It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious “facts” continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms.If these “facts” (...) were remembered, not only in the study of British literature but in the study of the literature of the European colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the “worlding” of what is now called “the Third World.” To consider the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation fosters the emergence of “the Third World” as a signifier that allows us to forget that “worlding,” even as it expands the empire of the literary discipline.1[…]In this essay, I will attempt to examine the operation of the “worlding” of what is today “the Third World” by what has become a cult text of feminism: Jane Eyre.2 I plot the novel’s reach and grasp, and locate its structural motors. I read Wide Sargasso Sea as Jane Eyre’s reinscription and Frankenstein as an analysis—even a deconstruction—of a “worlding” such as Jane Eyre’s.3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University. She is the translator of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie and is presently finishing a book entitled Master Discourse, Native Informant. Her previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “ ‘Draupadi’ by Mahasveta Devi” and “The Politics of Interpretations”. (shrink)

A paper about cross-cultural and cross-racial loving that emphasizes the need to understand and affirm the plurality in and among women as central to feminist ontology and epistemology. Love is seen not as fusion and erasure of difference but as incompatible with them. Love reveals plurality. Unity–not to be confused with solidarity–is understood as conceptually tied to domination.

Despite all its merits, the vast majority of critical attention devoted to colonialist literature restricts itself by severely bracketing the political context of culture and history. This typical facet of humanistic closure requires the critic systematically to avoid an analysis of the domination, manipulation, exploitation, and disfranchisement that are inevitably involved in the construction of any cultural artifact or relationship. I can best illustrate such closures in the field of colonialist discourse with two brief examples. In her book The Colonial (...) Encounter, which contrasts the colonial representations of three European and three non-European writers, M. M. Mahood skirts the political issue quite explicitly by arguing that she chose those authors precisely because they are “innocent of emotional exploitation of the colonial scene” and are “distanced” from the politics of domination.`1We find a more interesting example of this closure in Homi Bhabha’s criticism. While otherwise provocative and illuminating, his work rests on two assumptions—the unity of the “colonial subject” and the “ambivalence” of colonial discourse—that are inadequately problematized and, I feel, finally unwarranted and unacceptable. In rejecting Edward Said’s “suggestion that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the colonizer,” Bhabha asserts, without providing any explanation, the unity of the “colonial subject .”2 I do not wish to rule out, a priori, the possibility that at some rarefied theoretical level the varied material and discursive antagonisms between conquerors and natives can be reduced to the workings of a single “subject”; but such a unity, let alone its value, must be demonstrated, not assumed. Though he cites Frantz Fanon, Bhabha completely ignored Fanon’s definition of the conqueror/native relation as a “Manichean” struggle—a definition that is not a fanciful metaphoric caricature but an accurate representation of a profound conflict.3 1. M. M. Mahood, The Colonial Encounter: A Reading of Six Novels , pp. 170, 171; and see p. 3. As many other studies demonstrate, the emotional innocence and the distance of the six writers whom Mahood has chosen—Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Chinua Achebe, R. K. Narayan, and V. S. Naipaul—are, at best, highly debatable.2. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question—The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen 24 : 25, 19.3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington , p. 41. Abdul R. JanMohamed, assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. He is a founding member and associate editor of Cultural Critique and is currently working on a study of Richard Wright. (shrink)

The Predicament of Culture is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in postcolonial contexts. In discussions of ethnography, surrealism, museums, and emergent tribal arts, Clifford probes the late twentieth-century predicament of living simultaneously within, between, and after culture.

In this book, James A. Boon investigates the history, dialectics and practice of the symbolic analysis of cultural diversity. His aim is to formulate a general comparative approach to the study of symbolic processes, integrating the major different theories about symbolic forms that have been developed by other writers.

Extrait de la couverture : ""Here, for the first time, is a book that brings women's writings out of exile to rethink anthropology's purpose at the end of the century.... As a historical resource, the collection undertakes fresh readings of the work of well-known women anthropologists and also reclaims the writings of women of color for anthropology. As a critical account, it bravely interrogates the politics of authorship. As a creative endeavor, it embraces new Feminist voices of ethnography that challenge (...) prevailing definitions of theory and experimental writing.". (shrink)

"This wonderful book does nothing less than to create the next stage of feminist thought." —Catharine R. Stimpson "De Lauretis provides a way of thinking about feminism that accepts rather than tries to resolve differences, that refuses ...

A radically subversive critique brings to the fore the masculine ideology implicit in psychoanalytic theory and in Western discourse in general: woman is defined as a disadvantaged man, a male construct with no status of her own.

Borderlands/La Frontera deals with the psychology of resistance to oppression. The possibility of resistance is revealed by perceiving the self in the process of being oppressed as another face of the self in the process of resisting oppression. The new mestiza consciousness is born from this interplay between oppression and resistance. Resistance is understood as social, collective activity, by adding to Anzaldúa's theory the distinction between the act and the process of resistance.

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Chicana writers Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, was intended as a collection of essays, poems, tales and testimonials that would give voice to the contradictory experiences of “women of color.” In fact, the editors state: -/- We are the colored in a white feminist movement. We are the feminists among the people of our culture. We are often the lesbians among the straight. -/- By giving voice to (...) such experiences, each according to her style, the editors and contributors believed they were developing a theory of subjectivity and culture that would demonstrate the considerable differences between them and Anglo-American women, as well as between them and Anglo-European men and men of their own culture. As speaking subjects of a new discursive formation, many of Bridge's writers were aware of the displacement of their subjectivity across a multiplicity of discourses: feminist/lesbian, nationalist, racial, socioeconomic, historical, etc. The peculiarity of their displacement implies a multiplicity of positions from which they are driven to grasp or understand themselves and their relations with the real, in the Althusserian sense of the word. Bridge writers, in part, were aware that these positions are often incompatible or contradictory, and others did not have access to the maze of discourses competing for their body and voice. (shrink)