Good evening, dear readers, and my apologies for the delay! Instead of spending my Sunday morning finalizing my blog post and my Monday evening working with the new theories (as per usual), I instead spent most of my time on the phone with and in the car to my doctor’s office as we all tried to figure out whether or not I had broken my foot on Saturday. Luckily, it’s not broken – just a very bad sprain – but it threw me for a limited mobility loop and was so emotionally exhausting that I wasn’t able to churn out anything coherent. With all of the amazing and interesting pieces we had to examine and analyze this past week (which I’ll be linking for you here, of course), I’d much rather take my time and express my thoughts when I’m in a good headspace for analysis. Shit happens, ne? Sometimes you just have to take the L (and that’s okay – nobody is perfect); I would rather take the L for letting you read work that I’m proud of that’s late, than take the L for presenting you with a bunch of unrelated hoopla on time.

Now that the housekeeping is out of the way, let’s address our key term of the week! Although most of you are probably familiar with the idea of feminism, it actually takes on a very different context in post-colonial (and colonial) discourse; this context in particular is important to keep in mind as we continue to push for intersectionality in our feminist strivings. In Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, Ashcroft et. al. note that Western feminism throughout history has “assumed that gender overrode cultural differences to create a universal category of the womanly or the feminine [and] was operating from hidden, universalist assumptions with a middle-class, Euro-centric bias…[that] failed to account for or deal adequately with the experiences of Third World women” (102). In short, Western feminism once again demonstrates how white people create sweeping generalizations out of their own experiences and then utilize those generalizations to compile a universal picture that is undoubtedly untrue and inapplicable to most, if not all, non-white people. Western feminism has and does not take into account the different circumstances of women living in non-Western countries, let alone the differences between all of those women and their needs. But, before I go into specific examples of how feminism has functioned as a tool for imperialism in the past, I want to contextualize Western feminism, or white feminism, in the present because I think it’s important for us to be able to recognize.

When I think of modern Western feminism, also known today as white feminism, the very first name that comes to my mind is Taylor Swift. “Oh, but she’s done so much for women! She’s definitely a feminist! How can you say that?” Listen, I’m not saying Taylor Swift isn’t a feminist and doesn’t support other women by any means. However, the way she interacts with other women in the entertainment industry, especially women of color, illuminates how she has missed the mark and been complicit in upholding an industry that disadvantages women who do not look like her: a tall, skinny white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes (read: the epitome of the ideal white woman). Perhaps the biggest example of Taylor Swift’s white feminism is her 2015 feud with Nicki Minaj. In a series of tweets that have since been deleted, Taylor Swift reacted to Nicki Minaj’s call-out of the music industry and its racism. Here’s an article to brush you up on it. Swift completely hijacked the conversation about race that Minaj was trying to have with her Twitter audience, instead diverting the blame towards men and believing the onslaught of tweets to be about her – of course, they weren’t. Swift completely missed the point behind Minaj’s tweets and stirred up a whole feud controversy that was focused on by the media for weeks, rather than adding to the conversation about racism and sexism in the industry, which was the actual intended focus. Unfortunately, things like this still happen all the time because white people do not know how to not make things about them. Watch Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) – you’ll see plenty of examples of white people inserting themselves into conversations/addressing topics not meant for them that you’ll probably find relatable. We need to hold ourselves accountable if we want to achieve true intersectionality in our activism and support for people of color, and one of the first steps we can take towards that achievement is dismantling white feminism. I’d now like to move into the theory and discuss Western feminism and its history in the non-Western world. Similar to how Swift derailed the conversation to make it about herself, calling attention away from the real issues at hand, Western feminism has been used by both men and women in the past to actually help further imperial agendas.

In both her article “The Discourse of the Veil” and her talk “Muslim Women and Other Misunderstandings,” Leila Ahmed discusses the practice of veiling and how it became a symbol of oppression in the Western world. By the eighteenth century, the West had a generalized idea of Islamic women that had been compiled from stories of travelers and their interpretations of Arabic texts. Of course, all of these stories and interpretations offered solely male views that “(1) often garbled and misconstrued the specific content and meaning of the customs described and (2) assumed and represented the Islam practiced in Muslim societies in the periods in which the Europeans encountered and then in some degree or other dominated those societies to be the only possible interpretation of the religion” (320). Europeans had once again constructed a single story about an “Other” that they could use to normalize their own customs and begin changing the customs of those they colonized. 

By this point, middle-class Victorian feminism was also on the rise; rather than deal with feminism on European soil, white men discovered they could rally with white women and turn the feminism that they disdained into a colonial tool on non-Western soil. People like Lord Cromer (and later, Egyptian Modernist Qassim Amin) had begun to utilize feminist arguments in the service of colonialism to attack the men in the places the West colonized. Ahmed notes that the argument white men made for dismantling the practice of veiling (among other Islamic practices) was that “women had to throw off the veil so that Muslim men could become civilized, so they could raise civilized young boys who became civilized men. They would be like good British mothers” (“Muslim Women”). Because women were indeed oppressed by both cultural patriarchal and Western standards, women were the easiest target; get women to stop veiling, and change will gradually follow in the men. However, most demands for banning veiling actually called for even more oppressive measures, like limiting women’s education to have them focus solely on their duties as wives and mothers. Hence, it is clear that women actually meant nothing to European men – they were simply a tool to help the West rid colonized societies of their native practices and instead introduce colonizer culture as the be-all-end-all solution in a more subtle context. 

Unfortunately, harmful depictions of the veil as oppressive still exist today. I myself perpetuated this notion until four years ago when I met my friend, Ramsha. Ramsha was a mutual who I began talking to via Tumblr. Even though we lived very different lives, as she lived in Qatar and spent her summers in Pakistan (and I’d never left the tri-state area at that point), we bonded over normal things like TV shows, K-Pop, cats, and college struggles. I had no idea she was Muslim until she mentioned that she had gotten a new swimming suit. Of course, I wanted to see pictures – I’d never seen swimming suits from Qatar in Old Navy and was curious about designs – and she obliged and sent me a snapchat. Her new swimming suit was an all-black burkini. Immediately, I asked her why she would wear something like that when it was so hot and assumed it was because her religion made her do it. Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t the reason; Ramsha had struggled with body dysmorphia from a young age and having more coverage made her feel confident enough to go outside in public. Naturally, I felt awful for making that assumption and apologized to her profusely – because she’s so patient and understanding, all was forgiven. From that moment on, though, I began thinking about all the different reasons a woman might wear a burkini, hijab, niqab, etc. and eventually realized that it was none of my business. If they want to wear it because it makes them feel safe, confident, or beautiful, then that’s their choice. We have to stop assuming that covering up means oppressed because we don’t know the individual cultural context of the woman wearing that article of clothing; we need to learn from past mistakes (of which there are plenty). 

My misperception of the burkini is thus part of the common idea of the “Third World Woman” that Chandra Talpade Mohanty expresses in her work “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse.” Similar to Ahmed, Mohanty notes that Western feminist discourse employs essentialism to construct the idea of the “average third world woman [who] leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being ‘third world’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.)” (337). Basically, Western feminism puts itself at the center as a referent and paints a picture of a “Third World” woman based on all of those differences. It presents a single story of what a third world woman looks like, which is usually powerless and forlorn (is anyone else thinking back to the various book covers that all feature veiled women from Dr. Clemens’ talk? I know I am). One of the main problems with the use of this term is that it once again does not consider other aspects of women’s lives, like socioeconomic status or political affiliations, only the fact that they are women; “Third World” is a label that reduces non-white and non-Western women to generalized stereotypes without considering the ramifications of doing so. However, what’s really sad, to both myself and to Mohanty, is that Western feminism cannot exist without that “Third World” label. Western women are not truly free or unoppressed, but they can fool themselves into thinking otherwise and remaining at the center by focusing more on the oppression (and contributing to the further marginalization) of non-Western women. Think about your perception of “Third World” women; does it fall into the above definition? 

Although I struggled to understand Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” I’ve come to the conclusion that she is in agreeance with us concerning the Western world and how it is in the business of preserving its own superiority. The thought that stuck out to me the most from her piece (aside from the last line on pg. 28 that essentially declares non-Western women as a sub-subaltern) was: “for the ‘true’ subaltern group, who identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself” (27). What I took this to mean was that “true subaltern” subjects, or non-white people who do not support or uphold European ideals, will never be truly represented because they cannot speak for themselves. Those who could theoretically speak for them ultimately cannot speak for them because those individuals are part of an elite class who are in touch with/uphold/have held Western values at some point and are subsequently biased, unattuned to the needs of the “true subaltern.” To help you pull all of that together in familiar contexts, here’s an example using Nervous Conditions: the West is Europeans, the elites are people like Nyasha, Nhamo, and Babamukuru, and the “true subaltern” are Rhodesian farmers with no formal education (and maybe even Tambu, if we stretch it a little). Hopefully by now we’re all starting to get the picture that white people paint for non-white people – a colonial one full of deceit and tragedy. 

The reason I saved Yaa Gyasi’s Inescape for last is because it left the biggest impact on me. I personally thought that the story was heartbreaking, even if some of my peers didn’t see it as such. Gifty’s mother sacrifices her marriage to move her family to America for a better life, just as Gifty must cope with being looked at by others as an anthropological study because she is different from them (being from Ghana and having) as she moves through the higher education system and eventually becomes a professor at Stanford. Gifty and her mother are double or subaltern “others” in the sense that they are both women and non-white, so they must contend with white generalizations and essentialism in both categories. One of the ways in which this happens are in Gifty’s encounters with white people. The conversation between Anne and Gifty about Gifty and her mother not knowing each other was especially eye-opening, as Anne introduced a Western perspective that I had begun to agree with until I caught myself thinking in terms of American and Euro-centric familial customs. You don’t have to know everything about a person in order to be close to them; Japan should’ve taught me that at the very least since people generally don’t form the kinds of connections that Americans do.

I also thought that Gyasi’s depiction of Ghanian cultural influence from Gifty’s mother intersecting with Gifty’s love for Western poet Gerard Manly Hopkins was interesting. Gifty sometimes struggled to see logic the same way her mother did, so she instead utilized Hopkins’ work to try and understand the way her mother felt about God. While the methods were very different, I think they had similar results, as Gifty was able to reconnect with a feeling she thought she lost once she abandoned God through her study of Hopkins. She was also better able to understand her mother through his poetry, which is why – I think – Gifty indulged her mother in her final moments instead of correcting her and diverting her focus away from her religion. Maybe, just maybe, it was an attempt to make her mother feel as though she were not an “other,” (or crazy) for once in her life. I’d like to reread the story a few more times because there are probably countless things I missed, but the one thing I did take away from it during this reading was that women will never be able to have peace in this world with the way things are now, even if peace is in the form of an ugly Chow-Westie mix.

Until next Sunday, everyone.

ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE OF POST COLONIAL THEORY (Z)…

Hello everyone, and welcome back to your weekly PoCo exploration station! We have another great read to discuss in terms of theory this week. Specifically, we’ll be examining Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” So, buckle up, you guys, because here we go!

Like me, some of you may have been confused at the use of the word “ambivalence.” Don’t be! I honestly had no idea what it meant until it was defined for me this week, so I’m going to do the same for you so that we can all be in this together (cue High School Musical song of the same name). According to Ashcroft et. al.’s Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, which defines the term in relation to Bhabha’s essay, ambivalence “describes the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between colonizer and colonized. The relationship is ambivalent because the colonized subject is never simply and completely opposed to the colonizer” (12). Pretty straightforward, right? I thought so too. However, there’s an article by Amardeep Singh that further explains the idea of ambivalence in plain English; it also does the same thing with Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry and hybridity (which we’ll be tackling next week). I strongly recommend that you read it before continuing because it really helps you wrap your head around the base concepts without much confusion. Without it, I would’ve been lost in an abyss of Freudian and Derridean terms that I understand in general, but wouldn’t have been able to grasp in relation to Bhabha because the theory is so dense.

Now, let’s jump into Bhabha and explore not only this notion of ambivalence more fully, but also how it relates to mimicry. (Please correct me if I’m wrong or simplifying the theory too much.) According to Bhabha, colonial mimicry is “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite…the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce, its excess, its difference” (266). In short, mimicry happens when the colonizers succeed in getting the colonized to begin copying or mimicking their ways of life, ideas, and culture (if white people even have a unique culture that hasn’t been stolen from elsewhere, that is). However, the colonized must always mimic and will never be able to be the same as the colonizers because they are not white; there will always be a noticeable difference in terms of skin color. Ambivalence, then, is a sort of “split” in feelings about the colonizer. The colonized are both complicit and resistant in adopting the colonizer’s ways, with some trying to fully adapt and others retaining negative attitudes towards the colonizers. 

Bhabha then goes on to explain how mimicry can be dangerous, as it is “at once resemblance and menace” (266). Mimicry is menace because it is close to mockery and the ambivalence within mimicry “suggests that the fetishized colonial culture is potentially and strategically an insurgent counter-appeal” (Bhabha 270). That’s a lot to unpack, right? In the most basic terms, here’s how I interpret these ideas: colonizers want the colonized to be like them – but not entirely – so colonizers appropriate a form of their culture and give it to the colonized to mimic. However, because colonizer culture is appropriated, the colonized mimic the appropriated culture the best they can in terms of their ownculture; this acting of mimicking can unintentionally be a form of subversion because the person mimicking the colonizers allows other colonized to see flaws within the colonizer culture.

Switching gears, I’d like to use Dangarembga’s novel to try and further contextualize these notions by focusing specifically on Nhamo and Babamukuru. Babamukuru is a “been-to” (to use Singh’s helpful terminology), or a colonized person who goes to the colonizer’s country and comes back mimicking colonizer culture, seemingly completed different (or transformed) from before he visited. However, Babamukuru comes back to the homestead, he is not afraid to get his hands dirty and perform manual labor like he did growing up (Dangarembga 7, 19). Babamukuru is thus the “mimic man,” as he is complicit in upholding colonizer culture while also rejecting it at times in favor of retaining aspects of his own upbringing and culture. When Tambu compares her uncle to her brother, she is able to see the differences and does not understand why Nhamo has changed so much, effectively learning to hate his family and their way of life. Later, Tambu learns that “in reality [Nhamo] was doing no more than behave, perhaps extremely, in the expected manner” (12). Seeing these differences helps her retain her own identity as she moves through the (colonizer-run/supported) education system.

Babamukuru is basically responsible for providing for the entire family, giving money to his brother when needed and keeping the homestead in mind as he works at the mission. He is also the one who insists Nhamo come home when there are no upcoming tests and worries that Nhamo is not developing properly, becoming too dependent on the mission and never wanting to go back home (Dangarembga 5-6). However, when he leaves for five years on a mission to England(he can’t say no because rejecting the colonizers outright is a form of “suicide” (14), but he refuses to leave his family behind), he takes his children with him; Nyasha especially struggles to adapt when they come back home, as she (like Nhamo) is too used to living a colonized lifestyle and has lost her identity in her struggle. Nhamo and Nyasha are the Others that colonial mimicry wants – they are fully mimicking colonizer culture in all aspects of their life with the exception of skin color (because they physically can’t) and cannot see that they are suppressing their own cultures as Rhodesians because the dominating colonizer culture has erased that identity. 

I found it really fitting that Nhamo died in this novel because what white/colonizer culture aims to do in the first place is kill the culture of the colonized completely. For Nhamo, that’s exactly what happened. He was not able to balance the two cultures, with the ambivalence in his mimicry leaning entirely towards compliance at the time of his death. I am interested in seeing what happens to Tambu and Nyasha as we continue reading the novel, and I really hope that Tambu is successfully able to keep mimicking what’s necessary for her to succeed while also retaining her knowledge of how colonizer education has hurt the people around her that she loves either by upholding sexist and patriarchal values (which we’ll discuss next week) or by creating a culture of colonizer culture fetishism amongst the colonized that begins to pull her people away from their cultures and identities.