Abstract
This chapter examines the development of a South Asian postcolonial feminism or feminisms and the implications of categorizations based on geographic and political location. This trajectory shows the development of identities in relation to specific territories and terminologies of “colour”.
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Notes
- 1.
“Extra national” refers to those diasporic bodies and sensibilities that do double duty in how they operate outside the borders of the country of origin , as well as how they function within the nation of adoption. In the first case, they are interpellated by the foundational national myths of blood and belonging , and their reception/acceptance in the country of origin is mediated by their response to this, while at the same time being incorporated into the modern success story of transnationality and globalization ; in the second, they are the “strangers within the borders” who are made to stand in for the Other even as they narrate multiple stories of the multicultural nation. In both cases, diaspora is not the cause for a celebration of the transcending of nationhood; to the contrary, diaspora proclaims the triumph of the nation-state in many different, complex ways in which it is hailed by the two spheres of influence.
- 2.
Sandoval acknowledges Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ’s characterization of this women’s history as “hegemonic feminist theory” in “The Rani of Sirmur” in Francis Barker ed. Europe and its others, 1985 (147).
- 3.
See Ranu Samantrai’s wonderful historical survey of the “black British (African Caribbean and South Asian) feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s” as an example of the “practical politics” of dissent by “those who refuse to remain under erasure, in AlterNatives: Black Feminism in the Postimperial Nation (2002, 1). Samantrai offers this as a particularly “instructive” model of “an aesthetic of conflict” because “it was founded on conflict and was consistently troubled by the dissent of its own affiliates” and therefore exemplified “a paradoxical practice of seeking racial and gender equality while interrogating the salience of race and gender as markers of similitude and difference” (ibid.). See also Wini Breines (2002).
- 4.
Postcolonial histories consist both of the pre-colonization specificities of these geographical locations and an inhabitation of and engagement with the landscape of the colonial metropolis and its administrative, bureaucratic, cultural, epistemological , ideological, and literary imaginaries. It is well known that developments in the margins transformed the culture and relations of ruling in the metropolis too. Postcolonial scholars thus straddle, with some felicity, many pre-colonial, colonial and anti-colonial archives. I am aware here that I am re-inscribing one of the constantly criticized tenets of postcolonial studies: that of making the moment of colonialism the definitive one for histories of colonized regions and peoples, a before and an after, so to speak.
- 5.
Anita Sheth and Amita Handa express this very well in “A Jewel in the Frown: Striking Accord Between India /n Feminists”:
Our coming to consciousness about our racial oppression has largely been delivered by Black feminist activists. When we read Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Barbara Smith, June Jordan, Linda Carty, Peggy Bristow, Dionne Brand, Makeda Silvera, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker—truly the list goes on—we come to understand the pain and injustice of, and resistance to, white supremacist oppression and exploitation, and learn about how this hateful practice of racism, colonialism and imperialism is put together and managed daily. We thus also find in their words an entry point to talk about ourselves, our exclusions, our struggles. We realize that as feminists working towards an anti-racist project, we have not understood our particular experiences as India/ns; we have not drawn on our particular histories of oppression, domination and resistance. Through their work, we have had access to South Asian feminists, like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Punam Khosla, Himani Bannerji, Nirmala Bannerji, Partha Chatterjee, Pratibha Parmar, Lata Mani, Chandra Mohanty, Kum Kum Bhavnani, Swasti Mitter. While we have been exposed to the historical subordination of India/n women by India /n men and to the subordination of all India/s in general by the white British, we have not found points of entry to discuss the particular prejudices and privileges that we as India/s in general and India/ns from a particular class have in relation to the spectrum of non-white people”. (1993, 39–40)
- 6.
Vilashini Cooppan repeats Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s caution of this thesis, that because colonial paradigms “reason by analogy, they cannot range over the uniqueness and complexity of American racial ideology or politics” (1994, 10).
- 7.
The US legal classification of Indians contrasts with the anthropological racial classification system developed by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) in which Indians were deemed Caucasian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_classification_of_Indian_Americans). In their own understanding, and through the traditions of Sanskritic scholarship and Indology, northern “Indians” trace their origins to the “Mediterranean type” and the Aryan colonization of circa 1900 B.C. Southern Indians, on the other hand, are deemed a hybrid of proto-Australoids, the predominant inhabitants of the subcontinent after the Negrito settlers c. 3000 B.C. (Hiro 2002). All this classification testifies not only to the intransient nature and intangibility of “race” as a method of tracing origins but also to the familiarity of subcontinentals with complex forms of identity-making, racialization being only one method.
- 8.
Now this equation is further complicated by immigrants from ex-British colonies like Singapore and Hong Kong.
- 9.
Immigrants from newly independent African nation -states get interpellated by pan-Africanism, a development that is now being questioned by many scholars from the continent, who speak of a hierarchy between descendants of slaves in the US and people from the old continent. It is a hierarchy that cuts both ways. On the one hand, routes to power are more open to the established blacks of the US, and on the other, newer people from Africa have a “more authentic” claim on their ancestry and heritage, as well as higher stakes in postcoloniality.
- 10.
I am sure there is an interesting study waiting to be done on how the religious language and trope of “conversion” have inflected social movements, the work on Buddhism by Dalit scholars such as B.R. Ambedkar in India being one such example.
- 11.
Speaking about “the underrepresentation of Native women in Bridge” as not being particularly anomalous, Deborah A. Miranda asks of her “sisters of colour”: “I ask, remember the differences between indigenous and diasporic; between indigenous and exile; between still-colonized native and freed slave; between choosing education as a way to speak, and having literacy shoved down your throat in a boarding school far from home, beaten into you” (2002, 193, 200).
- 12.
For example, the anonymous writer of “For My Sister: Smashing the Walls of Pretense and Shame” wonders “what it would be like for us all to speak more openly of the most secretive things about our own communities ” (Anon. 2002, 295). She/he further elaborates: “There seems to exist a general lack of priority among class-privileged South Asian Americans regarding the building of a sense of solidarity and community with people in the working class and other people of colour. This lack of community hurts us all, sister: we lose contact with a piece of our own humanity in the process of playing the capitalist game. The suicides of our young adults, people who are newcomers to the ‘game,’ testify to this loss” (ibid., 295–96). Of course, she/he is speaking of the second generation of the diaspora , but the culpability and conscientization of the first streams of immigrants cannot be evaded either.
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Chakraborty, M.N. (2017). Outside in the House of Colour: A Second Look at Postcolonial and Transnational Feminisms. In: Monk, N., Lindgren, M., McDonald, S., Pasfield-Neofitou, S. (eds) Reconstructing Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58427-0_5
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