‘Our Commitments to China’: Migration and the Geopolitical Unconscious of The Waves

Abstract

In Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, Susan Stanford Friedman proposes a geopolitical reading of Woolf beyond questions of the British Empire. A recent focus of Woolf studies has been debate about Woolf’s critique of, or orientalist participation in, British imperialism.¹ Reviewing these readings, Friedman raises two problems:

First, our overreliance on models of center/periphery and subject/object often denies agency to multiple others in a rush to condemn the center. Second, such binary oppositions tend to enmesh us Woolf critics in an unanswerable debate about whether to celebrate Woolf as critic of empire or to critique her as participant in and beneficiary of imperialism. (Friedman 119)