Is Western Feminism Imperialist?

Chandra Mohanty establishes the imperialism of western feminism in a resolutely systematic way in her essay, Under Western Eyes. Imperialism, she asserts, “implies a relation of structural domination and suppression of the heterogeneity of the subjects in question” and western feminism, she accuses, practices a discursive mode of the former. To her, western feminism exercises “a certain mode of appropriation and codification of scholarship and knowledge about women of the third world” through the use of analytic categories specific only to the U.S and Europe, which are then uncritically and indiscriminately applied to the lives and experiences of women all over the world. Her essay surveys multiple feminist texts to explore the mode in which they produce knowledge on women in the third world, and he three analytical categories she unpacks are 1) “Women” as a category for analysis, 2) the uncritical use of particular methodologies that provide proof universality and cross-cultural validity, and 3) the political principle underlying the methodologies and analytic strategies and the model of power and struggle they imply and suggest.

She begins her argument by establishing the difference between the category of women as “a cultural and ideological composite Other,” the symbolic, abstract notion of what a woman is, “constructed through diverse representational discourses”, and individual, embodied women – the real material subjects of their own particular histories. Their relationship is an arbitrary one – she asserts no direct correspondence, identity, or implication between the two. Rather, it is a relationship constructed within culture, specific to its place, time, and history, and should be analyzed with reference to specific cultures. Western feminist discourse discounts the importance of cultural difference in understanding  women’s experiences beyond the west – it’s discourse assumes the reality of a universal, homogeneous group of women with identical interests and desires relative to its own western context. That which unites all women globally is, to western eyes, a universal, shared experience of oppression, and therein, an elision takes place between the symbolic, discursively constituted woman and the individual, diverse women of the world. Woman, worldwide, is characterized by her oppression, and therefore homogenized as a collective, ahistorical entity, objectified and passive. Western feminism’s  focus, analytically, then, centers “not on uncovering the material and ideological specificities that constitute a particular group of women as powerless in a particular context. It is rather on finding a variety of cases of “powerless” groups of women to prove the general point that women as a group are powerless”.

The analytical tools used to establish the universality and cross-cultural validity of women’s oppression emphasize the euro-centrism of their approach. She discusses first the arithmetic method, where one random, ostensibly oppressive practice or characteristic (to western eyes) is singled out – her example being the veil – and is “denied any cultural and historical specificity”. Second is the uncritical usage of western-centric social structures onto those that look and operate entirely differently – she points to how “concepts like reproduction, the sexual division of labor in the family, marriage, the household, patriarchy, etc. are often used without their specification in local and cultural historical contexts”.  Third – the hunt to establish linked binaries, such as those that link the male:female binary to nature:culture, onto local discourses of representation, is also addressed. All three tools fail to capture and appreciate the cultural diversity of value and meaning ascribed to either cultural practice, societal structure, or representational discourse in different localized communities. There is no real appreciation of the reality of women’s experiences, the power they can and perhaps do hold respective to, for example, ethnic, class, or racial difference. The level of oppression is measured with the West as the referent and the yardstick. Only reductive generalizations result from tools such as these, and so, recreate and emphasize the assumption that women, everywhere, and particularly in the third world –  are oppressed. The West becomes the primary referent in theory and praxis – “it defines women as subjects outside of social relations, instead of looking at the way women are constituted as women through these very structures. Legal, economic, religious, and familial structures are treated as phenomena to be judged by western standards”.

The charge of imperialism results in the consequences of such knowledge production. Such an approach organizes the feminist political effort (which is necessarily linked to feminist theory) around priority issues that are inherently western-centric, and Mohanty argues this limits the possibility of coalitions between western feminism and working class and feminists of color around the world, who do not see themselves accurately represented in discourse. And their distortion, their misrepresentation has far deeper political consequences in the context of the West’s established hegemonic position in the world, where it holds “control over the orientation, regulation and decision of the process of world development”. When structures are defined as “underdeveloped” or “developing” in relation to conditions in the West, “an implicit image of the average third world woman is produced” and, simultaneously, the model to aspire towards, the bar to achieve, becomes the women in the West – not perfect, nut much better off. Superiority of the west is affirmed, as it “reinforces the assumption that people in the third world have just not evolved to the extent that the West has”. A paternalistic politics develops in a global arena towards women in the third world – where saving third world women becomes a rallying call for neo-imperialism. “Feminist analysis perpetuate and sustain the hegemony of the idea of the superiority of the West and produce a corresponding set of universal images like the veiled woman, the powerful mother the chaste virgin, the obedient wife. These images exist in universal, ahistorical splendor, setting in motion colonialist discourse which exercises a very specific power in defining, coding, and maintaining existing first/third world connections”. In this way, Mohanty establishes western feminism’s complicity within neo-colonial endeavors, and in this essay, points to their “inadequate self-consciousness” on the political effects of their work in the context of the global hegemony of Western scholarship, beyond the immediate feminist audience. The most striking line, for me, was her exclamation: “Beyond sisterhood there is still racism, colonialism, and imperialism!”

 

 

Amilcar Cabral answers this question in his text, defining national liberation as “the organized political expression of the culture of a people undertaking the struggle against colonialism/imperialism”. The first two-thirds of Cabral’s essay can be understood as an explanation of the definition stated above. Systematically, he explains that the expression and affirmation of culture is simultaneously the source, the spirit and the end of any national struggle to overthrow foreign domination. To explain this, he answers three questions: What is the culture of a people? How does it threaten colonial rule? How can one systematically organize a political expression of culture to then resist colonial rule? The first two theoretical questions are what I shall engage with in this post, and in so doing, I will seek to summarize his main argument and so, provide a thorough answer to the question “how important is culture to Cabral’s view of national liberation?” In short, very.

What is Culture?

Cabral’s argument rests on his materialist understanding of culture. For him, culture is a reflection of a society’s mode of production.  Two factors, he argues, determine a society’s mode of production:

1. the level of development of the productive forces of society – the manner in which people relate to nature/their capacity to act or to react in response to nature
2. the system for social utilization and distribution of the products made by productive forces, which determine relationships between individual men and different social classes and groups.

These two factors, which together constitute a people’s mode of production, reflect the way the society is ordered – it encapsulates a people’s entire mode of relating to the world, to others, and to themselves – which, when expressed, is known as culture. Cabral’s definition of culture thus is “the conscious result of the economic and political activities of a society – the dynamic expression of the kinds of relationships that prevail in that society, on the one hand between man and nature, and on the other hand, among individuals, groups of individuals, social strata or classes”. It is the “vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality” of a society – an affirmation that this society is real, there, and present! 

Cabral further argues that a people’s mode of production also determines their history and evolution.  “The mode of production, whose contradictions are manifested with more or less intensity through the class struggle, is the principle factor of the history of any group, the level of the productive forces being the true and permanent driving power of history”. Change, progress, time  – these ideas are charted through changes in a people’s material relationship towards their mode of production – the result of challenges and oppositions amongst the people on how to effectively and efficiently channel their productive forces and distribute and utilize its rewards. To chart this is “to speak of these is to speak of history,” Cabral asserts, “ but it is also to speak of culture”. Culture encapsulates these changes, or rather, the lessons learnt from these changes into the character of the culture it represents. Cabral argues that “if history allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalance and conflicts which characterize the evolution of society, culture allows us to know the dramatic syntheses which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress”. Culture holds within it the means of a society’s perpetuation, it’s survival, it’s progress. The metaphor Cabral employs of culture as a flower is now clear – it both represents a culture and is responsible for its continuity, its evolution, it’s growth.

How does it threaten colonial rule?

Having understood what culture means to Cabral, his claim that the affirmation of culture as imperative to any national struggle for liberation becomes clear. Foreign domination, Cabral asserts, is “the negation of the organic historical process of the dominated people by means of violently usurping the free operation of the process of development of their productive forces”. In taking control, they usurp the means of production for their own ends, and cut off a society’s personal relation to that which orients their sense of self, of each other, and of the land. It is their culture that they can turn to – therein resides the seeds to affirm and ensure the safety and continuity of their indigenous way of life, and so, therein resides the seeds to generate resistance against foreign intervention and usurpation of what is theirs. Culture is an affirmation of a way of being specific to the land, specific to the people, and if affirmed during a period of domination, keeps people empowered despite their material subjugation, and so, is threatening to the colonizer, the dominator. If the dominator does not simultaneously arrest and oppress the cultural life of the people it has taken over then “foreign domination cannot be sure of its own perpetuation.” Thus, how Cabral starts his essay, referencing Goebbels pulling out a revolver whenever culture was discussed is poignant – domination, true domination and control over a people can only be maintained if culture is liquidated. This results in the creation of racist theories and systems of thought that seek to negate the existence or the value of the indigenous culture in favor of that of the oppressors – it is fed into the people and emphasized as superior, or, at least, obedience to their own culture is demanded and enforced. If culture is not affirmed, or re-learnt, it can result in self-hate, cultural alienation, and stunted development for a people – removed from their means of production that no longer serve their ends, but to the benefit of the foreign power. 

The foundation of national liberation, to Cabral, rests in “the unalienable right of every people to create their own history…to reclaim the right, usurped by imperial domination… the liberation of the process of development of national productive forces”. If liberated, then the people will be allowed to determine the mode of production most appropriate for their collective well-being, and so allow for organic cultural development, growth, and progress, suited to their needs and desires. “A people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free culturally if they return to their upward paths of their own culture, which is nourished by the living reality of their own environment, and which negates both harmful influences and any kind of subjection to foreign culture.” Cabral highlights how many national liberation struggles are preceded by an increase in expression of culture, to affirm the cultural personality of the dominated people as a means of negating the oppressors culture. Thus, his definition is clarified: “it may be seen that if imperial domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture…the organized political expression of a colonized people”. Culture, thus, is the source, the spirit and the end of national liberation.

 

Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the people and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. (Franz Fanon)

 

I am offering a close reading of a passage from Ousmane Sembene’s novel, God’s Bits of Wood, wherein I locate a prime example of the effects of a crisis of representation (as discussed in class) played out on an individual level. In the passage I have selected, the damage wrought to the minds and the hearts of colonial subjects is exemplified in its introduction to one of the works central characters – N’Deye Touti. She, like every other figure in the novel, depicts a certain vantage point through which differing experiences and responses to colonialism are explored. In N’Deye Touti’s case, the site of her engagement, her suffering, occurs within her mind, her self, her identity. 

A member of Ramatoulaye’s household, N’Deye is young, beautiful, and most importantly, educated – and that is her burden. Her education has opened up her mind as a space to be annexed by colonial modes of thought – modes that further their cause for effective domination of their colonial subjects. An epistemological conquest over local modes of thinking, as we discussed in class, is part and parcel of any colonial endeavor. The language and worldview of the colonizer’s has been fed into N’Deye, imprinted upon her by way of her education, and at this point in the novel, she has not learnt to resist or respond to it critically – she indiscriminately absorbs racist, discriminatory discourse through the western-centrism of her education. Being black herself, this manifests in enormous internalized racism and hatred towards herself, her people, and her world.

This damage is wrought, as seen in the passage, by her education emotionally and imaginatively distancing her from her world. The text cites how “N’Deye herself knew more about Europe than Africa” – and laments that  “she lived in a kind of separate world: the reading she did, the films she saw, made her part of a universe in which her own people had no place, and by the same token she no longer had a place in theirs”. Her education plies her with experiences she cannot and will not ever have access to as a black woman – she is in awe of western, eurocentric ideals she can never attain. An extensive reader of romance novels – she is taught what love is through the words, images and experiences that exist nowhere near her own lived experiences – “love was something that went with parties and costume balls, weekends in the country and trips in automobiles, yachting trips and vacations abroad, elegant anniversary presents and the fall showings at the great courtiers. Real life was there: not here, in this wretched corner, where she confronted beggars and cripples at every turning”. Her education, naturally, gives no explanations as to why she is surrounded with so much poverty, grief, and ugliness. All she knows is that an idealized, perfect world – the world of the colonizer – exists, and her world, her Senegal, her Africa, cannot ever come close to matching it. Africa’s polygamous marriages have nothing to do with love, and this confirms in her the “lack of civilization” of her own people – they who do not live by eurocentric ideals that she deems necessary for any kind civility. She has never been taught to appreciate the ideals of her own. This existence inspires internalized hatred and disdain for her way of life for – “she would be seized with a kind of nausea, a mixture of rage and shame” at the sight, the recognition of it.    

That N’Deye has the capacity to resist colonial modes of thought is hinted when the story tells of how, by accident, she watches a European documentary film on an African tribe of Pygmies. In watching it, “it was as if she were hurled backward, and down to the level of these dwarves, and had an insane desire to run out of the theatre, crying aloud, ‘No, no! These are not real Africans!’” It is the first real representation of Africa by the West she sees, and she innately recognizes it as a false, generalized depiction. And yet, she cannot accept that they, the West, could be wrong. The extent to which her mind accepts the West as the only veritable source of knowledge is clear in that she still shrinks, that she describes her desire to correct, to decry their false depiction as insane. Her response to the film is bodily, almost – the desire to scream, to run – she knows what her mind refuses to accept. And yet, the story shifts immediately to another film screening in the theatre, where she turns on some men speaking loudly in the audience with “avenging fury and cried in French, ‘Be quiet, you ignorant fools! If you don’t understand, get out!’” The experience of the documentary film inspired little resistant or critical thought – only further turmoil – its almost as if her “avenging fury” is meant to make up for these men’s inherent African fault – their ignorance, their lack of decorum. She does not wish to investigate the aberrance – indeed, “she had never read a book by an African author – she was sure it would teach her nothing”.

N’Deye benefits from this education only in that she becomes an unofficial scribe and translator for the people in her village of N’Diayene. They need people like her to get educated – to allow the ones who cannot read, write, or speak the colonial language access to communication in a world where the the colonizers demand it as a prerequisite. But she is otherwise ridiculed for her European ways and fashions. Accidentally caught wearing a brassiere, her Mame Sofi ridicules her, crying “There is a cow in the house, walking on two feet, and all dressed up!” Her ways are other to her own people – and she will always be other to the West. The damage wrought by colonial control of the colonized’s understanding of themselves, their promotion of their world as an inaccessible ideal, leaves its victims exiled and alienated on both fronts. After the ridicule subjected to her in her own home, “she considered herself a prisoner in the place that she should have been her home”.

Thus, Sembene paints the cognitive devastation of the colonized subjects mode of apprehending and appreciating the world. I am sure many of us can see ourselves in the struggles, the emotions, and the experiences described above.