Bakhtin and Postcolonial Theory

Whereas Rushdie resorts in this instance to a commonality based on powerlessness and penury (effects, surely, rather than causes), Bakhtin believed that novelistic discourse thrived in the periphery of Hellenic culture and continued to thrive in the marginal reaches of societies because it is at those margins that different cultures interact and breed new forms. According to Bakhtin the reason that a writer such as Mario Vargas Llosa would be as receptive to Tagore as Rushdie claims, is that Vargas Llosa's "literary consciousness," like Tagore's and like Rushdie's, "was bilingual," and that the literature of magic realism was born in the "interanimation" of different tongues, which whether native or not, were all experienced as indigenous (Dialogic Imagination 61-63)

Of course, as with most of the fashionable theorists of recent times, Bakhtin has already been appropriated by postcolonial criticism, and the nomenclature Bakhtin found necessary to invent-diologism, heteroglossia, and even a term we have come to associate with [External Link] Homi Bhabha, hybridity-has filtered into a general critical consciouness from "Discourse in the Novel," his most (and, one sometimes gets the impression, only) studied essay. Perhaps the most interesting recent acknowledgement of Bakhtin's influence can be found in Robert Young's Colonial Desire (22-23). But Bakhtin's migration into the center of postcolonial discourse was ensured by Timothy Brennan's contribution to Bhabha's Nation and Narration (50-55, 60) and by Bhabha's own writings both in this work and in the similarly influential The Location of Culture (142-144 and 188-192).

Yet the manner in which Bakhtin's terminology has been applied demands precisely the kind of particularization Shohat appears to insist on when she distinguishes between post-colonial, post-coloniality and post-colonialism. Shohat, in fact, points very succinctly to the disciplinary problems that the ambiguity and even willfully ungrammatical use of such terms must entail (100-101), although my own use of the terms here differs considerably from hers. Bakhtin, the authority cited to lend prestige and weight to a theoretical claim, belongs to the sphere of postcolonialism, a critical practice whose foundations were laid by scholar-immigrants to the West ([External Link] Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha), but which has since become the province of metropolitan scholars and intended primarily for metropolitan consumption. The Bakhtin who continues to be part of a struggle against authoritarian discourse, the Bakhtin who defended the novel in its darkest hour in Stalin's Soviet union, and who like Franz Fanon was scarred by exile and maimed by his history, is-like Fanon-a prophet of postcoloniality, which is that mongrel, polyglot and fantastically polyvalent inheritance felt so acutely by Rushdie, the no-placeness which circumstance has decreed a home to so many of us. And so it is no coincidence that what Bakhtin valued in the novel is what has animated the artistic efflorescence of this century and of many other times, its resistance to the tides of History in giving voice to the fringe-dwellers of societies and civilizations, to the individuals who resist hegemony. [www.postcolonialweb.org]

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Rushdie, Naipaul, and Blurring Postcolonial Borders

Rushdie's superimposition of his homeland on the geographical Pakistan insistently points us to another common characteristic of the literary products of postcoloniality; namely, their frequent modification or even abandonment of the generic boundaries inherited from the literatures of colonizing cultures, most strikingly in their erasure of the boundary separating the fictional from the non-fictional. Thus Rushdie's satiric seriousness also has parallels to Carl Muller's comical and scabrous reminiscences of his vanishing ethnic community in Sri Lanka, a hybrid form to which he applies the coinage "faction," defined with a cheekiness worthy of Ondaatje as "more fact than fiction, if you please, but that will always remain, I suppose, a matter of personal opinion." (Yakada Yaka ii). More common yet are claims to factuality which disguise fictions, as Wimal Dissenayake and Carmen Wickramagamage have pointed out in the case of V.S. Naipaul's travel writings which, for all their elaborate apparatus of objectivity, borrow preexisting descriptive topi. Dissanayake and Wickramagamage give perhaps the subtlest and most carefully reasoned of all analyses of Naipual, recognizing not only his debt to Western epistemologies and pathologies of representation (see the general statement on travel writing in 1-20), but also some of the complexity of his attempt to achieve a "fuller comprehension of his own self-identity" (73), something that critics like Rob Nixon fail to see.

And just as Naipaul's fictions are those of a journalist, and Ondaatje's those of a lyric poet, Rushdie's fictions are narrated by an "I" who cannot forget that he is at heart an essayist, who cannot help lapsing from time to time into non-diegetic commentary and Calvinoesque interactions with a second-person addressee -- nowhere more so than in Rushdie's most recent novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, where the character-narrator steps out of his fiction to play the role of movie critic (see 168-169), a role which a certain Salman Rushdie once played for the newspapers.

Where in these mongrel works the narrator's "I" is in its purest form as representation of "self," where the onion has been peeled to the point of tears, is probably in the moments of unadulterated emotion: the Rushdie who defends himself against murderous accusations of apostasy, the Rushdie who claws at the jugular of the Commonwealth because of the patronizing comments of a lady from the British Council and the no less patronizing comments of a university literature don, or the Chinua Achebe who finds himself having to denounce Conrad anew because of a chance encounter in a parking lot (see Hopes and Impediments 1-2). Rushdie tells us that he experienced these incidents occurred weeks apart, but they are sandwiched in his memory as almost simultaneous and cumulative (Imaginary Homelands 61). What is most extraordinary in these instances are that these post-colonial encounters took place in those bastions of progress, universities, Cambridge in Rushdie's case and Amherst, Massachusetts, in Achebe's.

There already exists a vast literature of encounters -- Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra on the Nile, Stanley's Stanley and Livingston in darkest Africa, Bulgakov's Jesus and Pontius Pilate somewhere far from Moscow -- but these post-colonial encounters have something very special about them. Read, for instance Kurt Vonnegut's tear-stained eyewitness account of the slaughter of Biafra in the midst of whose death-throes a young Achebe is reduced to writing poetry ("Biafra: A People Betrayed," in Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons 149-151). Or witness Naipaul first setting foot in India and encountering another "faceless" Naipaul who, lacking the distinctiveness of the Naipaul of Trinidad and England, could "sink without trace into that Indian crowd." (see An Area of Darkness 43). Or consider the Berkeley of R.K. Narayan, where encounters with wonderfully pleasant people leave him so translated by sweetness and light ["I have lived under the illusion that I would never have to leave Berkeley. All the friends I seem to have in the world seem to be gathered there"] that one wonders why in the end he did pack up his bags and return to Mysore or, as Naipaul would have it, to his own imaginary retreat from reality, Malgudi, the chronotope to which Narayan returns in all his fictions, a place even more idealized and even more prone to delicate ironies than the real counterpart Narayan describes with such affection in his autobiography. (Narayan's Berkeley is confined to pages 164-167 of his autobiography, the only section which quotes journal entries, while Naipaul's deconstruction of Malgudi takes around nine pages of classical close-reading (India: A Wounded Civilization, 18-27).

It is through an irony somewhat harsher than those we encounter in Malgudi that I, too, had my most memorable post-colonial encounter at Berkeley where I was briefly in the employ (as a grader of essays) of a fairly well-known literary don, and a Shakespeare pundit at that, in the English department. Literary dons, apparently, are not that far apart whether they reside in the heart of the Olde Empire or in the young Wild West. In addition to his general dissatisfaction with my illiteracy, this don regarded me-the lone darkling thrush in a flock of graders-as the person best qualified to carry his books and to set up his microphone in anticipation of his advent in class. When I objected to the procedure and suggested that The Complete Works of W.S. be kept in a cupboard in the classroom, I was vouchsafed the enigmatic reply, "So we don't plant cotton," a line which he probably felt I would not recognize since it comes from a classic of American musical theater and presumes a certain cultural competence. When, eventually, our falling-out became a matter of departmental concern, my Complete Works were already packed and waiting to go. Uneasy lie the heads that bear the white lie's burden.

Needless to say, my academic derailment was nothing on the scale of Paul's epiphanal collapse on the way to Damascus, or Gandhi's ejection from a train at Bloemfontein, but it did change the direction of my life sufficiently for me to appreciate Naipaul's anger at Narayan's "almost hermetic philosophical system," a system which valorizes a quietistic retreat from harsh realities and from the polyglossic influence of alien ideas (see India: A Wounded Civilization 27). Naipaul parodies Narayan viciously, nowhere more so than in In a Free State, in which Santosh, one of a gaggle of character-narrators, retreats into a closet rather than face the terrifying freedom of Washington D.C. (the allegory is applied rather thickly), and who observes rioters setting the city on fire with the grim satisfaction that his "suttee" could expiate the sin of sexual contamination by a black woman. Naipaul's willingness to vilify, willy-nilly, all that he encounters, has not won him many friends, but the facile and near-universal imputations of a consistent heart-felt racism and orientalist misogyny seldom survive close scrutiny. Which is not to say that Naipaul may not be a misogynistic racist, but rather that most criticism of his work is trivial, hopelessly oblivious to the complexity of his tortured negotiations of his own post-coloniality, to his near-permanent alienation as expressed through a series of surprisingly different and surprisingly defective narrators who are placed in an astonishingly similar succession of chronotopes. Santosh's ridiculous claustrophilia and Salim's terrified retreat from the freedoms of London in A Bend in the River, are not only part of an unceasing vendetta against what Naipaul regards as dreams and illusions, but also an admission of his own claustrophobia (however far he travels, he always seems to end up in the same unpleasant, overcrowded place). He has the wanderer's fear of attachment: the things in which his characters place surplus value are chimerical, like Mr. Biswas's eternally mortgaged house, a torture chamber to which he grows attached as do many of Naipaul's characters to their balls and chains.

The great critical difficulty posed by Naipaul is, of course, that there is no real center to his novels, no easily-defined point-of-view. The unnamed "I" of The Mystic Masseur, his first novel, appears only twice, on both occasions to redeem the easily lost truth and to deflate the pretensions of the protagonist, while the omnipresent "I" of a late novel, The Enigma of Arrival, proves again and again to be a poor judge of that which he describes. And those who abhor Naipaul's obsession with India's filth, dirt and decomposition should also observe his treatment in this last novel of the environs of Stonehenge-the mystical geographical epicenter of the dying Empire in Hardy, but a quite unmystical, dung-strewn no-man's-land of firing ranges and rusting machinery, the detritus of a dead Empire, in Naipaul. And that death Naipaul describes as a painful one whose last gasps are a series of humiliations and horrors, not only to the once-colonized but also to the atavistic castaways of Empire, Jane in Guerillas, Yvette in A Bend in the River, Bobby in In a Free State, whose quest for sexual adventure in the "Third World" leads to brutal mistreatment, whose expectations-in a hideous parody of ejaculation-lead to expectorations.

That Naipaul is complex does not mean that we should unreservedly admire him, but it does mean that even at his worst he is a far more interesting a novelist than, for example, the much-praised Julian Barnes. In The History of the World in 101/2 Chapters Barnes manages a rather cunning burlesque of Conrad, while Naipaul's much earlier, ambivalent meditation on Conrad, his grudging admiration for the latter's stodgy, over-patinated (and as Achebe makes clear, artificial) realism, proves little more than a defense of his own insufficiencies of imagination and style; see Barnes 191-220 and Naipaul's "Conrad's Darkness" in The Return of Eva Perón 223-245. But it is Naipaul's essay which in identifying what is central to the reading of Conrad-his inescapable effect even on those who (like Achebe) detest him-is in the end more consequential and less ephemeral than Barnes's Amazonian caprice (whose conclusion, amazingly, is very Naipaulesque). By the same token, Naipaul's importance as a novelist need not be taken as a endorsement of his approach, for as Rushdie points out there are other, equally valid approaches in the creation of mongrel literatures:

El realismo magical, magic realism, at least as practiced by Márquez, is a development out of Surrealism that expresses a genuinely "Third World" consciousness. It deals with what Naipaul has called "half-made" societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new, in which public corruptions and private anguishes are somehow more garish and extreme than they ever get in the so-called "North," where centuries of wealth and power have formed thick layers over the surface of what's really going on. In the works of Márquez, as in the world he describes, impossible things happen constantly, and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sun. It would be a mistake to think of Márquez's literary universe as an invented, self-referential, closed system. He is not writing about Middle-earth, but about the one we all inhabit. Macondo exists. That is its magic. [Imaginary Homelands 301-302]

Again we can discern a writer defending his own chronotopes: Macondo is but another name for Peccavistan. Yet there is also a bold assertion which I find very important, and in its own way very moving, of a faith in a commonality of experience that can bridge the vast oceans between continents and between styles. And it is a faith that, whatever the odds are against us, we must cling to as Bakhtin did in the stygian night of Stalinist monologism, a fervent hope that some day things will cease to be done "in the usual way" and that our collective postcoloniality will indeed be replaced by a universal multicultural polycentrism. Until that time I shall continue to break the inherited rules, and end with a quotation, again from Rushdie, and again about one of those post-colonial encounters at one of those tiresome parties he can no longer attend. The chit-chat left him with the anger that gave birth to one of his greatest novels:

As to Afghanistan: after returning to London, I met a senior British diplomat at a dinner, a career specialist in "my" part of the world. He said it was quite proper, "post-Afghanistan," for the West to support the dictatorship of President Zia ul-Haq. I should not have lost my temper, but I did. It wasn't any use. Then, as we left the table, his wife, a quiet civil lady who had been making pacifying noises, said to me, "Tell me, why don't people in Pakistan get rid of Zia in, you know, the usual way?" Shame, dear reader, is not the exclusive property of the East (Shame 24).

------
www.postcolonialweb.org

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Postcolonial Literature: Problems with the Term

"Postcolonial Literature" is a hot commodity these days. On the one hand writers like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy are best-selling authors; and on the other hand, no college English department worth its salt wants to be without a scholar who can knowledgeably discourse about postcolonial theory.

But there seems to be a great deal of uncertainty as to just what the term denotes. Many of the debates among postcolonial scholars center on which national literatures or authors can be justifiably included in the postcolonial canon. Much of the discussion among postcolonial scholars involves criticisms of the term "postcolonial" itself. In addition, it is seldom mentioned but quite striking that very few actual authors of the literature under discussion embrace and use the term to label their own writing.

It should be acknowledged that postcolonial theory functions as a subdivision within the even more misleadingly named field of "cultural studies": the whole body of generally leftist radical literary theory and criticism which includes Marxist, Gramscian, Foucauldian, and various feminist schools of thought, among others. What all of these schools of thought have in common is a determination to analyze unjust power relationships as manifested in cultural products like literature (and film, art, etc.). Practitioners generally consider themselves politically engaged and committed to some variety or other of liberation process.

It is also important to understand that not all postcolonial scholars are literary scholars. Postcolonial theory is applied to political science, to history, and to other related fields. People who call themselves postcolonial scholars generally see themselves as part of a large (if poorly defined and disorganized) movement to expose and struggle against the influence of large, rich nations (mostly European, plus the U.S.) on poorer nations (mostly in the southern hemisphere).

Taken literally, the term "postcolonial literature" would seem to label literature written by people living in countries formerly colonized by other nations. This is undoubtedly what the term originally meant, but there are many problems with this definition.

First, literal colonization is not the exclusive object of postcolonial study. Lenin's cla���ssic analysis of imperialism led to Antonio Gramisci's concept of "hegemony" which distinguishes between literal political dominance and dominance through ideas and culture (what many critics of American influence call the "Coca-Colanization" of the world). Sixties thinkers developed the concept of neo-imperialism to label relationships like that between the U.S. and many Latin American countries which, while nominally independent, had economies dominated by American business interests, often backed up by American military forces. The term "banana republic" was originally a sarcastic label for such subjugated countries, ruled more by the influence of the United Fruit Corporation than by their own indigenous governments.

Second, among the works commonly studied under this label are novels like Claude McKay's Banjo and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart which were written while the nations in question (Jamaica and Nigeria) were still colonies. Some scholars attempt to solve this problem by arguing that the term should denote works written after colonization, not only those created after independence; but that would be "postcolonization" literature. Few people understand the term in this sense outside a small circle of scholars working in the field.

Third, some critics argue that the term misleadingly implies that colonialism is over when in fact most of the nations involved are still culturally and economically subordinated to the rich industrial states through various forms of neo-colonialism even though they are technically independent.

Fourth, it can be argued that this way of defining a whole era is Eurocentric, that it singles out the colonial experience as the most important fact about the countries involved. Surely that experience has had many powerful influences; but this is not necessarily the framework within which writers from--say--India, who have a long history of precolonial literature, wish to be viewed.

For instance, R. K. Narayan--one of the most popular and widely read of modern Indian writers--displays a remarkable indifference to the historical experience of colonialism, a fact which results in his being almost entirely ignored by postcolonial scholars. V. S. Naipaul is so fierce a critic of the postcolonial world despite his origins as a descendant of Indian indentured laborers in Trinidad that he is more often cited as an opponent than as an ally in the postcolonial struggle.

In fact, it is not uncommon for citizens of "postcolonial" countries to accuse Americans and Europeans of practicing a form of neocolonialism themselves in viewing their history through this particular lens. Postcolonial criticism could be compared to the tendency of Hollywood films set in such countries to focus on the problems of Americans and Europeans within those societies while marginalizing the views of their native peoples.

Fifth, many "postcolonial" authors do not share the general orientation of postcolonial scholars toward engaging in an ongoing critique of colonialism. Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, for instance, after writing powerful indictments of the British in their country, turned to exposing the deeds of native-born dictators and corrupt officials within their independent homeland. Although postcolonial scholars would explain this corruption as a by-product of colonialism, such authors commonly have little interest in pursuing this train of thought.

Although there has been sporadic agitation in some African quarters for reparations for the slavery era, most writers of fiction, drama, and poetry see little point in continually rehashing the past to solve today's problems. It is striking how little modern fiction from formerly colonized nations highlights the colonial past. Non-fiction writers often point out that Hindu-Muslim conflicts in South Asia are in part the heritage of attempts by the British administration in India to play the two groups of against each other (not to mention the special role assigned to the Sikhs in the British army); yet Indian fiction about these conflicts rarely points to such colonial causes. A good example is Kushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956) which deals directly with the partition of India from an almost exclusively Indian perspective.

Indeed, "postcolonial" writers often move to England or North America (because they have been exiled, or because they find a more receptive audience there, or simply in search of a more comfortable mode of living) and even sometimes--like Soyinka--call upon the governments of these "neocolonialist" nations to come to the aid of freedom movements seeking to overthrow native tyrants.

Sixth, "postcolonialism" as a term lends itself to very broad use. Australians and Canadians sometimes claim to live in postcolonial societies, but many would refuse them the label because their literature is dominated by European immigrants, and is therefore a literature of privilege rather than of protest. According to the usual postcolonial paradigm only literature written by native peoples in Canada and Australia would truly qualify.

Similarly, the label is usually denied to U.S. literature, though America's identity was formed in contradistinction to that of England, because the U.S. is usually viewed as the very epitome of a modern neo-colonial nation, imposing its values, economic pressures, and political interests on a wide range of weaker countries.

The Irish are often put forward as an instance of a postcolonial European people, and indeed many African writers have been inspired by Irish ones for that reason. Yet some of the more nationalist ones (like Yeats) tended toward distressingly conservative--even reactionary--politics, and James Joyce had the utmost contempt for Irish nationalism. It is not clear how many Irish authors would have accepted the term if they had known of it.

Although postcolonial theory generally confines itself to the past half-century, it can be argued that everyone has been colonized at some time or other. Five thousand years ago Sumer started the process by uniting formerly independent city-states, and Narmer similarly subjugated formerly independent Upper and Lower Egypt. Rushdie likes to point out that England itself is a postcolonial nation, having been conquered by Romans and Normans, among others.

Not only is the term "postcolonial" exceedingly fuzzy, it can also be argued that it is also often ineffective. A good deal of postcolonial debate has to do with rival claims to victimhood, with each side claiming the sympathies of right-thinking people because of their past sufferings. The conflicts between Bosnians and Serbs, Palestinians and Jews, Turks and Greeks, Hindu and Muslim Indians, and Catholic and Protestant Irish illustrate the problems with using historical suffering as justification for a political program. It is quite true that Europeans and Americans often arrogantly dismiss their own roles in creating the political messes of postcolonial nations around the world; but it is unclear how accusations against them promote the welfare of those nations. In addition, when they are made to feel guilty, countries--like individuals--are as likely to behave badly as they are to behave generously.

It may make American and European scholars feel better to disassociate themselves from the crimes of their ancestors (which are admittedly, enormously bloody and oppressive, and should be acknowledged and studied--see resources below), but people struggling for freedom in oppressed nations are more likely to draw inspiration from the quintessentially European Enlightenment concept of rights under natural law than they are to turn to postcolonial theory. Similarly, European capitalist market theory is far more attractive to most people struggling against poverty in these nations than are the varieties of socialism propounded by postcolonial theoreticians.

"Postcolonial" is also a troublesome term because it draws some very arbitrary lines. South African writers Athol Fugard and Nadine Gordimer are often excluded from postcolonial courses, although their works were powerful protests against apartheid and they have lived and worked far more in Africa than, say, Buchi Emicheta, who emigrated to England as a very young woman and has done all of her writing there--because they are white. A host of fine Indian writers is neglected simply because they do not write in English on the sensible grounds that India has a millennia-long tradition of writing which should not be arbitrarily linked to the British imperial episode.

Of those who write in English, Anita Desai is included, though she is half German. Ngugi wa Thiong'o is included even though he now writes primarily in Gikuyu. Bharati Mukherjee specifically rejects the label "Indian-American," though she is an immigrant from India, and Rushdie prefers to be thought of as a sort of multinational hybrid (though he has, on occasion, used the label "postcolonial" in his own writing). Hanif Kureishi is more English than Pakistani in his outlook, and many Caribbean-born writers living in England are now classed as "Black British." What determines when you are too acculturated to be counted as postcolonial: where you were born? how long you've lived abroad? your subject matter? These and similar questions are the object of constant debate.

In fact, postcolonial theoretician Homi Bhabha developed the term "hybridity" to capture the sense that many writers have of belonging to both cultures. More and more writers, like Rushdie, reject the older paradigm of "exile" which was meaningful to earlier generations of emigrants in favor of accepting their blend of cultures as a positive synthesis. This celebration of cultural blending considerably blurs the boundaries laid down by postcolonial theory.

In practice, postcolonial literary studies are often sharply divided along linguistic lines in a way which simply reinforces Eurocentric attitudes. Latin American postcolonial studies are seldom explored by those laboring in English departments. Francophone African literature is generally neglected by Anglophone African scholars. Because of these failures to cut across linguistic boundaries, the roles of England and France are exaggerated over those of the colonized regions.

It can even be asked whether the entire premise of postcolonial studies is valid: that examining these literatures can give voice to formerly suppressed peoples. This is the question asked by Gayatri Spivak in her famous essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Using Antonio Gramsci's arcane label for oppressed people, she points out that anyone who has achieved enough literacy and sophistication to produce a widely-read piece of fiction is almost certainly by that very fact disqualified from speaking for the people he or she is supposed to represent. The "Subaltern Group" of Indian scholars has tried to claim the term to support their own analyses (a similar project exists among Latin American scholars), but the nagging question raised by Spivak remains.

It is notable that whenever writers from the postcolonial world like Soyinka, Derek Walcott, or Rushdie receive wide recognition they are denounced as unrepresentative and inferior to other, more obscure but more "legitimate" spokespeople.

This phenomenon is related to the question of "essentialism" which features so largely in contemporary political and literary theory. Usually the term is used negatively, to describe stereotypical ideas of--to take as an example my own ancestors--the Irish as drunken, irresponsible louts. However, protest movements built on self-esteem resort to essentialism in a positive sense, as in the many varieties of "black pride" movements which have emerged at various times, with the earliest perhaps being the concept of "négritude" developed by Caribbean and African writers living in Paris in the 1930s and 40s. However, each new attempt to create a positive group identity tends to be seen by at least some members of the group as restrictive, as a new form of oppressive essentialism.

Faced with the dilemma of wanting to make positive claims for certain ethnic groups or nationalities while simultaneously acknowledging individualism, some critics have put forward the concept of "strategic essentialism" in which one can speak in rather simplified forms of group identity for the purposes of struggle while debating within the group the finer shades of difference.

There are two major problems with this strategy, however. First, there are always dissenters within each group who speak out against the new corporate identity, and they are especially likely to be taken seriously by the very audiences targeted by strategic essentialism. Second, white conservatives have caught on to this strategy: they routinely denounce affirmative action, for instance, by quoting Martin Luther King, as if his only goal was "color blindness" rather than real economic and social equality. They snipe, fairly effectively, at any group which puts forward corporate claims for any ethnic group by calling them racist. Strategic essentialism envisions a world in which internal debates among oppressed people can be sealed off from public debates with oppressors. Such a world does not exist.
Similarly, "strategic postcolonialism" is likely to be a self-defeating strategy, since most writers on the subject publicly and endlessly debate the problems associated with the term. In addition, the label is too fuzzy to serve as a useful tool for long in any exchange of polemics. It lacks the sharp edge necessary to make it serve as a useful weapon.

However, those of us unwilling to adopt the label "postcolonial" are hard put to find an appropriate term for what we study. The old "Commonwealth literature" is obviously too confining and outdated as well as being extremely Eurocentric. "Anglophone literature" excludes the many rich literatures of Africa, for instance, written in European languages other than English, and taken in the literal sense, it does not distinguish between mainstream British and American writing and the material under discussion. "New literature written in English" (or "englishes" as some say) puts too much emphasis on newness (McKay is hardly new) and again excludes the non-English-speaking world. "Third-world" makes no sense since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist "second world." "Literature of developing nations" buys into an economic paradigm which most "postcolonial" scholars reject.

The more it is examined, the more the postcolonial sphere crumbles. Though Jamaican, Nigerian, and Indian writers have much to say to each other; it is not clear that they should be lumped together. We continue to use the term "postcolonial" as a pis aller, and to argue about it until something better comes along.

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Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India 1822-1922

Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
by Anindyo Roy

Publisher: Routledge
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 2004-12-23
ISBN-10: 0415304350

This book addresses the idea of 'civility' as a manifestation of the fluidity and ambivalence of imperial power as reflected in British Colonial Literature and Culture. Discussions of Anglo-Indian Romances of 1880-1900, E. M. Forster's The Life to Come and Leonard Woolf's writings show how the appeal to civility had a significant effect on the constitution of colonial subject-hood and reveals 'civility' as an ideal trope for the ambivalence of imperial power itself.

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Problems with the Term PostcoloniaL

"When," an Indian friend of mine (with a progressive cast of mind and a firm conviction in the idea of technological advancement) asked in exasperation, "does the state of postcoloniality end?" Questions of the same order have been plaguing literary scholars for a while, and a number of profound thinkers and theorists have done their best to abolish the term "postcolonial" altogether. In articles first published in 1994 in the journal Social Text, both Ella Shohat and Anne McClintock point out that "postcolonialism" never really existed except as a designation of convenience, and that it is no more, in essence, than colonialism attached to a "post-" (and straining at its tether to reassert its modes of thought).

In an essay of more than a decade earlier Salman Rushdie made a seemingly parallel argument: he, too, sought to banish an insufficient term, "Commonwealth," which according to him creates an "exclusive ghetto" whose effect is to change the meaning of English literature into "something far narrower, something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist." Rushdie went on to point out that "at best, what is called 'Commonwealth literature' is positioned below English literature proper," placing "Eng. Lit. at the center of the world and the rest of the world at the periphery," a situation which inverts priorities and obscures more fundamental literary issues. (I paraphrase Rushdie's angry essay, "'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist" Imaginary Homelands 61-70.)

There is a distinction, however, between Rushdie's denunciation of "Commonwealth" and the no less passionate attacks of recent critics on "postcolonialism." For Shohat and McClintock the thing described by the offending word is no more real than the world mapped by colonialism, while for Rushdie it is not the thing described (to which he permits a tangible existence) but the concept represented by the term itself which is an insidious "chimera." Rushdie's essay is replete with references to writers -- Indian, Latin American and African -- who do share a certain commonality of experience, and throughout he is a celebrant of what he calls a "transnational, cross-lingual process of pollination" (69) -- what the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin terms, with no less approbation, "polyglossia" Bakhtin introduces the concept of polyglossia in his early essay "Epic and Novel" (The Dialogic Imagination 12), although he elaborates on its import only in his longer works (61-67).) Indeed, even in his fictions Rushdie seems to delight in the word "mongrel," a term he associates particularly with the grand melange that is India, but which can be applied more broadly to a polyglot state.

The occasion for my embracing "mongrel," however, is not Rushdie's predilection for it, but its use in 1996 by an Australian politician to describe the offspring of parents of mixed race. As a term which has already won some celebrity in other contexts, and one which would easily encompass such freckled monsters as Joyce and Yeats in the same polyglot potpourri (and those poor creatures could only wish they were postcolonial), it seems to have no less a ring to it than other fortunate pejoritives like "Impressionist" or "Fauve," and surely could be adopted with no less felicity than Aimé Césaire's "négritude." Moreover, the program for a theory of mongrel literature is already present, albeit in a form I do not find entirely acceptable, in Rushdie's essay:

. . . if we were to forget about "Commonwealth Literature," we might see that there is a kind of commonality about much literature, in many languages, emerging from those parts of the world which one could loosely term the less powerful, or the powerless. The magical realism of the Latin Americans influences Indian-language writers in India today. The rich, folk-tale quality of a novel like Sandro of Chegem, by the Muslim Russian Fazil Iskander, finds its parallels in the work-for instance-of the Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, or even Cervantes. It is possible, I think, to begin to theorize common factors between writers from these societies-poor countries, or deprived minorities in powerful countries-and to say that much of what is new in world literature comes from this group. This seems to me to be a "real" theory, bounded by frontiers which are neither political nor linguistic but imaginative. [69-69]

Where I think Rushdie falters in his definition is in vacillating in his choice of umbrella under which his writers shelter, at one moment an economic and political one, at another "imaginative." Interestingly, long before Rushdie placed the writers from the margins at the center of "what is new in world literature," Mikhail Bakhtin had made rather similar claims about the distinctive and innovative qualities of novelistic discourse; for instance, in "Epic and Novel" (The Dialogic Imagination 11-12).

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[The essay, which is Part One of Anthony R. Guneratne's "Virtual Spaces of Postcoloniality: Rushdie, Ondaatje, Naipaul, Bakhtin and the Others," has been adapted, with kind permission of the author, from the no-longer extant NUS site on which the original paper for the First Conference on Postcolonial Theory appeared. [External Link] = linked materials not in the original print version.GPL]

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Theories of Post-Coloniality: Edward W. Said and W.B. Yeats

Post-colonial theory, a mode of thought which accepts European Imperialism as a historical fact and attempts to address nations touched by colonial enterprises, has as yet failed to adequately consider Ireland as a post-colonial nation. Undoubtedly, Ireland is a post-colonial nation (where ‘post-’colonial refers to any consequence of colonial contact) with a body of literary work that may be read productively as post-colonial.

Although colonialism, as a subject for Irish criticism and theory, has been tentatively broached (for example, see Celtic Revivals (1985) by Seamus Deane) Edward Said’s lecture “Yeats and Decolonization”, published as a pamphlet by Field Day in 1988, was an important catalyst for post-colonial study of Irish literature and culture. The premise of this now seminal study is that Yeats was a poet of decolonisation, a muse expressing the Irish experience of the dominant colonial power of Britain. Rather than reading Yeats’s poetry from the conventional perspective of high European modernism Said explains that “he appears to me, and I am sure many others in the Third World, to belong naturally to the other cultural domain” (3).

Using this as his point of departure, Said enters into a line of argument which claims that Yeats was a central figure in debating and asserting an overt drive towards the construction of a national Irish identity as a vital act of decolonisation. Further, Said places Yeats within a global framework of anti-Imperialism, drawing parallels between the Irish poet and Third world writers and theorists such as Fanon, Neruda and Achebe. Though an incredibly influential essay, the reverberations of which may still be felt in Inventing Ireland and other texts, it is also a work that demands close analysis and is replete with short-sighted and ill-informed ideas.

Said locates Ireland among territories like India, South America, Africa and Malaysia as a site of colonial contention. In doing so he emphasises Ireland’s role, and thus Irish literature, in colonial history as a member of the peripheral (from a Eurocentric viewpoint) Third World. According to this “bog dwellers” are paralleled as the Irish counterpart to “innumerable niggers, .... babus and wogs” (6). Yet, this argument, in retrospect, does not hold.

Denis Donoghue (“Confusion in Irish Studies”) has explicitly condemned post-colonial theory for adopting a global paradigm of colonial experience as a discourse which treats all Empires as homogenous. Said’s essay, displaying many of the pitfalls critiqued by Donoghue, does indeed offer a simplistic formulation of colonial experience. A formulation convenient for both the nationalist politician and for the scholar searching for an uncomplicated post-colonial framework to elicit meaning in Irish literature. But this is centrally flawed, heedless to the individual national and regional encounter with Imperial powers in Ireland, or any colonial country. Despite acknowledging the complex relationship between Ireland and Britain, “it is true the connections are closer between England and Ireland than between England and India” (15), and the complexity of Yeats’s own position, “he belongs .... to the Protestant Ascendancy whose Irish loyalties .... were confused” (13), this is apparently only in order to gloss over such glaring disparities.

Said also wishes to present Ireland as a Third World nation, both England’s poor “other” and belonging to the “cultural domain” of the developing world in opposition to the First World of European modernism. It is not unfair to describe such sentiments as verging on the ahistorical. To discuss “Ireland’s backwardness” (14) and Third World status is to blatantly ignore the historical and economic fact that Ireland was, and is, a relatively wealthy member of the First World. As Liam Kennedy (Modern Ireland 107-121) clearly explains, even if Ireland has been a nation less wealthy than Britain or France, to consider Ireland as an underdeveloped peripheral nation is farcical:

The conclusion is inescapable: average incomes in Ireland, even half a century earlier in time than in the case of African and Asian countries, belonged to a different economic league. That league was a West European one, with Ireland enjoying much the same average living standards as countries like Spain, Norway, Finland, Italy (110).

What makes the Irish example so interesting and difficult for the post-colonial theorist is the fact that Ireland was victim, accomplice and beneficiary to British and European Imperialism. The sense of hybridity in post-colonial culture, that “cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in relation of Self to Other” (Bhabha 207) is essential to an understanding of Irish identity. Eight centuries of fluid movement between Ireland and Britain has produced some of the most complex cultural identities possible, and can be seen to manifest themselves today in the North as enigmatically as they ever have in Irish-British relations.

Irrespective of these problems (and there are others) one cannot ignore the fact that an “imperial relationship is there in all cases” (Said 15). “Yeats and Decolonization” is significant for the dual effect it had of bringing post-colonial theory into Irish cultural criticism and for moving Ireland closer to the post-colonial arena. And this is not to forget the most positive element of Said’s essay; his placing of Yeats as an important artist within the Irish context of nationalist aspirations and decolonising enterprises.

Though perhaps not as satisfyingly as the reader would hope, Said depicts Yeats’s “insistence on a new narrative” for Irish people as central to the emergence of Irish nationalism. The reclaiming of Ireland, of the geographical space and the imagining of a community in his poetry, acts as a resistance to colonialism. For Said “Leda and the Swan” (Yeats’s Poems 322) represents Yeats “at his most powerful” where “he imagines and renders” (24) the results of the colonial relationship between Ireland and Britain. The poem has been further discussed in this vain by Declan Kiberd (Inventing Ireland 312-315) who interprets the “swan as the invading occupier and the girl as a ravished Ireland” (315). This reading, to Donoghue’s mind, exemplifies the confusion of his lecture “Confusion in Irish Studies”, yet there is something profitable to a post-colonial reading of “Leda”.

The poem was to have originally been written for publication in the Irish Statesman on the subject of the Russian Revolution but, as Donoghue notes, Yeats claimed that “as bird and lady took such possession of the scene that all politics went out of it” (Yeats’s Poems 587). However, “Leda” was composed in September 1923, a fact Kiberd finds persuasive in pointing to a return to politics with the subject and imagery of the Civil War. The final question:

Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? (322)

suggests various meanings for the poem grounded in ambiguity. If one takes the Swan to be colonial Britain and Leda a feminised and dominated Ireland it would appear Yeats was offering a deep and prophetic commentary on the consequences of colonialism. According to Greek mythology, following the rape of Leda, Clytemnestra was born who would later kill Agamemnon. Here Yeats indicates that the birth of the new nation of Ireland after the withdrawal of England, the dropping from the “indifferent beak”, was destined to a chaotic and violent life. Anti-colonial nationalism, in effect based on a colonial model of state, searching for a return to a pre-colonial Ireland without acknowledging the hybridity of a new Irish culture, would inevitably lead to civil war. Unfortunately Yeats does not offer a solution to the problems of reasserting an Irish nation after colonialism, but his commentary does offer an insight to the complexities a post-colonial nation may encounter.

That “Yeats and Decolonlization” was published in 1988, merely a decade ago, bears witness to the fact that post-colonial discourse has only begun to contribute to both Irish culture and an understanding of that culture. As this process continues, with the publication of works by scholars like Lloyd and Kiberd, the example of Ireland should (hopefully) warp and twist the shape of current models of post-colonial thought. Certainly Ireland shall add to post-colonial discourse while post-colonialism will open up new critical spaces for the study of Irish literature and culture.


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This project was completed under the direction of Dr. Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast. source: http://www.qub.ac.uk/

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Writing Women in Late Imperial China

Writing Women in Late Imperial China. Edited by Ellen Widmer and Kan-I Sun Chang. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 535 p. $24.95


As Kan-I Sun Chang points out, "many Chinese scholars' stubborn adherence to a rigid scheme of historical evolution" hinders them from paying attention to Ming and Qing poetry in general--an important genre of the two last dynasties in Chinese history. Coincidentally, this period also witnessed emergence of publications of a considerable numbers of women's writings--often in the form of poetry. As writers marginalized by their gender in a relatively marginalized field, their works have been unduly neglected by scholars in Chinese studies in the past. Writing Women in Late Imperial China is a timely work, which does justice to this exciting scholarly field, richly endowed with "archives of little or never-studied materials" (Widmer, introduction).

Writing Women in Late Imperial China is the fruit of the international conference "Women and Literature in Ming-Qing China" at Yale University in 1993. The anthology consists of thirteen essays contributed by participants from various fields in Chinese studies. These articles are divided into four parts: 1) Writing the Courtesan, 2) Norms and Selves, 3) Poems in the Context, 4) Hong lou meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber).

The first part includes five articles, dealing with courtesan culture, flourishing in the urban culture particularly during the late Ming period. In his "Ambiguous Images of Courtesan Culture in Late Imperial China," Paul Ropp approaches this culture from a social-historical point of view, by problematizing often male dominant perspectives inherent in its writing records. In "The Late Ming Courtesan: Invention of a Cultural Ideal," Wai-yee Li associates the fate of courtesan culture with scholarly nostalgia for their past glory. At the same time, few courtesans achieved a limited equality with the opposite sex by assuming an ambiguously androgenic role through their literary accomplishment. In the same vein, Dorothy Ko's "The Written Word and the Bound Foot: A History of the Courtesan's Aura" shows how closely the fate of courtesan culture was related to that of scholarly culture. Furthermore, Ko explains that the prosperity and the decline of the courtesan culture were inversely associated with " the overtness of textual expressions of the foot-binding culture." Through a study of a play depicting the life of famous courtesan poets, Katherine Carlitz's "Desire and Writing in the Late Ming Play 'Parrot Island'" explores the dynamic relationship between two most important categories [End Page 267] of writing women during this period: courtesans as images created by male playwrights and gentry women as readers. In his "Women in Feng Menglong's 'Mountain Songs," Yasushi Oki explores female voices in a genre of popular culture, mountain songs collected by Feng Menglong, well-known late Ming writer and compiler of vernacular fiction. This essay shows how bold and active female voices in popular culture were transformed into much more passive and "decent" ones through the literary input of scholars. However, in his own ratings, Feng expressed a preference for daring and coarse popular songs.

The second part consists of two essays, focusing on collections of women's poetry. In her "Ming and Qing Anthologies of Women's Poetry and Their Selection Strategies" Kang-I Sun Chang provides an overview of anthologies of women's writings in late imperial China. This overview convincingly argues for the necessity of the current anthology. From a feminist perspective, Maureen Robertson examines changing voices of gentry women in their writing works in "Changing the Subject: Gender and Self-inscription in Authors' Prefaces and 'Shi' Poetry." These women writings constantly negotiated their voices amidst conventional perceptions of their gender, influences of their well-known (male) predecessors, and their own agenda in order to create a space for female subjectivity in their writings.

Part three studies poems in literary texts. Ann Walter's "Writing Her Way Out of Trouble: Li Yuying in History and Fiction" shows how a woman's writing could be used as double-edged sword--as both evidence of incrimination and means of salvation--in a vernacular story based on an history event. In her "Embodying the Disembodied: Representations of Ghosts and the Feminine," Judith Zeitlin associates femininity (ying) with literary images of ghost in three tales of Liaozhai's Records of the Strange, a collection of fantastic tales written by a Qing scholar. Grace Fong's "De/Constructing a Feminine Ideal in the Eighteenth Century: 'Random Records of West-Green' and the Story of Shuangqing" deals with male reappropriation of a woman in writing and her writing materials and shows how they fit to his fantasy world.

Part four is devoted to the masterpiece of Chinese fiction, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Haun Saussy's "Women's Writing and the Hong lou meng" studies poems supposedly written by female characters in this well-known 18th century novel, by primarily focusing on two poetic forms: poetry on objects and poetry on history. From a different angle, Wu Hong's "Beyond Stereotypes: The Twelve Beauties in Qing Court Art and the Dream of the Red Chamber" analyzes the development of images of the twelve beauties in relations to the reinvention of female architectural [End Page 268] spaces. Wu's essay shows to what extent this spatial relationship is related to the structural organization of the imperial palace in the light of Yongzheng emperor's poems written for the paintings of "twelve beauties." Ellen Widmer's "Ming Loyalism and the Woman's Voice in Fiction After Hong lou meng" links this novel with the occurrence of a self-aware effort to address a female readership in fiction writing, whose prosperity could partly be attributed to the need of Ming loyalists' search for a different literary expression.

This coherently structured volume rich with little known materials opens a new field for any one interested in Chinese studies, feminism, and cultural studies. As Nancy Armstrong, a feminist scholar in Victorian fiction, writes in her postface for the collection: "A peculiarly self-conscious exuberance colored the way in which the presenters at the Yale conference went about turning over new cultural-historical ground. Each paper took steps to generate a classification system capable of containing the new material, to challenge what had suddenly revealed themselves as masculine criteria for literary value, to map a more adequate social historical context for women's cultural production, and to define more self-consciously gendered positions from which to speak as literary scholars."

Tonglin Lu
University of Iowa

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this article was published at http://muse.jhu.edu

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Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism

In this study, L=pez argues for a formulation of postcolonial studies which diverges in three significant ways from current academic and institutional practices: the postcolonial as constituted by a series of dispersed and irregular criticisms not at all containable within a single set of parameters, as a distinct ontological moment in the life of

Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism (Suny Series, Explorations in Postcolonial Studies)
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791449939
274 pages

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Gender, Postcoloniality and Orality

Hasna Lebbady, Department of English, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco

I would like to begin by sharing a problem with you, which has troubled me for many years. As a Moroccan teacher of English, was I simply doing the work of others for them? As a 'Europeanist by training' (Spivak 1993: 145), was I just submitting myself to the structures of a language that imposed its identity on me? Furthermore, how could I articulate myself through a predominantly imperialist and patriarchal medium that defined my ancestors as 'hideous Moor[s]' (quoted in Fiedler 1960: 40) and where, in Alice Walker's words: 'there are only Moors (defined as men) and no Moresses' (1987: 191). The effect of all this was to silence me, for although I had crossed cultures, crossed backgrounds even, while remaining very much at home, I could not find a space for myself within this language. Furthermore, how could I make English my subject without appearing to advocate Westernisation at the expense of my own cultural traditions?

Paradoxically, a possible answer to these questions was to be found in the very subject that appeared to bear such a controversial relationship to my self. The recent developments in English Studies, including Women's Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Cultural Studies have endowed the prospect of teaching English with exciting new possibilities for me. These theories have enabled me to perceive that I am not alone to face this type of dilemma and to begin to envisage some ways out of it. They have enabled me to realize that it is possible for those who have been marginalized to begin to forge a space for themselves within this alienating medium. I have now begun to appreciate the different shades involved in reading English, such as that suggested by Gayatri Spivak when she claims that:

the postcolonial as the outside/insider translates white theory as she reads, so that she can discriminate on the terrain of the original. (1993: 197)

The white theory she refers to is that informed by postmodernism and poststructuralism which she suggests that postcolonialists need to transform to their own ends.

In fact, there appear to me to be numerous similarities between what different theorists are attempting to do. They all question the centrality of the dominant discourses, which claim to be universal. Postmodernism, both in its theory and in its fiction, calls into question the norms of the center, and, in Linda Hutcheon's words: "challenge[s] their transparency" (1980: 53). Those master narratives are challenged by ex-centrics since they are perceived as: "tool[s] of ideological control" (Lee 1990: 27). Using a similar mode of thinking, but writing within a postcolonial context, Homi Bhabha advocates hybridity, which he describes as being: 'at once a mode of appropriation and of resistance' (1997: 120). What he upholds is a discourse that appears to mimic the one at the center, in this case colonial discourse, but which in fact serves to disrupt it. This is very similar to what Angela Carter proposes when she says that:

It is so enormously important for women to write fiction as women‹it is part of the process of de-colonizing our language and our basic habits of thoughtŠit is to do with the creation of a means of expression for an infinitely greater variety of experience than has been possible heretofore, to say things for which no language previously existed. (1983: 75)

What Carter recommends is a mode of writing which would enable women to represent themselves differently from the way they have been represented within patriarchal discourse. In her novel, The Passion of New Eve (1977), she depicts the way women have been viewed as castrated males by having Evelyn, the male protagonist and first person narrator, reduced at the hands of Mother and her woman's group into Eve. Mother and her group make use of the phallic symbolic‹a knife‹to construct this version of femininity. The being they produce is a 'biological woman' who can only think like a man, as she retains Evelyn's consciousness. In this way Carter foregrounds the extent to which women who conform to the constructs imposed on them by patriarchal norms are trapped within extreme versions of femininity and predominantly masculine views of the self. Such constructions of femininity rely on the binary logic either/or, which is not the one Carter advocates. What she upholds is a sense of gender identity, which acknowledges both masculine and feminine elements at once, without viewing them as extreme oppositions of each other.

Feminist theory has begun to enable some women to conceive of ways out of dilemmas similar to the one that faced me. It has now become a commonplace within this theory to perceive patriarchy as having reduced woman to the Other as Simone de Beauvoir (1949) has argued. This process of Othering, which is also dependent on the binary logic either/or, has been depicted by a number of women writers in terms of the physical reconstruction of women. For example, Fay Weldon in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) depicts this construction of femininity in terms of cosmetic surgery that her protagonist, Ruth, undergoes in her attempt to reduce her 'monstrous' body into the petite shape of her husband Bobbo's mistress, Mary Fisher. The pain involved in such a process is compared to that of

Hans Anderson's little mermaid [who] wanted legs instead of a tail, so that she could be properly loved by her Prince. She was given legs, and by inference the gap where they join at the top and after that every step she took was like stepping on knives. [1983: 173]

Only by thus reducing herself and confining her movement can Ruth begin to be valued within her predominantly patriarchal context.

One process which combines both the idea of castration and reduction in size, and which has been practiced on an inordinate number of women, is genital mutilation. Alice Walker, in Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), portrays the construction of femininity in terms of this mutilation. It is what her African American protagonist, Tashi, undergoes in her efforts to return to her roots and become a woman in her tribe:

The operation she'd had done to herself joined her, she felt, to these women, whom she envisaged as strong, invincible. Completely woman, Completely African. Completely Olinka . . . It was only when she at last was told by M'Lissa, who one day unbound her legs, that she might sit up and walk a few steps that she noticed her proud walk had become a shuffle. [61]

Both Weldon and Walker depict the literal construction of femininity and point out the extreme pain with which it is associated. What is of particular relevance to my argument here is the fact that Tashi's wound is the result of her desire to return to the roots, a desire to form an integral part of her African culture. This process is greatly sanctioned by the culture she aspires to form part of, but it is also the process which has led to her sister Dura's death and which Walker reveals as involving even more confinement within the exceedingly patriarchal structures of that culture. It is revelations of this kind which have led Walker to claim, within a different context, that there is a:

connection between mutilation and enslavement that is at the heart of the domination of women in the world. [1992: 131]

Nawal El Saadawi would corroborate this statement as she makes numerous references to genital mutilation in her novels. In Two Women in One (1975), the protagonist Bahiah takes note of what has happened to her sister.

The cries of Fawziah still rang in her ears; there was a red pool of blood under her. Every day she waited for her turn. The door would open and Umm Mohammed would enter with the sharp razor in her hand, ready to cut that small thing between her thighs. [97]

p>In El Saadawi's writing, genital mutilation is revealed to be the threat that serves to ensure women's submission. Its aim is to reduce them to what patriarchy dictates that women should be, about which Bahiah wonders:

And what do you consider a normal woman? One with beaten eyes who walks with closely-bound feet, obedient and submissive, with amputated sexual organs? [1975: 112]

In The Circling Song (1989), El Saadawi carries her argument a step further when she refers to Hamida's genital mutilation as 'a hard metal belt' (67), which she claims is the original chastity belt. However, it is only in The Hidden Face of Eve (1980) that El Saadawi describes her sister's and her own genital mutilation. And it is in that book that she spells out some of the significances of that barbaric act.

In the final analysis we can safely say that female circumcision, the chastity belt and other savage practices applied to women are basically the result of the economic interests that govern society. The continued existence of such practices in our society today signifies that these economic interests are still operative. [41]

Female genital mutilation, like foot binding in ancient China, is what some women feel they must submit to in order to truly belong to their societies, but it is also one way in which women are effectively reduced to the Other, in order, among other things, to ensure the economic aims of their societies. What these women writers foreground is the extent to which patriarchal culture colonizes female sexuality, ensuring that women's bodies are transformed to conform to patriarchal and capitalist aims.

The way patriarchy reduces women to the Other is similar to how colonial discourse reduces people of different races and cultures to Others, as Edward Said (1978) has argued. This process is quite effectively symbolized in J.M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) by the fact that Friday has had his tongue cut off by a knife. This method of Othering is another illustration of the connection made by Walker between mutilation and enslavement. The knife is furthermore reminiscent of the one Evelyn is submitted to in Carter's The Passion of New Eve. In Foe too it is representative of the symbolic order, which serves to maintain the slave dealer in power by effectively silencing the Other, or rendering him incapable of speech.

The fact that his tongue has been removed spurs the female narrator, Susan, to wonder if they have not cut off more than the tongue, suggesting that this too is a form of castration. Friday is castrated within this colonial context to the extent that he is effectively prevented from taking part in the symbolic order in which, according to Lacan, the phallus is 'le signifiant privilégié' (1971: 111). That Friday's oral capacity has been denied further suggests that the oral tradition that may form part of his cultural heritage has been effectively suppressed so that he is reduced to the position of being represented by a European woman narrator who continuously seeks the authority of a male writer in an attempt to accomplish her task. The fact that the Other has been deprived of the possibility of representing himself, and has to be represented through a predominantly imperial and capitalist medium, further suggests the extent to which writing is valorised within this context. Unlike traditional cultures, based on orality, in which narratives belong to society at large, within cultures based on literacy, narratives‹and ideas in general‹become capital assets. In this way orality and literacy come to form another binary opposition, which needs to be subverted.

Subversion is what Friday becomes capable of in the novel. Significantly, despite the slave dealers' efforts, he never becomes reduced to impotence. The way he manages this is by never attempting to make use of the authoritative English at all. Although only he can provide Susan with the closure she seeks in order to represent him, he continuously fails to comply with her wishes. It is, in fact, his refusal to partake in her desired mode of narrativity, which becomes indicative of Friday's power. He mocks Susan's efforts at representation and her desire to become a writer. Furthermore, he succeeds in signifying in ways other than through the use of language. By doing so, Friday defies the capacity of English to impose an identity on him and becomes endowed with a sense of empowerment and potency, which are not dependent on the structures of that language.

Significantly, Susan is prevented from obtaining a similar form of transcendence. By bestowing on her the task of representation, which he himself steers clear of, Coetzee in fact bestows on her a futile task. Although her tongue remains intact, she too has problems taking part in the symbolic. In a novel where writing in general and representation in particular are viewed as authoritative processes, her efforts appear to be particularly useless. What is stressed is her complete impotence in view of the task facing her. Susan, for Coetzee, becomes not so much a narrating character as a way of characterizing the narrative‹a way of feminising it. By making her the narrator, Coetzee's aim is not to empower women but to re-inscribe them into the inferior position to which they have always been relegated. And, in a way, this too is a form of castration, revealing the female narrator to be lacking in the phallic potency, which she aspires to by continuously seeking the authority of the male writer. Whereas Friday is depicted as capable of signifying outside the structures of language, Susan is trapped within the compulsion to conform to the authoritative mode of the male writer, be it Foe or Coetzee himself. Women, even English women, have never had their own tongues. It is such realizations, which have prompted Helen Cixous to point out that:

If woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to disclose this 'within', to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it into her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside it. [1980: 275]

In this way, Cixous encourages women to take hold of language and make it their own, without having to rely on the authority of male writing.

The way the writers I've mentioned depict different constructions of identity imposed on those in the margins by the various discourses at the center raises numerous questions. Can women escape from their confinement only by aspiring to male positions? Must postcolonials, like Moors, be conceived of only as males? In order to avoid being subsumed under rampant Westernisation, must one necessarily resort to extreme forms of traditionalism? Is it necessary to continue to valorise literacy at the expense of our rich oral traditions? Should we continue to operate within the binary logic, which is at the heart of these different oppositions?

One could begin to deal with the issues raised in these questions by advocating a refusal to conform to the logic either/or. This is neither a matter of androgyny as advocated by some feminists, nor is it a matter of multiculturalism. It is neither a return to the roots, as Tashi attempts to do in Possessing the Secret of Joy, nor integration into the culture of imperialism. It does not even imply having to make a choice between literacy and orality. What is involved is a whole new process that must be undertaken and a whole new identity that must be arrived at. It is more a matter of taking hold of language, as Cixous advocates, and transforming it from within. We should force it to truly articulate us and not simply enable it to speak us. We must refuse to be confined by its meanings and creatively transform it so that it no longer conforms to the logic either/or. This new space should enable women to be women without feeling any compulsion either to conform to extreme norms of femininity or to ape the norms of male authority. Within this space, postcolonials need not feel compelled to adhere either to extreme forms of traditionalism or to those of Westernisation. Such a space could enable female Fridays to signify and to conceive of themselves differently from the Other to which they have been reduced within the patriarchal colonial discourse. It could even enable Moroccan English teachers to teach the texts of their culture which have not been written before and which have hitherto been marginalized. What is involved, in fact, is not a matter of conforming to a predefined category whether it be that of gender, race, or nation, but of taking the process of construction into one's own hands in an effort to go beyond those categories and creatively come to terms with a new identity that transgresses the boundaries set by those in the center. This would require dismantling the logic either/or and adhering to a different logic; it could involve conforming to the logic neither/both.
Works Cited

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. The Second Sex. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1988.

Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge

Carter, Angela. 1977. The Passion of New Eve. London: Virago, 1990.

__________. 1983. 'Notes from the Front Line'. In Michelene Wandor, ed. On Gender and Writing. London: Pandora Press: 69-77.

Cixous, Hélène. 1980. 'The Laugh of the Medusa'. In Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Amherst: University of Massachusettes Press: 245-264.

El Saadawi, Nawal. 1975. Two Women in One. London: Al Saqi Books, 1985.

__________. 1980. The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. London and New Jersey: Zed Books.

__________. 1989. The Circling Song. London and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd.

Fiedler, Leslie. 1960. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Doubleday, 1992

Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge.

Lacan, Jacques. 1971. Ecrits 2. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Lee, Alison. 1990. Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction. London and New York: Routledge.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London and New York: Routledge.

Walker, Alice. 1989. The Temple of My Familiar. London: The Women's Press.

__________. 1992. Possessing the Secret of Joy. London: The Women's Press.

Weldon, Fay. 1983. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1987.

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Book Review: "Dominance without Hegemony"

I admire Edward Said for his brilliant work on debunking the myth of western hegemony by his study "Orientalism". His work has opened our mind that the dichotomy of western and eastern in fact was designed by the west to describe a tradition, both academic and artistic, of hostile and deprecatory views of the East by the West. Through this work, Said highlights the inaccuracies of a wide variety of assumptions as it questions various paradigms of thought which are accepted on individual, academic, and political levels.

If you are interested in post-colonial studies, besides reading on Said's book, you may be interested to see one of the important book which discussed about the history of the colonial state in South Asia, especially India. "Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India" by Ranajit Guha.

Aside from its obvious relevance to Indian history, Guha's book is a brilliant example of revolutionary historical method, new perspectives on nationalist history, and theoretical inventiveness in the procedures of historical research.
--Edward W. Said

Short description about the book

What is colonialism and what is a colonial state? Ranajit Guha points out that the colonial state in South Asia was fundamentally different from the metropolitan bourgeois state which sired it. The metropolitan state was hegemonic in character, and its claim to dominance was based on a power relation in which persuasion outweighed coercion. Conversely, the colonial state was non-hegemonic, and in its structure of dominance coercion was paramount. Indeed, the originality of the South Asian colonial state lay precisely in this difference: a historical paradox, it was an autocracy set up and sustained in the East by the foremost democracy of the Western world. It was not possible for that non-hegemonic state to assimilate the civil society of the colonized to itself. Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this closely argued work, was a paradox--a dominance without hegemony.

Dominance without Hegemony had a nationalist aspect as well. This arose from a structural split between the elite and subaltern domains of politics, and the consequent failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to integrate vast areas of the life and consciousness of the people into an alternative hegemony. That predicament is discussed in terms of the nationalist project of anticipating power by mobilizing the masses and producing an alternative historiography. In both endeavors the elite claimed to speak for the people constituted as a nation and sought to challenge the pretensions of an alien regime to represent the colonized. A rivalry between an aspirant to power and its incumbent, this was in essence a contest for hegemony.

See also the review from Harvard University Press,

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Postfeminism vs. the Third Wave

In reading the essays on postfeminism in this section of EBR, I'm struck by the imprecision of the term. Some of the essays - like Stobb's - seem not to be discussing postfeminism per se, but just younger feminist negotiations with the conditions of life in the early 20th century. Others, like Guertin, use the term postfeminism but without a particular sense of its significance; this piece seems more to be discussing feminism in general, or perhaps third wave feminism - I find the discussion of cyberfeminism fascinating, but I don't buy that it's equivalent to postfeminism. Helford, Yaszek, and Mazza seem to be engaging with the idea of postfeminism in ways that I find most interesting and useful; they're identifying something other than third wave feminism, and they're considering the significance of the "post" rhetoric as it applies to feminism in an era of backlash.

The term "postfeminism" always makes me wary - it's a suspect term, a catchphrase from the early '90s that was used to suggest that we no longer need feminism, that we're past it. I don't hear it that much anymore, but when I do, it's often problematically used in a way that suggests it's synonymous with third wave feminism.

Now, speaking of imprecise and suspect terms, third wave feminism is right there with them - it's a highly contested term that loosely defines a generational and political cohort born after the heyday of the second wave women's movement. Although I've edited a collection of essays that both embraces and interrogates the term,notenotenote
Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (Northeastern University Press, 2003)note1note others - like Bitch publisher Lisa Jervis - have argued that it's time to get rid of it altogether.

The controversies surrounding the use of the term "third wave feminism," however, are different from those surrounding "postfeminism." When feminists debate the third wave, generally they're trying to determine if there's enough of a generational divide between older and younger feminists to warrant a whole new label. The question seems to be, have we moved far enough from the social issues that propelled the women's movement in the 1960s and '70s to be able to suggest that there's a new wave? The rhetoric surrounding postfeminism, by contrast, tends, as Lisa Yaszek notes, "to describe the contemporary moment as one in which the goals of feminism have been achieved" and "to invoke a `blame-the-victim' mentality." Often arguments made from a postfeminist perspective rely on what Elyce Helford identifies as "the belief that personal choices and `bootstrap' efforts can bring a woman (and hence all women) empowerment and equality." While the third wave says, "We've got a hell of a lot of work to do!" postfeminism says, "Go buy some Manolo Blahniks and stop your whining."

Postfeminism relies on competitive individualism and eschews collective action; it obscures or makes invisible the many ways in which women are often fearful, subjected to rape and other kinds of violence, and politically and economically underprivileged. The third wave, however - in texts from Third Wave Agenda to Manifesta to Colonize This! - grapples with women's intersectional identities and demands an end to all the forms of oppression that keep women from achieving their full humanity.

Postfeminism and the third wave, then, are entirely different entities. Rebecca Walker's 1992 essay, "Becoming the Third Wave," articulates these differences powerfully; the essay documents the virulent and persistent sexism of the early 1990s and calls young feminists to rally to the cause, and the final paragraph of the essay consists of this declaration:

I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.

Reading that always makes me want to make a fist and say, "Hell, yeah."

So, thirteen years after Walker's declaration, are we not finally past postfeminism?

:: this article written by Alison Piepmeier, originally published at www.electronicbookreview.com

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Bisexuality, Queer Theory and Mary Dorcey's Biography of Desire: An Outlaw Reading

by Paula R. Pratt, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane

Hearing the term "post-colonialism" spoken in an Irish context we would most likely expect the reference point to lie somewhere within the greater portion of the twentieth century, following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921 (Irish 88). Until the last decade or so, these expectations would most likely be met.

More recently -- and especially in the fields of women's studies, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies and, indeed, Irish studies -- such a reference might also be heard in discussions of topics such as gender, sexuality, identity, difference, etc. Post-colonial, in these contexts, might be used by those envisioning a time (sooner rather than later, it might be hoped) when the hetero-normative occupiers of the sexual landscape would fold up their tents, de-commission their weapons, and steal away into the mists . . . leaving behind, simply, humans who would be, in Ellen Barnett's words, "free to love whomever they choose in whatever manner that works best for them" (qtd. in Rust 238).

Assuming that this vision is not to be realized any time soon (some might conjecture that the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland would sooner hand in their weapons than society remove heterosexuals from their role as "protectors" of sexual "normality"), we are left with the present set of complexities surrounding the juxtaposition of heterosexuality and "everything else." But, how to discuss these complexities? What terms to use? It seems that, as soon as one term is proposed and takes its place in the critical lexicon, it is deconstructed and replaced with another, or others. A constant process of clarification, narrowing, inclusion, etc.

For example, "sexual liberation" becomes "women's liberation," which becomes "feminism," then "feminisms" or "womanism." Similarly, "homosexual" is clarified by "gay" and "lesbian," and then, more recently, by the introduction (or re-introduction) of a term that seems to have become the canopy under which are gathered the above-mentioned "everything else," namely: queer.

At this point it might be useful to summarize some of the various definitions of this term, both in its popular reclamation by gays and lesbians from the realms of insult, and in its appearance in theoretical parlance within the last decade. Because my time is short, and the exploration of definitions multi-layered, I'll briefly say that the critical use of the term usually references the sense of diversity and fluidity among and within various sexual behaviors and identities, either lying along some sort of continuum or scattered across the (colonised) sexual landscape, having in common their deviance from the heterosexual "norm." I do also want to clarify that this description only covers the specific use of the term "queer" in a sexual context, and does not include its wider use to describe other "deviancies" and/or "differences."

I would like to focus my remarks this morning on Mary Dorcey's novel, Biography of Desire, in order to show how this story helps to shed further light on bisexual identity, which has been -- and still is -- perceived as deviating from both ends of the homosexual/heterosexual polarity. Judith Butler speaks to this: "Identity categories tend to be the instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression" (qtd. in O'Driscoll 31).

It is my observation and experience that many bisexuals (and some of them in the Irish queer community) have initially hesitated to identify as such for fear of being seen as betraying or diluting the effectiveness of the gay/lesbian political agenda, because of that part of their identity which encompasses the heterosexual attraction.

Dorcey's novel contributes to the understanding of this hybridity and its resonances by constructing a biography, not of a "queer" love affair, but of the human experience of attraction and desire: desire awakened, diminished, and reawakened, with all the attendant vagaries involved. Dorcey herself shies away from the label "lesbian writer," and prefers to wear the distinction of "Irish," if any. Nonetheless, in an interview published in Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland, she did address the topic of sexual "deviancy" in the Ireland of her youth and young adulthood:

The word 'homosexual' was not spoken or written in Ireland before the 1970's. The word 'gay' didn't exist. I had never heard of a bisexual. I had never seen one or spoken to one. So how did I manage to become one? [28]

Later in the same interview, she clarifies the evolution of her own "identity" by connecting it to desire: "I am lesbian because I have loved women more than men. That is, I have loved women more deeply, more completely. . . . I think I was born bisexual and chose to become a lesbian when I fell in love with a lesbian . . ." (30).

It might be said that it was just this sort of "hybridity" in Dorcey's own identity -- the rather fluid movement from bisexuality to lesbian identity -- that gave birth to the narrator of the "biography": Katherine, a married (presumably straight) woman, who has fallen in love with Nina. The novel is actually made up of two narratives, beginning with the story of Nina, an Irish lesbian partnered (for seven years now) with Elinor, mother of 8yr. old Lizzie. Nina has just received a diary, dropped through her letterbox, written by Katherine, an American woman living in Dublin, with whom she's had a year-long affair. The two had broken off their relationship, and Katherine had gone back to Boston to be with her dying father, but has returned to Ireland, having accepted that all was ended, only to be met at the airport by Nina. Katherine has written in the diary during the week she spent in a rented house by the sea in Clare, where she went to wait for Nina to make her "final" decision: whether to stay with Elinor or leave her to be with Katherine.

It is the diary that contains the other narrative. Katherine wrote it, ostensibly, to pass the time while she waited, alone in the house just outside a small crossroads town. She explains in a note to Nina, slipped into the middle of the book: "When I wrote this I didn't intend to show it to you but now it seems the best way of communicating. I want you to know what I've lived through in the past week, alone here, waiting for you. Please be patient. I want you to read it from start to finish. Begin at the beginning and don't make a final decision until you reach the end. Promise me?" (Dorcey 7).

We read the narratives in alternating chapters, set in different time frames. Katherine's story moves through her eight days of relative solitude, while Nina's is set in Dublin, during the two days following her receiving the diary. Both narratives contain portions of flashback, recounting the women's pasts and, especially for Katherine, the stories of their sexual awakening and development. The biography, however, belongs to Katherine, while for Nina the current time frame and events are more crucial, as she confronts the necessity of deciding which woman to choose.

Katherine's identity, more complex than Nina's, is revealed over the first few of her chapters, as we learn that she was born in the U.S. to Irish emigrant parents, but was sent back to Dublin to boarding school, and eventually married Malachy, an Irishman, with whom she has had two sons. At the time she met Nina -- and fell instantly in love -- she was, in her words, "A secondary school teacher, a mother, a wife, a nice middle-class girl who married a nice middle-class man. I know how well I fulfill the stereotype" (44).

As Katherine considers, in retrospect, whether she had only done what had been expected of her in the Ireland of the 1950s, or whether she had truly loved and been attracted to a man, she finds herself defending her current attraction to Nina in front of an imagined court (which would, of course, judge her fitness as a mother, given her new "identity"). She admits that "from my earliest years I . . . loved boys. Does that make it better or worse? But however confusing, [or] contrary, I'll indulge myself with the truth . . . and state categorically that the first person I loved was of the male sex" (153). She anticipates a common criticism leveled at bisexuals by lesbians: "They [lesbians] want to believe that a married woman in her middle thirties who falls in love with another woman must have been essentially lesbian to begin with. . . . [They] describe me as 'latent' or 'closeted'. They suspect women like myself of playing it safe -- denying our real nature until we've established ourselves in the conventional roles of wife and mother" (57).

She does admit that in the beginning of her marriage she had gloried in the approval of her "normal" union: "The whole world encouraging, applauding. . . .A handsome couple. The joy of life. . . . Proud of being at last that amazing ordinary thing -- a woman. And . . . fucking was not only the living proof of it but the very core, its nature and foundation" (61). But she again answers the charge: "I was genuinely attracted to all the men in my life. I want to say that at the outset. . . . I was entirely and contentedly heterosexual" (57).

It is significant that nowhere in her narrative, written a year after falling in love with Nina, does she refer to herself as a lesbian, even though she does admit to previous relationships with women. In fact, in her retrospective account of the "biography" of her various desires, it is clear that she was attracted to both boys and girls. Differently, it is true, but truly attracted and, in some cases, in love.

Her failure to name this female/female attraction lesbian is worth noting, given that such an admission would probably be expected by Irish society, and would certainly be acceptable to her newly-found community of Nina's friends. Neither, however, does she name her identity as bisexual. Rather, she asks: "Did I fall in love with you or fall in love with women? Did I grow tired of Malachy or tired of men? I'm not sure I can (or want to) answer any of these questions" (57). Her ambivalence is authentic, given the relative lack of public acknowledgment of bisexuality as a "real" identity.

None of this introspective question of identity is overt, of course. Dorcey is, after all, writing about desire. Nor does her text have the heavy-handed sense of "place" which has often burdened Irish literature. Still, the particular Irish setting, and Katherine's "American/Irish" identity are subtly used to foreground her psychic exploration.

Dorcey has purposely placed Katherine in a farmhouse in Clare, a county marked by isolated landscapes, where she will have "all the time in the world," as the Irish would say -- time she never had in her life as a wife, mother and teacher -- for herself. The environment in which Dorcey places her melds with her wish to come to terms with her authentic self, separate from her husband (or Nina). Referring to the quite literal "pull" which the mucky ground has on her as she walks, she remarks: "Everything here seems to have an independent life. A will of its own" (53). And it is her purpose for coming to that place to record what has happened and, if possible, why. To chart the "metamorphosis, [the] long journey . . . out of one life, as an ordinary wife and mother, into a new, totally unexpected world or a new way of being in the old world"(38).

As well, the shifting, moving, fluid nature of the west-country atmosphere mirrors Katherine's uncertainty about the direction of that journey. She speaks of the process of writing the "biography" in terms suggestive of the paths she walks to the crossroads and back each day: "To travel [this] arduous journey, stumbling from one hour to the next, from one foothold to another. Arriving at what seems a vantage point to discover only another cliff-face, the path sliding from under foot" (365). It is also no accident that Dorcey has created Katherine as an American, born of immigrant parents, who has emigrated back to the land of their birth. This particular journey parallels the other sexual one that she has taken, which she describes to Nina:

The culture you live in is so different from mine. It was at times as if we were from different countries, meeting in one foreign to us both and then deciding to go to the native country of one. In this scenario, I was the emigrant. I left my people and went to live with yours. [162]

As the week progresses, however, and Nina's life back in Dublin becomes even more complicated, the physical landscape and weather seem to merge with this new emotional territory, as she vents her anger and frustration at the unraveling of her plans: "Good Christ, what a crazy, god-forsaken bloody place! What am I doing here? I will go mad if I stay much longer" (222).

Katherine does soon leave, and the events taking place in Nina's life mean that she goes on to Galway, there to rejoin her family and hope for a further meeting with Nina. Whether that happens, however, is not as significant, as what Katherine has learned about herself in this week. By drawing her as neither heterosexual nor homosexual, but as bisexual -- a mix of both -- Dorcey configures Katherine's humanity at the core of her identity. She is thus able to say to Malachy, when he shows up to plead with her to leave Nina:

"I can't fit any of what's happened to me in the last months into your words. Into the words I had for my life before this happened. But I'm not the woman I was when this life was right for me. And I can't fit back again. I've been changed forever. It's not just about love or happiness. It's about a way of being in the world, a vision, a sense of communication and sharing. . ." (270]

Similarly, in words that balance these, she writes to Nina at the end of the biography: "Whatever happens between you and me, there's no going back. Even if I were never to see you again, I am changed forever by my love for you" (363).

And Katherine even faces the probability that she will have no relationship with anyone: "Maybe I'd be better off alone. Without man or woman," since it might be preferable to "end relationships while they still have the glow of perfection" (318). Whatever does happen between Katherine and Nina, Katherine can say, in the end, that: "I do feel that things work out for the best, if we are honest and true to our deepest natures. I don't believe in sacrifice or unnecessary suffering" (339).

Because of the time factor for this morning's presentation, I have limited my comments about identity to those concerning Katherine's experience, which I believe to be that of a bisexual woman. There is far more to say about Nina, about her choice in the end, and about the Irish characters that interact with Katherine in Clare. I do, however, want to conclude by returning to Sally O'Driscoll's article, in which she makes a distinction between what she sees the ambiguity of the term queer, due to its popular and theoretical usages, and what she feels is a clearer term, outlaw, used by Alison Jaggar in 1989.

People who experience conventionally unacceptable, or what I call 'outlaw,' emotions often are subordinated individuals who pay a disproportionately high price for maintaining the status quo. . . . Outlaw emotions are distinguished by their incompatibility with the dominant perceptions and values." [qtd. in O'Driscoll 34]

O'Driscoll further refines her use of the term by distinguishing between "outlaw theory," which is static, and "is the framework of the interpretation" and "outlaw theorizing," which describes the "outlook of the interpreter" (37).

I would consider the work I have begun in this paper to be an outlaw reading of Dorcey's novel, since I sense that my interpretation of Katherine as a bisexual narrator would be somewhat "incompatible" with some "dominant perceptions" within Irish studies, women's studies, and certainly gay and lesbian studies. My sense of this comes from comments heard in workshops, papers dealing with "lesbian literature" at Irish studies conferences, etc.

One such incident took place at a women's studies conference in 1997 at Trinity College Dublin, in a workshop around the topic of sexual identity. One young woman from Galway managed to come out as a bisexual for the first time, during the discussion. The facilitator proceeded to dismiss her contribution by saying that she (the facilitator) didn't give a lot of credibility to bisexuality, adding that, when she hears the term, all she can imagine is a group of men and women "romping about in the bushes together."

I would see Mary Dorcey's novel -- aside from the contribution it has made to Irish literature (indeed to the reshaping of contemporary Irish literature) -- as also and primarily making a contribution to the shaping of the perceptions and understanding of bisexuality in all its richness and humanity.


Works Cited

Bravmann, Scott. Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture and Difference. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Dorcey, Mary. Biography of Desire. Dublin: Poolbeg, 1997.

Hutchins, Loraine and Lani Kaahumanu, eds. Bi Any Other Name. Boston: Alyson, 1991.

"Interview with Mary Dorcey." Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland. Eds. Ide O'Carroll and Eoin Collins. London: Cassell, 1995. 25-44.

Irish Almanac and Yearbook of Facts 1997: Facts and Figures North and South. Donegal, Ireland: Artcam, 1997.

Jagose, Annamarie. "Queer Theory." Online. Australian Humanities Review. Internet. 31 Mar. 2001. Available http://www.lib.latrobe.edu/AHR/archive/Issue-Dec-1996/jagose.html

Newitz, Annalee and Jillian Sandell. "Bisexuality And How To Use It: Toward a Coalitional Identity Politics. Online. Bad Subjects. Issue 16, Oct. 1994. Internet. 2 Apr. 2001. Available http://eserver.org/bs/16/Sandell.html

O'Driscoll, Sally. "Outlaw Readings: Beyond Queer Theory." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 22 (1997): 30 -- 55.

Rust, Paula. Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics: Sex, Loyalty and Revolution. New York: NYUP, 1995.

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