Commentary on Article “Narrations Postcoloniales” By Antonella Corsani, Christophe Degoutin, Francois Matheron and Giovanna Zapperi

« Postcolonial » is a word which can appear ambiguous, a word with multiple signifigances, but which nevertheless does not want all dire ([2]).” If the “post” does not return to a linear reading of history, nor with one compared to the colonial epoque, the postcolonial condition cannot be thought apart from colonial experience. (1)

The theoretical language in the context of a Postcolonial Narrative certainly has an inter-web of complexity from the definitions and references in this article. Towards the introductory idea of its ambiguity and its fluxuous latent companions – a declaration of dualities, polarities, solidarities, metaphors, allegories are extremely relevant. The form of any coersion provokes a battle field and yet, perhaps its needed to somehow sustain from the exhausted or fragmented. A way of an open or free thought is questionable in the contradiction of a dominant force and this critical dynmanic persists for ultimately expressing the multiplicty of a postcolonial narration by indiviuals and/or movements.

Where can the seperation begin in a narration when there is an evitable non seperation? There are still so many issues that the arrival to a “post” colonial narrative is a metaphor of its own kind in response also to “double colonization” or “multi colonization”. It’s opposite is ironic and thus this discourse functions for a contemporary condition as percieved in this article. We are directed to think of this space and what could be seen as an equative description by Gayatri Spivak - The etymological gesture of: history and story » historical accompaniment of science like that the events of the past and then to the account, imaginary reality or, narrative construction is exemplified. He continues to define the relationship between the destabilized certainity for the Western “memory” and rebute history as if it were a “reassuring metanarration”(2) – a stability for the unknown or uncharted. Ultimately the theory refers to this “return ticket” as a way to reconsidered thought.(3)

The following reference to the words of Donna Haraway claims a definite authority over the subject; consequently the path is bound for the manifestations of “located knowledge” and “new knowledge” in the path of individual multiplicity because the space witin suggests such possibities.(4) The narrations are also resonant in a mythological gaze in the argument of rereferencing at a latent distance. A continual growth, movement or motion within a narration occurs and causes a difficulty for a definition and significance. It is almost impossible for people and women to relieve themselves from coerced and preconcieved characteristics in colonialism or post colianlism terms and begin a different narration or a “hydridized” narration and have comprehended by its audience.

Preceding to the consideration of women on this subject, the article refers to Homi Bhabba in which he says “the relationship between colonizer and colonized must be reconsidered like a dynamic report/ratio.” As well as Foucault’s concept of “the capacity is not complete, it is always imperfect and can never destroy a subjectivity which resists to him.”(5) These contextual thoughts in correspondance to the relative problematics of minorities are oppositional. The impliment of mimicry is agreeable of its countereactability in the sense of how the authors’ refer to it as a continuing function to express the “operation of domination, with dispelling consequence for the borders between dominant and dominated, colonizing and colonized.”(6) In a sense it implies a similarity to a codependency upon each other.

There is an immeadiance for critical thought referring to “women of the Third World” as Spivak expresses - it is a definite figure of the colonial subalternaity in hisotry. How can the voices of these people be heard in such a space? The article’s persistant questions by Spivak of exploitation and domination of the third world is a delicate thread and seemingly unavoidable. Its also agreeable in the result of an “indivual’s multiplicity which makes it possible to think of the fractured identites, nonfixed, moving, deviating.” The article’s point of feminist references including Alice Walker, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, amongst the many women of colour who struggle to be heard clearly expresses the adversity of fighting in an arena of further cultural isolation and/or contradiction. It weaves back to the ideas of the complex relationship with the dominant culture and searching for a way to surpass or overcome this syndrome.

Another similar example from an online article I have found in comparison to the narrations of Alice Walker:
“Both women and ‘natives' are minority groups who are unfairly defined by the intrusive ‘male gaze' , which is a characteristic of both patriarchy and colonialism. Both peoples have been reduced to stereotypes (virgin, whore, savage, heathen) and denied an identity by the system that entraps them. In recent times, post-colonial studies has reacted to this viewpoint and subsequently involved itself with the issue of gender, questioning to what extent this affects the lives of colonial subjects who also happen to be female, i.e. investigating whether gender or colonial

oppression is the more significant political factor in women's lives. To my mind, colonialism is the greater evil, because it automatically entails the threat of misogynistic, patriarchal beliefs, given the fact that imperialism was unequivocally male-centred and euro-centric, thus immediately labelling all foreign women alien subalterns. The obvious fact that colonial oppression affects the lives of women, both socially and economically, has forced post-colonial critics to adopt a keener awareness of gender roles when discussing imperialist exploits.”(7)

Language, again however, in the context of the question raised by Gayatri Spivak states: can the subordinates speak? Or “The subordinates speak, in spite of the language dominating. These minority languages do not produce only distortions of direction, but also of new significances.”(8) In these distortions - is there a possiblity for a new language and different kind of acceptable liberation or is just that place for “displacement” and “contamination” as the article states? Again it is a fine line for any kind of autonomy to take place and yet in the example of Romaine Moreton’s Post me to the Prime Minister was made between the space, between the language engaging in its historical content resumes a constructive impediment.

Thus, they phrase the concepts as » to think of narration in a wider direction, in it - at the same time offers critical dimensions, direction, in it at the same time offers critical dimensions, theoretical and aesthetic and its why it implies to theorists, writers and artists.(9) The suggestion for a wider direction is the result of the credibility of postcolonial narrations in its form and complex hybridized communication. What are other results, problematics, resolutions that can be applied in a “post” syndrome. In reference to my own personal projects of researching the Philippines, these theories are entirely relevant. Philippines as well face an interesting diaspora of colonized discourse. What are the current issues for them what is their critical hold in terms of adaptiblity or invisibility?

There is an importance in the research which Alessandra Gribaldo and Giovanna Zapperi propose to investigate the work of contemporary artists who question the bond between narration, memory, and colonialism through the contemporary crisis of ethnographic narration. In this instance, I would like to refer to the possible relevance of Philippine Contemporary Artist Alma Quinto in her collaborative work “House of Comfort” representing a woman’s life both as survivor and dreamer – an installation of transformation and an inter-layered architecture to reveal the multiplicity of a narration. On another spectrum, perhaps the works and words of Filipina Queer Activist Sabrina Margarita are relevant for my debate. There is a definite multitude for a narrative, theoretical and artist discourse, that perhaps in its relativity these these are the ways it could be comprehensively expressed.

Footnotes

1) From Paragraph 1 « Postcolonial » est un mot qui peut apparaître ambigu, un mot aux multiples significations, mais qui néanmoins ne veut pas tout dire( [2]). Si le « post » ne renvoie pas à une lecture linéaire de l’histoire, ni à une postérité par rapport à l’époque coloniale, la condition postcoloniale ne peut pas être pensée en dehors de l’expérience coloniale.

2) From Paragraph 2 » Un aller-retour aussi entre l’« Histoire » et les « narrations ». Il existe en anglais deux mots pour une même étymologie : history et story. Le premier définit la discipline, l’histoire comme science des sociétés et des événements du passé. L’« Histoire » comme mémoire des hommes. Le deuxième, story, signifie récit, réel ou imaginaire, construction narrative. Narrations postcoloniales comme autant de « stories » qui déstabilisent nos certitudes quant à la « mémoire » occidentale, européenne, qui nous obligent à renoncer à l’« Histoire » comme métanarration rassurante.

3) From Paragraph 2 » Dans son introduction à la traduction italienne de A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, de Gayatri Spivak, Patrizia Cafelato( [4]) définit le postcolonial comme un espace théorique et d’action pour repenser les dispositifs du savoir et les cartographies du pouvoir dans un aller-retour historique et narratif, en recherchant dans le passé et dans le présent, dans les textes de la culture et dans les signes de l’imaginaire, les fondements de ce que Gayatri Spivak définit comme la « violence épistémique » du colonialisme et de l’impérialisme

4) From Paragraph 3 » Cette rupture ouvre une nouvelle topographie de la connaissance marquée, comme l’a souligné Donna Haraway, par le déplacement depuis l’unité d’un savoir hégémonique vers une multiplicité de « savoirs situés ».

5) From paragraph 8 » Comme l’indique Homi Bhabha, le rapport entre colonisateur et colonisé doit être repensé comme un rapport dynamique, ouvert( [7]). Le concept de « mimicry », qu’il élabore à partir de Foucault, est en ce sens essentiel : le pouvoir n’est jamais total, il est toujours imparfait et ne peut jamais anéantir une subjectivité qui lui résiste.

6) From Paragraph 4 » Si le terme « postcolonialisme » implique alors l’épuisement d’une époque historique, celle des colonies, il suggère aussi l’éclatement du récit dominant et la possibilité de penser, imaginer, écrire et raconter autrement.


7) Caslin, Sinead “Feminism and post-colonialism “ Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies The Imperial Archive Online Article http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/imperial/key-concepts/feminism-and-postcolonialism.htm

8) From Paragraph 10 » Invisible parmi les invisibles, subalterne parmi les subalternes, la « femme du Tiers-monde » n’existe qu’à travers le discours de ceux qui la représentent et ne peut donc pas atteindre le statut d’une subjectivité pleine et autonome.

9) From Paragraph 11 » Le projet Narrations postcoloniales s’efforce de penser la narration dans un sens élargi, dans sa dimension à la fois critique, théorique et esthétique, et c’est pourquoi il implique à la fois théoriciens, écrivains et artistes.

Appendix :

Postcolonialism and women writing in Afrikaans

Louise Vijoen, Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, University of Stellenbosch

Part 2 of the author's "Postcolonialism and Recent Women's Writing in Afrikaans," which first appeared in World Literature Today and which appears here with the kind permission of the author and Dr. William Riggan, editor of that publication. Copyright, of course, remains with the author and World Literature Today. Many thanks to Eric Dickens for suggesting the inclusion of this important essay.
The parallel between the relationship man-woman and the relationship empire-colony or colonizer-colonized has often been cited in postcolonial theory as well as the "double colonization" of women in colonial situations (see Holst-Petersen and Rutherford 1986). Some writers even feel that imperial, colonial and postcolonial discourses can largely be seen as "allegories of gender contests" (Williams & Chrisman 1993: 18). Although this reduction of the one to the other obliterates historical specificity and difference, it can be said that the history and preoccupations of feminism show certain similiarities with that of postcolonialism. Early feminism, like the oppositional form of postcolonialism, tried to subvert structures of domination while both feminism and postcolonialism have tried to write back the marginalised into the dominant discourse (Ashcroft e.a. 1989: 175-176).

These superficial similarities between postcolonialism and feminism should however not blind one to the fact that the feminist struggle is not neccesarily coterminous with the struggles for political freedom characteristic of oppositional postcolonialism. It has been shown that some post-colonial nationalisms have entrenched rather than dismantled the power of patriarchy so that women's struggle against domination often continues in these contexts. Much has been said and written about the continuous dialogue between race and gender which considerably complicates the discourse of postcolonialism as far as the situation of women is concerned. In the process considerable attention has been given to the need to avoid totalising strategies which eradicate difference and presume the unity of concepts like the 'third world woman', the 'black woman' and the 'white woman'. Even more than elsewhere scholars in postcolonial feminism have been forced to elaborate their own subject positions in an attempt to establish the historical specificity of their discussions and to avoid the impression of a theoretical colonization. In contexts of oppositional postcolonialism (like the South African in the past decades) the dialogue between race and gender often centered around questions like: which comes first, gender or race? should one's first loyalty be to gender issues or the political struggle of the racially oppressed? It was not uncommon for women writers to feel pressurised to give their political (racial) loyalties priority over their gender loyalties. The debate around this issue in South African literature has been lively with academic feminists sometimes arguing the case for feminism and the gendering of race against prominent writers (see Lenta 1988).

Without discounting the fact that other categories of writers have contributed significantly to the establishment of a postcolonial discourse in Afrikaans, it is striking that previously marginalised discourses (women's writing, gay writing and popular literature) have become increasingly important in interrogating the discourses of power in South Africa. It has been suggested by more than one critic that Afrikaans women writers can play an important role in transforming South African culture in the postcolonial context. André Brink maintains that Afrikaans women writers have already shown the ability to utilise feminism's strategies for the subversion of fallocratic systems (1990: 4) while Kenneth Parker argues that their freedom from any obligations towards the masculinist discourse of the Great South African Nation has already led to experimentation with ways in which to write the new South Africa (1994: 4-5). It must however also be noted that the category of mainstream Afrikaans woman writer does not as yet include coloured or black women despite the fact that more than half of the speakers who use Afrikaans as a first language are coloured people. Although one can point to a few Afrikaans texts by coloured or black women published in anthologies like I Qabane Labantu. Poetry in the emergency (1989), no novels, collections of short stories or volumes of poetry exist in mainstream Afrikaans literature. This silence can undoubtedly be read as an indication of the double colonization effected by Afrikaner cultural domination on the grounds of race as well as gender. Some of the other reasons for this silence have been pointed out by Beverly Jansen: the double oppression of coloured and black women in the apartheid society as well as in the family, an inferior education system, debilitating socio-economic conditions that sapped women's creative energy, the preference for English because of political resentment against Afrikaans as language of the oppressor and the neglected status of the oral tradition used by many of these women (1985: 79-81).

Although the category Afrikaans woman writer displays racial homogeneity (in contrast with that of the men writing in Afrikaans), this does not simplify the position of women writing in Afrikaans with regards to race. Afrikaans writing by women until the sixties was influenced by the ambivalent position of Afrikaans women who were part of a group who felt themselves colonized by white British imperialism but who also colonized black South Africans. Therefore it is not strange to find that Afrikaans women's writing up until the sixties displayed patterns of affiliation to Afrikaner nationalism and racial supremacy. It is also interesting to note that women writers achieved considerable prominence in the Afrikaans literary system despite gender oppression, although this does not necessarily imply a well developed feminist discourse (Van Niekerk 1994: 5). Since the sixties, but especially during the seventies and the political emergency of the eighties, Afrikaans women writers have occupied a strong place in the tradition of dissidence against the apartheid regime in Afrikaans literature. Although they are the racial 'others' of women of colour, most of those writing since the sixties have chosen to 'betray' (a term used by Trinh in referring to the "triple jeopardy" of writing women, 1989: 104) their own race in identifying with the liberation struggle of black people in their texts. Their position is therefore not unlike that of white settler women in previous centuries whose narrative stance was considerably complicated by their alignment with colonized blacks but simultaneous entrapment in the discourses of imperialism and patriarchy implicit in the mere act of writing in a colonial context (Driver 1988: 12).

My discussion of the following examples of Afrikaans women's writing since the beginning of the eighties will try to demonstrate that an engagement with the problems of race, class, gender and writing constitutes a common element in the postcoloniality of Afrikaans women's writing. The complex social, historical and cultural positionality that emerges from these texts again indicates that it would be a mistake to regard even the small Afrikaans literature as a monolithic entity. The power of recent Afrikaans women' writing writers lies in the multiple voices that enunciate a complex subjectivity and that enable their texts to speak to diverse audiences (see Henderson on black women's writing in America, 1993).

2.

The Postcolonial Woman as a Terminological Problem

George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University

The term postcolonial in the phrase "postcolonial women" turns out to be just as problematic as the metaphoric uses of other words related to colonialism. "The coupling of postcolonial with woman," as Sara Suleri points out, almost "inevitably leads to the simplicities that underlie unthinking celebrations of oppression, elevating the racially female voice into a metaphor for 'the good.' Such metaphoricity cannot be called exactly essentialist, but it certainly functions as an impediment to a reading that attempts to look beyond obvious questions of good and evil" and provides "an iconicity that is altogether too good to be true."

What Suleri calls this "rectitude" -- this too easy certainty of the speaker or writer's moral and political superiority -- provides the "theoretical undoing" of such terminology and argument on several grounds. First, its tends to empty the word postcolonialism of its historical force and value: "Where the term once referred exclusively to the discursive practices produced by the historical fact of prior colonization in certain geographically specific segments of the world, it is now more of an abstraction." And this abstraction comes at a great cost:
this reimaging of the postcolonial closes as many epistemological possibilities as it opens. On the one hand, it allows for a vocabulary of cultural migrancy, which helpfully derails the postcolonial condition from the strictures of national histories, and thus makes way for the theoretical articulations best typified by Homi Bhabha's recent anthology, Nation and Narration (1990). On the other hand, the current metaphorization of postcolonialism threatens to become so amorphous as to repudiate any locality for cultural thickness. A symptom of the terminological and theoretical dilemma is astutely read in Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay, "Is the Post- in Postmodernisms" 1989: 28). The acute embarrassment generated by such an idiom could possibly be regarded as a radical rhetorical strategy designed to induce racial discomfort in its audience, but it more frequently registers as black feminism's failure to move beyond the proprietary rights that can be claimed by any oppressed discourse.

One reason for such metaphorization of the term postcolonial, like that of the term colonize, lies in its convenience as a way of assigning values and establishing the moral superiority of both the critic and the critic's topic. A second appears in the almost necessary ignorance of most of us involved in working with postcolonial texts: after working for three decades with Victorian English literature, art, and culture, I have a sense of what I do and do not know about them. In contrast, like most contemporary students of postcoloniality, I have no such detailed knowledge of the individual cultures that produced the postcolonial texts I read and teach -- in part because I do not know the indigenous languages that rival and shape texts in English and in part because these texts come from so many different countries. Unfortunately, having grown up within a former colony does not help all that much, since although one can speak with more authority (!) about one's own country, one cannot do so about the experience of colonialism and postcolonialism in general. Nigerian poets and critics cannot, in other words, speak for those from India and Australia.

What practical and theoretical approaches, then, must (or can) the student of postcolonial texts in English take? What does the reader's purpose have to do with this problem?

References

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literratures. London: Routledge, 1989.

Bhabha, Homi K. (ed.) Nation and Narration, New York: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1990.

Suleri, Sara. 'Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition.' Critical Inquiry 18. (1992): 756-69

3.

Feminism and Postcolonalism by Sinead Caslin

Feminist discourse shares many similarities with post-colonial theory and for this reason the two fields have long been thought of as associative, even complimentary. Firstly, both discourses are predominantly political and concern themselves with the struggle against oppression and injustice. Moreover, both reject the established hierarchical, patriarchal system, which is dominated by the hegemonic white male, and vehemently deny the supposed supremacy of masculine power and authority. Imperialism, like patriarchy, is after all a phallocentric, supremacist ideology that subjugates and dominates its subjects. The oppressed woman is in this sense akin to the colonized subject. Essentially, exponents of post-colonialism are reacting against colonialism in the political and economic sense while feminist theorists are rejecting colonialism of a sexual nature.

Both women and ‘natives' are minority groups who are unfairly defined by the intrusive ‘male gaze' , which is a characteristic of both patriarchy and colonialism. Both peoples have been reduced to stereotypes (virgin, whore, savage, heathen) and denied an identity by the system that entraps them. In recent times, post-colonial studies has reacted to this viewpoint and subsequently involved itself with the issue of gender, questioning to what extent this affects the lives of colonial subjects who also happen to be female, i.e. investigating whether gender or colonial oppression is the more significant political factor in women's lives. To my mind, colonialism is the greater evil, because it automatically entails the threat of misogynistic, patriarchal beliefs, given the fact that imperialism was unequivocally male-centred and euro-centric, thus immediately labelling all foreign women alien subalterns. The obvious fact that colonial oppression affects the lives of women, both socially and economically, has forced post-colonial critics to adopt a keener awareness of gender roles when discussing imperialist exploits.

Similarly, feminism has become much more aware of its post-colonial counterparts in recent times. In the 1980s, feminist critics Hazel Carby and Sara Suleri began to sense that Western feminism was rooted in a bourgeois, euro-centric prejudice that had to be remedied in order to avoid the continued neglect of the so-called 'Third World woman'. Chandra Talpade Mohanty for one is severely critical of regarding all women as a homogeneous group, without taking into account inevitable differences in ethnicity and circumstance. I would agree that this failure to acknowledge historical specificity is as damaging as other assumptions based in chauvinism and ignorance.

Feminists also tend to apply this intolerance of blanket terms to post-colonialism and have subsequently been highly critical of post-colonialists' tendencies to construct a single category of the colonized, thus ignoring the important issue of gender difference. The undeniable fact that colonial oppression affected men and women in different ways should be recognized, as females were often subjected to what has been called a ‘double colonization' , whereby they were discriminated against not only for their position as colonized people but also as women. According to Guyatri Spivak, this differentiation is essential for an exhaustive examination of colonial domination. The result of this treatment is ultimately the formation of the terminologically problematic post-colonial woman.

Even constructions of the pre-colonial are strongly influenced by the phallocentric prejudice that wrongly defines ‘native' women as passive and subsidiary inferiors. In fact, many of the representations of the female ‘native' figure in Western Literature and Art perpetuate the myth of the erotically charged female. Note for example the primitive exoticism and sirenesque danger of Ayesha in H. Rider Haggard's prejudice-strewn 1887 novel She. Indeed, for much of the nineteenth-century, black skin came to depict sexual promiscuity and deviant behaviour. A particularly reprehensible example of the ignorance and prejudice that ‘offensive' foreign sexuality engendered is the infamous case of the Hottentot Venus, which details how British colonial powers transformed one young African woman into an icon for racial inferiority and savage female sexuality. It is the story of Saarti Baartman (1789-1815), a female member of the Khosian tribe of South Africa , who was taken to Britain in 1810 and exhibited as a biological oddity and scientific curiosity due to her pronounced buttocks and genitalia. Her consequent humiliation and degradation illustrate the racist mindset common in 19th Century Europe and her image has become a lasting symbol of Western colonial attitudes towards Africa.

There are a significant number of literary texts that are written from both a feminist and post-colonial standpoint. These texts often share views on the individuality and disparity of the subject, as well as agreeing on shared strategies of resistance against dictatorial external forces. For example, Bill Ashcroft in Key concepts in post-colonial studies likens ‘writing the body' in feminism to ‘writing place' in post-colonial theory. This suggests that the colonised space in feminist discourse is the vulnerable female body, thus reflecting the fertile, productive nature of both body and place, which has the power to yield crop but also to destroy it. Both are capable of ruthlessness if forced to it, as is the case in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, where the ex-slave Sethe is forced to commit infanticide, in order to save her child from the untold horrors of colonialism.

One text which deals explicitly with the ‘double colonization' of women by both their male counterparts and the dominant colonial powers is Caryl Churchill's controversial 1979 play Cloud Nine. Essentially a gendered critique of familial and sexual roles in Victorian colonial society, the play comically utilises cross-dressing and role-doubling to explore the relationship between colonial and sexual oppression throughout history. Act I occurs in a British colony in Africa where Clive, the racist, sexist colonial administrator, imposes his stringent ideals on his family and the African natives. As the superior white male, he determines the roles the women and natives must play. Betty is his doting, self-effacing wife who chirrups: “I am a man's creation as you see, And what men want is what I want to be.” Gender boundaries are crossed as Betty is played by a man, thus foregrounding her gender as a fiction constructed by the ‘male gaze'. Clive and his patriarchal society cannot envision women's identity therefore Betty must be played by a male actor. Through the character of Betty, Churchill satirises the traditionally subordinate role of women in history, forcing us to recognise that female identity is a historical and cultural construction.

Likewise, Joshua the black servant is what the colonizers want him to be and is therefore played by a white man. This also symbolizes the way in which our imperial, racist heritage reduces African identity to the construction of white, Western assumptions. Betty is a consequence of patriarchal structuring just as Joshua is the product of imperial advancement. Betty fails to value herself as a woman nor does Joshua as a black and they are consequently replaced by white men. The clear absence of the female and the native here highlights the sense of a continual struggle to maintain individuality against the odds, and shows how images and stereotypes can acquire a depressive power over people. Yet Churchill moves beyond stereotypes to investigate the very movements which brought those stereotypes to prominence. She is concerned with depicting how colonialism perpetuates itself; instilling fear into its subjects through vicious beatings, the castigation of women and the repression of sexual freedom.


Both women and natives in Cloud Nine are depicted as wild, evil, dangerous creatures. Clive believes “You can tame a wild animal only so far. They revert to their true nature and savage your hand.” This statement reflects how anything ‘other', i.e. not white, heterosexual, Western and male, is regarded warily as a potential threat to the established order. Sexuality is regarded as being of particular danger and Betty's sexual awakening with Harry is likened to exploring the dark, unknown jungles; “When I'm near you it's like going out into the jungle. It's like going up the river on the raft. It's like going out into the dark.” Betty calls her sexual desire “my wickedness” and Clive labels it “the weakness of your sex”, warning his demure wife “We must resist this dark female lust, Betty, or it will swallow us up.” There are obvious parallels here between sexual and colonial oppression which Jean Genet has called the colonial or feminine mentality of interiorised repression.

Churchill, like other feminist writers, blames patriarchy for the victimization of women and the destruction of any female sense of selfhood. We must recognize that imperialism is also essentially a form of patriarchy that diminishes any opportunity for identity formation in its subjects. As regards the question of whether patriarchy or colonialism is more detrimental to its subjects, I would select the latter. Racial otherness is arguably more damaging because while it is acceptable to be a woman, (provided it is the right type of woman) it is never acceptable to be a ‘savage native'. This critical approach would suggest that gender is often overridden by racial status and consequently becomes largely inconsequential, thus reflecting one of the central debates presently raging in feminist and post-colonial studies.

Further reading:
• McClintock, Anne. Imperial leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.
• Blunt, Alison. Rose, Gillian. Writing women and space: colonial and postcolonial geographies. New York: Guilford Press, 1994.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A critique of postcolonial reason: toward a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

4.

Philippine References

FROM ‘RED HOUSE’ TO DREAM HOUSE:
ALMA QUINTO’S HOUSE OF COMFORT BY PATRICIA MARION LOPEZ

BAMBOO GIRL