As with all the terms in this text, the meanings of postcolonialism are contested. The most basic contestation relates to the term ‘post’. In common with other assumptions surrounding this term, some readings suggest that postcolonialism refers chronologically to the period after colonialism. Other readings imply that postcolonialist writing is that which is opposed to and resists colonialism. The difficulties that inhere from this contestation are mainly concerned with the political nature of postcolonial writing. In respect of the first definition, we cannot assume that all writing produced after colonial rule is politically resistant. In respect of the second definition, we cannot assume that all resistance writing will be concerned with anti-colonial experiences or cultural practices. This is because ‘Not all of it will be concerned with colonial power issues such as establishing identity and, in the case of women’s post-colonial writing, family/kinship, motherlands and mother tongue’ (Wisker, 2000: 13). These issues of political definition are significant to understanding the issue of difference in feminist postcolonialist perspectives. In this respect I shall highlight three issues (see also Table 3.3):
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Table 3.3 Postcolonial differences
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1 The critique of colonialist modes of representation in Western feminist work and related issues of voice.
2 An emphasis on multiple differences, complex diversities and loca — tionality arising from issues of cultural hybridity and diasporic experiences.
3 A cautionary retention of the importance of a unified political identity.
In respect of modes of representation Wohl (2001) illustrates how the colonialist nature of British Victorian popular literature and science portrayed Irish, Black and working-class people as unreasonable, irrational, childlike, believing in superstition, criminal, excessively sexual, filthy and inhabitants of ‘dark’ lands. These pervasive and extensive assumptions of Victorian superiority throw into sharp relief Weedon’s (1999) remarks in respect of Western feminist writings on Third World women. Weedon comments that they ‘share a marked tendency to view women from other societies through a Eurocentric gaze which privileges Western notions of liberation and progress and portrays Third World women primarily as victims of ignorance and restrictive cultures and religions’ (ibid.: 188).
A classic example of a critique of this form of representation is Mohanty’s (1991) discussion of how the concept of the ‘Third World Woman’ has been authorized through Western discourses. This ‘Third World Woman’ was represented as passive, oppressed and the victim of ‘traditional’ religions and cultures. Narayan’s (1998) focus on feminist critiques of masculine epistemology also illustrates how these overlook the concerns of non-Western women. For example Western feminism has been critical of the individualism of positivism because this concurs with a political emphasis on individualistic liberal rights. However, Narayan notes how concepts such as individual rights are highly useful for fighting problems rooted in ‘traditional’ cultures. In this respect Narayan (1998: 83) comments that ‘different cultural contexts and political agendas may caste a very different light on both the ‘‘idols’’ and the ‘‘enemies’’ of knowledge as they have characteristically been typed in western feminist epistemology’. Central to a critique of the imperialistic nature of Western feminism is, therefore, its attempts to ‘speak for’ others. Ang (1997: 57) comments in this regard that there is a ‘profound suspicion of any hegemonizing, homogenizing, universalizing representation of ‘‘us’’ and. . . a strong resistance against modes of political mobilization on the basis of such representations, especially among those who used to be silenced or rendered invisible by them’. Drawing on the idea of multiple subjectivities postcolonial analyses have also challenged Western binary oppositions through a focus on cultural hybridity and diasporic experiences that give rise to multiple differences. Thus:
Against nativist visions of autonomous racial or cultural difference, postcolonial theorists are likely to note that such distinctions are no longer feasible in an era of pervasive migration, media globalization, and transnational information flow. The colonized’s fashioning of an insurgent counteridentity is inevitably shaped by the experience of colonization; the colonizer’s culture is irrevocably altered by contact with the native. As a result, a conception of distinct, singular, internally homogenous groupings gives way to a model of metissage, of borrowing and lending across porous cultural boundaries. (Felski, 1997: 12)
In this respect, Barkan and Shelton (1998: 5) suggest that the political significance of diaspora is the creation of a ‘‘‘nonnormative’’ intellectual community’. Such a community is considered able to provide a critical, though ambivalent and fragmented, voice that may contribute to dismantling the relations of colonialism. Wisker (2000: 16) refers to this as colonization in reverse and she makes the point that ‘Post-colonial migrants both unsettle and enrich what was thought of as the centre of imperial powers.’ The theoretical and political response to these issues has been a call for the acknowledgement of the multi-axial cultural, historical, temporal and locational specificity of subjectivities. For example, Brah provides a possible future through multi-locationality and dia-synchronic relationality:
What I wish to stress is that the study of diasporic formations. . . calls for a concept of diaspora in which different historical and contemporary elements are understood, not in tandem, but in their dia-synchronic relationality. Such analyses entail engagement with complex arrays of contiguities and contradictions; of changing multi-locationality across time and space. (1996: 190, emphasis in original)
In terms of politics this leads to a complex project. This entails a variety of concrete practices designed to undermine the relations of power at the economic, political and cultural levels while at the same time remaining ‘vigilant of the circumstances under which affirmation of a particular collective experience becomes an essentialist assertion of difference’ (Brah, 1990: 143). For example, Brah’s concerns are to ‘critique discourses of fixed origins while also seeking to reconstruct a space of identity from which a different kind of subject might speak and act’ (Gedalof, 2000: 344). Thus, in an interview with Brah, Davis and Lutz suggest that for her:
identity is about hierarchies which are constantly in flux and need to be seen in context. . . She finds any politics constituted around the primacy of one axis of differentiation (gender, race or class) over all others limited in its ability to do justice to the everyday experiences of most individuals who — like herself — have mixed allegiances and move in and out of different identities. (2000: 369-70)
The notion of mixed allegiances and the moving in and out of identities and on the specific and local is foregrounded in Tripp’s (2000) analysis of the women’s movement in several African countries. In this respect, Tripp comments: ‘There are enormous disjunctures between Western feminist discourses of difference and how the idea of difference has been articulated in women’s movements in Israel, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, or India — that is, places where difference has mattered ‘‘too much’’’ (ibid.: 649). Her analysis illustrates how the women’s movement in Sudan, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya has been able to bridge extensive ethnic, racial and religious differences.
In particular, the concept of locationality has been a significant aspect to postcolonial theorizing. Wisker (2000) offers a useful conceptualization that illustrates that location is both a matter of culture, history or geography and a place of values, ideology and spirituality:
‘Location’ as a notion and phenomenographical whole is much richer merely than that of the cultural, historical and geographical context of writing and reading, which it includes. Location and the ‘loci of enunciation’ are the places or contexts from which we experience and speak, where we place ourselves ideologically, spiritually, imaginatively. In everyday language, it answers the question ‘where are you coming from?’ and so gives us, as readers, a sense of the differences we need to negotiate, the information and feelings we need to find out about in order to gain a better understanding of writing by those who come from and speak from contexts different from our own. (ibid.: 7-8)
The materiality of location should also be stressed. Issues of location are imbued with the politics of identity, nationhood and geography. These restrict and facilitate our movement and operate to ‘place’ us and be ‘placed’, to ‘name’ and be ‘named’. For example, Mohanty reflects on how she was constructed as an illigitimate outsider through the visa requirements that were necessary to visit the Netherlands:
leaving for the Netherlands, I discovered a visa was required to enter the country. I am an Indian citizen and a permanent resident of the United States. Procuring a visa involved a substantial fee ($60); a letter from my employer (the letter of invitation from NOISE was inadequate) indicating that I have a permanent job in the US; that I was going to Utrecht for a professional conference; and that my employer would be financially responsible for me while I was in the Netherlands; and finally, a notarized copy of my green card, the ‘proof’ of my permanent residency in the United States. I never leave home without this card. (1997: xi)
Moreover, Beasley comments:
despite the interest of [postcolonial] feminists developing a cultural politics of difference in the postmodern agenda of destabilizing identity, they generally do not display as unreserved a determination to demonstrate the fluidity of identity, especially of identities linked to race/ethnicity. Additionally, they often express doubts about the extent to which social relations can be described in postmodern terms. (1999: 115)
In this sense postcolonial feminists seek to reaffirm the connections between difference and hierarchy (Felski, 1997). Thus, while postcolonial theorists might want to avoid the fetishization and Orientalism of Western assumptions of difference, they are also wary of those who urge that old divisions are being replaced with new alliances and that the fragmentation of modernism is creating similarities rather than differences. In this respect Beasley (1999: 115) notes: ‘Reservations regarding this plurality appear to be linked to concern that it may imitate a form of cultural genocide.’ Smith’s commentary on those who speak of progress, independence, development and decolonization illustrates how the significance of power relations and identity are central to the postcolonialist project:
Is this imperialism? No, we are told, this is post-colonialism. This is globalization. This is economic independence. This is tribal development. This is progress. Others tell us that this is the end of modernism, and
therefore the end of imperialism as we have known it. That business is now over, and so are all its associated project such as decolonization. People now live in a world which is fragmented with multiple and shifting identities, that the oppressed and the colonized are so deeply implicated in their own oppressions that they are no more nor less authentic than anyone else. While the West might be experiencing fragmentation, the process of fragmentation known under its older guise of colonization is well known to indigenous peoples. We can talk about the fragmentation of lands and cultures. We know what it is like to have our identities regulated by laws and our languages and customs removed from our lives. Fragmentation is not an indigenous project, it is something we are recovering from. While shifts are occurring in the ways in which indigenous peoples put ourselves back together again, the greater project is about recentring indigenous identities on a larger scale. (Smith, 1999: 97)