CAN THE SUBALTE

RN SPEAK?

Mohd Arshad Bin Khadir @ Krishnasamy

D20101038185 

Muhammad Shahril Bin Saibon

D20101038302 

Muhammad Yazid Bin Rosly

D20101038223 

Santhiya A/P Ramadas D20101038252 

Navitha A/P Sanmugam D20101038253 

POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISM

What is Postcolonial Feminism?

Subset of Feminism

It was developed as feminism focused more on Western

cultures

It seeks to study the effect of colonialism on non-white,

non-western women in the postcolonial world.

It often argues that non-western women are

misinterpreted.

Western view on Non-western Women

White men or women are needed to save brown women from brown men (Roy, 2002)

All women are united under a sisterhood of exploitation by patriarchy.

Westerners as the Saviours

George W Bush in large part justified the war in Afghanistan through an appeal for the liberation of Afghan women.

The women of Afghanistan constituted the ultimate victims, putting the United States in the position of ultimate protector

(Young, 2003)

Politics of the Veil The veil has been concerned, intrigued, fascinated

and troubled the western commentators most.

Some westerners desire of freeing women from the prison of their veil (Spivak, 1994)

Kirklees Council in Dewsbury suspended classroom assistant Aishah Azmi for refusing to remove her veil at school.

In France, decision was made to ban the wearing of headscarves by Muslim girls in school, along with large crosses and other covert religious symbols.

The veil symbolizes an exotic and seductive

Orient that has long intrigued the Westerners.

Non-western women feel that it is part of their

own identity.

A British Muslim woman said that she saw the

hijab as an act of solidarity with Muslim women

all over the world.

Many independent and capable women are

veiled

Indigene Du Caire

Taken from the Stockton Postcolonial Projects

Postcolonial Feminists on Western View

Many women are oppressed by much more than patriarchy

Western women have set the agenda of feminism

It focuses more on geographic and cultural specificity

By using the term "woman" as a universal group, women are then only defined by their gender and not by social class, race, ethnicity, or sexual preference.

Postcolonial feminism began as a criticism of the failure of Western feminism to cope with the complexity of postcolonial feminist issues

Postcolonial Feminism & Race

mainstream Western feminism has largely avoided the issue of race

Race was not seen as an issue that White women needed to address.[15]

Critiques of Post colonialism Feminism

Postcolonial feminism is itself a critique of western

feminism

Western feminist movement criticizes postcolonial

feminism is on the grounds that breaking down women into

smaller groups

This criticism claims that postcolonial feminism is divisive

Postcolonial feminism and third world feminism are also in

danger of being ethnocentric

HYBRIDITY

Framing Hybridity Among postcolonial theorists, there is a wide consensus that hybridity

arose out of the culturally internalized interactions between

“colonizers” and “the colonized” and the dichotomous formation of

these identities.

This theoretical perspective will serve as the foundation for the

considerations explored in this paper, employing hybridity as a

powerful tool for liberation from the domination imposed by

bounded definitions of race, language, and nation.

Race Racial hybridity, or the integration of two races which are assumed to be

distinct and separate entities, can be considered first in terms of the physical

body.

Mixed births such as mestizo, mulatto and muwallad were stigmatized as a

physical representation of impure blood, and

Racism long served as a tool of power that maintained that even in this

blending of two bodies, just “one drop” of black blood would deem the body

impure and alien, an abomination.

In embodying the inability to bind identities to race, racial hybridity both in

the physical body and in consciousness offers a means of deconstructing the

boundaries of dichotomous racial identities.

Language In addition to race, language has long been bound in definitions as a symbol of nation and

a mode of exclusion. As a means to connect with other social beings, communicating with

language is a meaningful performance in that speaking requires two parties, one to

perform language and an audience to observe and absorb language.

Fanon’s theorizing addresses the power of language in the formation of identity as he says,

“To speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization,”

(1967: 17-18).

The use of a colonizer’s language by the colonized to speak of the crimes of colonialism is

its own transgression and act of resistance.

National Culture “How do you tell who is indigenous to the country and who is not? Given a history of

migration, what is the dividing line between the indigenous and the nonindigenous?”

(Mamdani 2005: 10).

Hybridity in a postcolonial world muddles the very definitions of culture by which

nations define themselves.

Said shows the diverse processes by which dominant cultures are formed at the service

of Others. Using words like “shape,” “definition,” and “transmute,” he describes the

act of defining nation and the artificial nature of these boundaries.

FANON AND THE VIOLENCE OF POSTCOLONIALISM

Some forms of postcolonialism have suggested

that a more direct form of intervention is required

for change.

Frantz Fanon even called for the necessity of

violence.

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)

Colonial world is a Manichean world

- a world of black and white alone

- colonial knowledge sought to completely

separate black from white.

Two element of colonialism in tension:

1. Through colonial rule and education, the colonised were constantly told of the superiority of colonisers’ values and these should be aspired to and copied.

2. However, at the same time there was the existence of what Fanon called ‘the fact of blackness’, in other words, the manner in which a colonised person can most immediately identified is by the colour (or other features) of their skin. This ‘fact of blackness’ was a marker of inferiority which was inescapable.

The copying of colonizers' values- can never be totally

successful, and it is this which maintains the superiority of

the colonizers

“Indians can mimic but never exactly reproduce English values…

their recognition of the perpetual gap between themselves and the

‘real thing” will ensure their subjection”

(Loomba, 1998)

Psychic trauma occurred when the colonized subject

realised that he would never be able to attain the whiteness

he had been taught to desire, or shed the blackness he had

learnt to devalue.

“At the risk of arousing the resentment of my coloured

brothers, I will say that the black man is not a man”

(Frantz Fanon- Black Skin, White Masks)

Fanon produced analysis of the psychological problems

facing black men and women in a white world.

The condition he identified was self-division or alienation

from the self.

He presented a number of case notes recording ‘colonial

war and mental disorder’

Fanon reversed the ideas of the colonizers.

“Rather than seeing colonialism as the result of the failings

of the other (namely, European colonialism was needed as

the others were not able to rule themselves), we now saw it

as the cause of the mental defects of the other”

Negative traits of colonised (violence, hysteria, laziness)

were brought actually by the colonialism.

WHY VIOLENCE?

From European point of view – saw native

as being uncivilized and lack the ability to

rule by themselves.

Anti-colonial resistance denote to the

European that the native are being violence

Fanon thinks otherwise.

Fanon

European initial act of conquest – power over body and

mind.

Thus to maintain the European power violence is

inevitable.

Natives starts decolonization

Bring the native together with common purpose

Gaining self respect.

After decolonization

Neo- colonialism – western- dominated international

capital which would not allowed newly independent

country to develop in peace

Fanon vision has a gender bias

Woman as sexual violence

Example through the movie The battle of Algiers

References

Sharp, J. (2009). Geographies of post-colonialism (1st ed.). London: SAGE.

The Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project,. (2011). Veils and Postcolonial Feminism. Retrieved 19 May 2014, from https://blogs.stockton.edu/postcolonialstudies/veils-and-postcolonial-feminism/