, operating from a hidden, universalist, middle-class, Eurocentric perspective:
 silencing or marginalisation of issues of class, heterosexism, racism or colonial legacy
 failing to account for the experiences of Third World women / questioning of the category of “third
world woman”
 “there are no women in the third world” (Suleri, Meatless Days, 1989)
 assumption of a shared marginality centred in genre
 Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (quote
1)
 problematic/simplistic use of the concept of ‘sisterhood’: (quote by Lorde, 2)
POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST CRITICISM

 Barbara Smith (1984): part of a ‘Third World’ feminist

movement:
 See quote 3
 Disregard of racism:
 See quote 4 by Moraga and Anzaldúa
 Western feminism: universalist aspirations, common
oppression, sameness, human rights.
 Reaction against that Western feminism: differences,
specificities / diversity and layerness of women’s
experience / social determinants of class, race, national
affiliation, religion and ethnicity
POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST CRITICISM

 Against how post-colonial theory has tended to elide gender differences in

constructing a single category of the colonized (Spivak 1985, Mohanty 1984, Suleri
1992):
 ‘double colonization’
 Voice and silence: Who speaks for whom and whose voices are heard:
 Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985): See quote 5
 The subaltern (marginalized): contradictory and heterogenous. See quote 6 by
Mani.
 Position and locality.
 POSTCOLONIAL
 Agency and resistance:
FEMINIST CRITICISM
 Benita Parry’s “Problems in Current Theories
of Colonial Discourse” (1987): See quote 7
 Western feminists as “the true ‘subjects’” and
Third-world women as “objects” (shared
oppression, powerless victims) robbing them
“of their historical and political agency”
(Mohanty, “Under Western Eeyes” 1984)
 See quote 8 by Alexander and Mohanty
POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST CRITICISM

 (Impossible?) Representation of the complex

subjectivities of colonial subjects:
 The effacement of the colonised woman
 Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a
Critique of Imperialism” (1985)
 Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847):
quote 9
 Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966):
quote 10
POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST CRITICISM

 Feminism, Borders and Borderlands, Migration and Diaspora:

 Diasporic experience of women of colour; breaking down of traditional binary categories; cultural
hybridity; liminal third spaces.
 Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987): see quote 11
 Carole Boyce Davies’s Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994)
 Identity and palce; cross-cultural, transnational, translocal, diasporic experience.
 Susan Standford Friedman’s “Bodies on the Move: A Poetics of Home and Diaspora” (2004):
 Home: dislocation, nowhere, elsewhere, imaginary (utopian, dreamed) space, forever gone (maternal
body, motherland), place of loss.
 See quote 12.
POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST CRITICISM

 Global / international feminism

 Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas (1938) (quote 13)
 Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s
Movement Anthology (1984), ed. Robin Morgan
 Morgan’s Introduction: “Planetary Feminism: The
Politics of the 21st Century” (quote 14)
 International feminism that goes beyond nationalism /
Assumption of universal sisterhood
POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST CRITICISM

 Global / international feminism

 Criticized for the assumption that Western middle-class women share the concerns of all women,
ignoring differences of race, sexual preference, class or age.
 Assumption of a feminism free of asymmetrical power relations
 Utter rejection of nationalism (women’s movements in struggles for self-determination, democracy
and anti-imperialism)
 Alexander and Mohanty, ed. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures
(Routledge, 1997) (quote 15)
POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST CRITICISM

 Transnational feminism:
 there is no feminism free of asymmetrical power relations
 relationships between women from different nations (uneven, unequal, complex)
 taking into account differences of nation, race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, religion
 asymmetries and inequalities of power generated by capitalism, patriarchy, globalization
and diaspora
 effects of modern imperialism on women / contemporary forms of colonialism
 complex relation between feminism and nationalism
 how contemporary racisms and gendered oppressions are produced
 Mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
(2003)
  How to develop strategies that are both local and
global, theoretical and practical?
 How to maintain the relation between theory and
praxis, academic discourse and the material world?
 How to incorporate feminism within postcolonialism
without being divisive while the projects of
decolonization and nation-building are still under way?
 How to combine postcolonial perspectives that focus
on race and ethnicity with the global feminist alliance?
Food for thought
 How to deal with the category ‘women of colour’,
fractured by the politics of location and the strife
between minority communities in the first world,
women in diasporic communities, and women in the
third world?
 “How to walk the fine line between a reductive and
predictable sort of essentialism and the continued
need for representation?” (Bahri 2009)
Henry Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife” (1892)

“The Drover’s Wife”, Russell

Drysdale, c. 1945
Jean Rhys’s “Let Them Call it Jazz” (1962)

 The Left Bank and Other Stories, 1927

 Postures, novel, 1928 (published in the US as Quartet)
 After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, novel, 1931
 Voyage in the Dark, novel, 1934
 Good Morning, Midnight, novel, 1939
 Wide Sargasso Sea, novel, 1966
 Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, 1979
Zoë Wicomb’s “There’s the
bird that never flew” (2008)
Zoë Wicomb’s “There’s the bird that never flew” (2008)

Doulton Fountain, Glasgow

Zoë Wicomb’s “There’s the
bird that never flew” (2008)
Saartje Baartman or
‘the Hottentot Venus’
Saartje Baartman or
‘the Hottentot Venus’
Saartje Baartman or
‘the Hottentot Venus’
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Imitation” and “A Private Experience”

 Purple Hibiscus (2003)

 Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)
 The Thing Around Your Neck (2009)
 Americanah (2013)
 We Should All Be Feminists (2014)
 Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen
Suggestions (2017)