Judith Butler suggests that in order to make a revolution happen, it is important to have a common, shared cause. This cause, according to Butler should not emerge out of lived experiences—because they are different for everyone—but out of shared humanity. While this idea is significant because it creates a new notion of unity which is based on natural similarity of being human as opposed to being defined in contrast to an other, it can be argued that mobilizing such a movement may not be that practical. The following analysis argues that as opposed to Butler’s approach, there is a need for intersectionality as established by Kimberle Crenshaw and Bell Hooks.

Crenshaw came up with the notion of intersectionality after observing the way black women are oppressed by both white and black men as well as white women. They are not only otherized on the basis of their race but also on the basis of their gender. For this reason, neither black men include them in their struggle for civil rights nor do white women include them in their feminist movements. Intersectionality is thus supposed to be an inclusive notion where all marginalized groups can unite.

Bell Hooks, in Ain’t I a Woman, also reflects on the need for a similar idea. She illustrates how black men and white woman—both marginalized groups—also oppress black women. She further elaborates on why this happens. Black men use black women as punching bags in order to take out their frustrations and insecurities. This behavior is enabled by patriarchal structures. White women, too, otherize black women simply because they consider them inferior, uncouth, and sexually deviant. These racial prejudices prevent them from incorporating black women into the feminist movement. Despite the movement’s claim of being inclusive, black women are continuously silenced or misrepresented.

White feminism has not been inclusive for black women, not only because of racial prejudices but also due to the differences in their issues. Since race determined socio-economic status, white women are more privileged than their counterparts. Their issues are concerning pay gaps, voting rights, and government representation. Black women, who are suffering to be treated as human beings have different priorities at the time Hooks is writing. These different needs cannot be met under a singular banner of feminism.

As a result, intersectionality becomes important. It recognizes that not all people are same. Just as their values differ, their priorities differ too. And more importantly, the oppression they suffer from may also differ. Acknowledgment of different kinds of oppression means a realization of the fact that different structures can be oppressive in different ways. Hooks also elaborates on how real freedom can only result from the destruction of structures like racism, sexism, and capitalism. Understanding that all such systems are oppressive paves the way for unity. Intersectionality enables this unity while also understanding that differences exist. This understanding is necessary for inclusion and also for the sake of tackling oppression on all fronts.

Based on Abel Meeropol’s poem, “Strange Fruit” is a song about the lynching and killing of black people. Billie Holiday’s rendition of the song was the first one and thus has a significant place in the history of redemption songs. The song is raw and yet subtle. It addresses the violence caused by racism but also creates a pastoral backdrop. This contrast emphasizes on the point being made. The song does not call out white people directly. It also does not openly ask for black people to rise to action. Instead, it creates a quieter and more internal response. This song can be seen as an embodiment of Toni Morrison and Aime Cesaire’s notions of using language and poetry and tool for liberation, and Martin Luther King’s idea of nonviolence.

The first argument presented here is simple; poetry and music are tools of liberation. Morrison recognizes the absence of black representation in literature. She illustrates how language is political and aids the agendas of those who possess it. “Strange Fruit,” written in the English language, not only represents but empowers the black person. The oppressor’s language is molded to aid the oppressed and that too in a moment when even black people were trying to produce content for the consumption of white people. Holiday’s version of the song came out in 1935 and it was the first song of its kind among the uncle-Toms of the black music industry. It presented a history and an account of the present. Without overtly calling for a revolution, it does the required job of informing the people and stirring emotion. In accord with like Cesaire’s ideas about poetry being weaponized, Holiday’s song on Meeropol’s poem aims to bring the very real problems of a people into an arena which was considered entertainment only. Such kind of inclusivity reflected on support, shared fear, and the need to break the silence. In a way, this song acts as one of the first steps to the civil rights movement.

This song also embodies the nonviolence Martin Luther King talks about. An analysis of the lyrics shows that. The song opens with a pastoral image of “trees” but sets a dark tone from the beginning as these trees are stated to “bear strange fruit.” The purpose of the pastoral image seems to be to highlight the unnatural acts taking place in a natural setting. There is “blood” everywhere as “black bodies” swing and the “smell of burning flesh” is carried through the “southern breeze.” The juxtaposition of images of trees and wind with blood and death creates an uneasy feeling which continues to exist as the song goes back and forth between a tranquil scene and bloodshed. It calls to the sense of smell and sight as the “scent of magnolias” is interrupted by the “smell of burning flesh.” The song ends with references to fruit, rain, and sun, creating an image of ripeness and fullness. Yet, the crop is “bitter.” This could be seen as the white man’s apparent progression in contrast with his ugly racism.

The song on its own is not making a direct claim. It’s descriptive but it does not define the oppressor, only the oppressed. It simply reports on the events taking place and suggests that they are unnatural. The tone is not accusatory. In fact, the pastoral imagery and Holiday’s calm voice contrast with the violence. It also does not seem to be asking to cause a revolution based on violence like the one Malcolm X or Fanon seems to advocate for. The song merely causes contemplation. It yearns for peace. It is a cry for help, and a plea to put an end to all violence. In this way, it reminds one of MLK’s faith in nonviolence. The objective is to redeem what is lost and what is left behind. Thus, violence in retaliation does not the serve the purpose.

Holiday’s song reflects on the power of language and the need for representation. It also shows how a silent and nonthreatening plea can also help bring one closer to liberation. The personal kind of response that this song creates embodies nonviolence and creates new possibilities. If blood is not shed, and if the white men sow seeds of equality and coexistence, a new fruit will be born. It is the possibility of a sweeter fruit that Holiday is showing and that MLK, too, was chasing.

Gloria Anzaldua, in Borderlands, describes her position as an ‘in-between’ who belongs to a community existing at the border of Mexico and the USA. Her inbetweenness is not only evident through the struggles of belonging that she describes but also through the way she narrates them. Anzaldua presents a mixture of prose and poetry. She does not stick to one form just like she does not use a single language to explain her experience. Anzaldua’s chapter, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” describes how as a Chicano woman, her language became a “synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness” (63). Her accent, pronunciation, and vocabulary were different from both Mexicans and Americans. The borderland had a language of its own and this language became a signifier of her difference. At home, she was considered not Spanish enough, and in school she was asked to speak in proper English. This led to a “kind of dual identity” which “internalized the borderland conflict” in a way that at times, Anzaldua felt that one identity cancelled out the other, leaving her as “nothing” and “no one” (63). The power of language and how it is able to create and represent identity is what was most striking in this text; Anzaldua shows that one needs to take ownership of language to be truly free. It resonates with me because a similar kind of juxtaposition of languages is happening with Urdu and English in postcolonial Pakistan.

Anzaldua refers to a “tradition of silence” which all marginalized people are forced to follow. She starts with an example of language being “a male discourse” (54). As a woman, she had always been taught that “well bred girls don’t answer back” (54). Some words in her language were only “derogatory if applied to women” and some words did not even have a feminine plural. It was not only that women were silenced because of cultural norms that associated silence with good breeding, but also the language itself gave them no words to speak. Anzaldua thus shows that language is molded by whoever is in power. It is a male discourse, and a white male discourse at that.

When the white man’s language is spoken by anyone who is not of the same race, it can be seen in a few ways. One way to look at it is to see it as the white man’s victory because he has been successful in enlightening the less intellectual beings. Another way, the one I think Anzaldua too proposes, is to see it as the colored person’s reclamation of power. If one establishes that the white man’s language is the language of power, whoever makes use of it should be understood as exercising that power. Chicano Spanish is the language spoken by the people on the peripheries who are otherized by their colored peers. One reason they speak both English and Spanish is because of their location. Another is that they feel powerless when they are rejected by both sides of the border. They speak the languages that they consider their own but that have been used as a tool oppression against them in order to empower themselves. These multilingual people then codeswitch and form a new “forked tongue,” a “secret language” (55). By creating the Chicano Spanish, these people took ownership of both the languages by molding them in their ways. It helped them communicate and gave them the sense of belonging which neither English nor Spanish could. This language consisted of “archaisms” of Spanish language as well as “anglicisms” which resulted from the English language being imposed on Spanish speakers. In this way, it had the essence of both the languages.

However, Anzaldua mentions how even then, these people were constantly reprimanded. They were blamed for “speaking the oppressor’s tongue by speaking English” or for speaking “poor” and “illegitimate” Spanish (55, 58). These attacks diminish their “sense of self” (58) and force them to prove to one another who the real Chicano person is, not recognizing the fact that “there is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience” (58).

This chapter on language is relevant to postcolonial states as reclaiming language is a part of the decolonizing project. If we take Pakistan as an example, and consider the imposition of the English language in the subcontinent, we can still see how people here are trying recover from the colonial hangover. The people here are multilingual and they too codeswtich between English and their local languages in daily conversation. The language spoken in Pakistan isn’t simply Urdu or Punjabi or any other regional language. It is a mixture of the local language and the colonizer’s language and it has become to norm across classes. Every now and then, someone on social media points out how sentences like “She was karing this (doing this)” with both English and Urdu words are funny. People view them as a joke. I propose, they are not a joke. They are, as seen through Anzaldua, a way of reclaiming power by reclaiming language.

Lastly, Aznzaldua also mentions how she would rather write without having to translate her words. In this chapter, she uses many Spanish phrases and she translates most of them because she is writing for an English speaking reader. This reminded me of Moni Mohsin’s The Diary of a Social Butterfly which is a novel of fiction and warrants no comparison to Anzaldua’s work except that Mohsin uses codeswitching and writes the entire novel in a language only decipherable to those who not only speak English and Urdu but also are familiar with the grammatical norms through which they’re juxtaposed. Anzaldua seems to be reaching towards a similar kind of goal; she wants to be herself unapologetically and rightfully points out that language plays a key role in doing so. Until she is able to achieve this kind of decolonization and freedom, she acknowledges that she will be bound and her language will be considered illegitimate.

Toni Morrison’s purpose in “Black Matters” is to highlight the lack of presence of African American characters in the American literary canon. She suggests that this absence occurs either because “silence” over matters of race imply an inclusion of black people in the collective or because racism is defined asymmetrically by looking at the black person as a victim. Morrison argues that this exclusion of black characters and black literature signifies an erasure of black history. It either does not represent black people at all or it shows them as minor characters that are stereotyped as victims. Black people thus fail to recognize themselves in the stories they read. In her preface to Playing in the Dark, she praises Marie Cardinal’s work because her language helps the black reader recognize himself. Morrison advocates for inclusion of such literature into the canon in order to prevent the black reader from feeling like the other. She also adds later in the book that the little representation of black people is based on binaries between them (uncivilized) and the white American (civilized), and explorations of the white self in comparison to the black self. This can also be read through the lens of Oriental discourse.

Examples of stereotyping are plenty in the Oriental discourse. In the Arabian Nights, the base tale presents prince Sheheryar as a selfish and insecure despot who is too involved in his personal matters to care for the nation. This stereotype of a despot is associated with the orient. The notion of antinationalism is also oriental and created in comparison to the nationalist Europeans. The promiscuous women, Sheheryar and his brother’s wives, are also presented in opposition to the European ladies. Murad, an Orient slave with whom the prince’s wife has an affair, is supposed to look ape-like and yet is described to have animalistic sexual appeal which adds to the animalistic character of the orient. These particular descriptions show up in other literary works as well.

Their purpose is to build stereotypes that reduce the orient to his baser instincts so he is built in comparison to the civilized European. Even the oriental translations of Eastern works reorient the way they were meant to be read. Thus in oriental discourse, there is selective representation which is political and has a great impact on those that read these texts. The fact that these texts became extremely popular and were replicated time and again shows how the orient was turned into an exotic character, existing purely for the Europeans’’ entertainment.

When Oriental discourse was brought to India with the East India Company, Warren Hastings began a bigger project of translations and writings. This led some local Indian writers to write in the same way and they too began to use the oriental stereotypes. Again, the purpose of these characters was to create complacence. If the literature too attested to the notion that the white man wanted to impose, it became easier for the colonized to internalize these ideas. This shows how literature works to build identity as well.

Morrison seems to be diagnosing a problem similar to that of Oriental discourses. It is a problem of representation which has previously made the orient into the other that is seen as a binary of the European and is attributed negative characteristics which are stereotyped and popularized. The similar can happen if black history is eroded and black identity is either not represented at all or is represented selectively. It is essential to make efficient use of literature in order to highlight the history of black struggle as well as to give black people characters that they can recognize and identify with.

Senghor’s idea of negritude is “the sum of the cultural values of the black world” and a “way of relating oneself to the world and to the others.” He explains how “the African has always and everywhere presented a concept of the world which is diametrically opposed to the traditional philosophy of Europe.” What becomes apparent at the beginning of Senghor’s analysis is that he uses this notion of negritude in retaliation, in an attempt to separate and somehow—through this separation—elevate the Africans. In doing so, Senghor ends up creating the African identity in contrast and in relation to the European. In doing so, he manages to create an African identity which is different from the rest but does not account for the differences within. What ends up happening is a form of homogenization of African values and culture, something the colonizer too had already tried to do. Thus the same issue of generalization exists here. The purpose of creating an identity, from the colonizer’s point of view, was to associate unpleasant characteristics with the colonized and to have these associations fixed in time. When Senghor tries to establish the essence of being African, he too makes the mistake of not taking time into consideration. He also creates the African in contrast with the European in the way that the African identity becomes a performance put up for the European to see and validate. In this way, there is no universalism in Senghor’s notion of negritude.

The first issue is that affixing an African identity for all time. This mirrors the European mission of categorizing. The only difference is that in Senghor’s version, the African identity is associated with relatively positive attributes. Regardless, homogenizing a culture of different people with different histories and associations with different tribes becomes problematic. Some culture and history is lost while other is mixed in a way that becomes unrecognizable. Such mixed up and homogenized identity is not representative of a real people, but an imagined community. With such a conception of self that they do not recognize, when Africans try to decolonize, they are likely to be confused and angry. The unity, togetherness, and pride in self that negritude wanted to achieve becomes redundant and counterproductive. This affixation in time, that Fanon too rejected, is what diminishes the possibility of universalism in this negritude.

The second problem is the African identity being built in response to the European identity. In doing so, the European again becomes the center and the standard according to which others define themselves. African art and African culture becomes entertainment for the European. Its difference only makes it more exotic and fascinating for the European. Again, a stereotype emerges which only does a disservice to the African people. This kind of recognition takes away from the identity of the African and cannot be considered as an example of universalism. There is thus no space of universalism in Senghor’s negritude.

Chandra Mohanty outlines the problematic implications of Western feminism portraying third world women as a “singular monolithic subject.” Mohanty describes how this homogenization of third world women creates a stark distinction between them—the other—and the Western women who are significantly better off. Such feminist discourse is inherently colonial as it privileges one kind of woman while depicting the other as the victim of the colonized societies. The following analysis of Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” will focus on two main consequences of this kind of feminist discourse. First, it will discuss how otherization of third world women is instrumental in making the Western women look better and more advanced. And then, it will elaborate on how this view of third world women does a disservice to them and only helps perpetuate their positions as a victim.

Mohanty quotes multiple examples to show how Western feminist discourse groups women from postcolonial countries under the singular title of third world women. These groups of Muslim women or African women are attributed certain characteristics that define them. This reductionism and determinism reminds one of a similar process of categorization—the colonizing process. The colonizers, too, categorized the colonized people in one big group of backward and uncivil beings who needed to be guided and civilized by their superior masters. Such categorization only exists for the purpose of comparison. There needs to be the uncivil person for the existence and justification of the civilized person. Similarly, there need to be the third world women struggling in their backward societies for there to be first world women who also struggle but somehow struggle in more useful ways such that they are eventually able to break the chains that bind them. The other—the third world women—exist to provide a scale for comparison and to show to the Western feminists that they have come a long way. Time, again, plays an important role. Similar to the colonized who lived in the colonizer’s past, third world women lives in Western women’s past. This is not to say that they share same histories but that if they were to mark their progress, the latter would be much ahead of the former.

The otherization of third world women is thus important to show the differences between them and their Western counterparts. And the importance of these differences is to be able to make a claim of value between the two. Of course, feminist discourse does not claim to promote such competition. It is still implied that while one type of woman struggles in silence, the other fights for her rights and is on the path to success. Thus the latter is the type of woman that one should aspire to be. Given the notion of time discussed above and the idea of success mentioned here, it is obvious that Western feminism suggests that there’s one particular kind of freedom that all women should hope for. This is the Western kind of freedom that only takes into account the Western culture and context. Any other kind of freedom is not freedom at all. It is simply another form of oppression or some kind of compromise that the third world woman is expected to make. For example, the image of a free woman will have Western attire (pants, skirts, etc) but the image of an oppressed woman will have a veil. The signifiers of liberation have been decided according to Western scales. Western feminism is imperialist in that way. It exploits the oppression of third world women to make itself look better in comparison.

Mohanty also discusses how such discourse portrays third world women in only a few selected ways. They are universal dependents, and victims of male violence, the colonial process, familial systems and religious ideologies. In any narrative involving third world women, their only role is that of a victim or a passive receiver of abuse and oppression. What this discourse robs them of, more than their conditions themselves, is not simply a voice but also the possibility of being anything other than a victim. In fact, oppression in such narratives is so normalized that it is expected. What else could these women get? It is as if their culture is designed to victimize them. Such a lens provides a pitiful view of third world women. Since their conditions—the men in their society or their religious ideologies—cannot change, they too cannot experience any change. What makes this pity more profound is the hopelessness that accompanies it.

With such reduced possibilities, the third world woman does not stand a chance. She has no choice, no hope, and perhaps no desire to be free like the Western woman. She is stuck being sexually violated, restricted to the roles of mother and wife, hidden behind a veil. The Western women are martyrs who fight bravely for what they know they deserve, and the third world women are victims who take what they get in silence. There is a particular respect associated with the former which is absent and is replaced by pity and perhaps judgment for the latter. While Western feminists fight for the right to vote, the third world women are concerned with more basic problems: the right to their own body, fixed gender roles, etc. Again, the third world women are behind. The problem here is that unlike the colonized who had the colonizer to guide him to civilization, the third world woman has no one. She is left behind with the same uncivil man with no further promise of redemption. She is permanently stuck in her helpless state.

Cabral establishes that culture is “simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and determinant of history.” Given this, the task for imperial powers is to simply attack the colonial subjects’ culture—and historical progress—and take over the process of development of productive forces. Stripped off their history and denied the means to produce, the colonized find themselves to be a people without time.  Cabral’s central argument is that liberation from these circumstances—national liberation—is essentially the liberation of the colonized culture. The process he suggests requires the colonized people to liberate the process of development of national productive sources and to use them in the most fruitful way. Since these productive forces signal the stages of development and the material relationships man has with his environment, they form the basis for culture as a force of progress and as a weapon of opposition. The following analysis will elaborate on three ways in which Cabral highlights the importance of culture for the sake of national liberation: negating colonial supremacy, developing identity, and uniting regardless of class differences to liberate productive forces.  

The relationship identified between culture and history is integral to Cabral’s analysis. Culture is a sum of history and vice versa. Both signal the existence of a rich past and an identity. By denying this history and stamping on their culture, the colonial powers refuse to acknowledge that their colonized subjects had complex and organized societies of their own and that they too followed some kind of rational progression. This refusal is necessary because if the colonized people’s cultural and social development is considered, the European civilizing process would seem rather useless. Sure, the colonizers may still rightfully claim to be advancing faster but they could no longer be able to suggest that the colonized stands frozen in time. Thus, it is necessary to take away the colonized people’s past and show even to them that they are a people without history and culture, and they need their colonial masters to provide them with said history and culture. The colonial masters thus create a need for their intervention and a way to legitimize their control.

Another significant aspect of this process is the dehumanization and identity crisis that the colonial subjects are put through. Their culture is denounced and they are continually reminded of the differences between them and their rulers. This leaves behind the question of who the colonized really are and how they should be. What occurs then is a strange cultural appropriation. The colonized, who has been imagined a particular way by the colonizer, suddenly starts materializing. This can be seen in the example of Mobutu Sese Seko who epitomizes what the European vision of a Congolese president would be (in his leopard print cap). Mobutu is still an example from the postcolonial world. The confusion in the colonial world may have been even more heightened. The colonized, lacking any source of exposure to their own culture, would have been forced to be molded into the culture their colonial masters chose for them. What this also leads to is a disoriented notion of progress. Since, in the absence of one’s own culture, the only example of progress becomes the European model of progress, the colonized begin to compare themselves to the same standards. Therefore, the feelings of discontent and internalized inferiority emerge and strengthen over time.

The socialist vein in Cabral’s argument is evident. He recognizes that there is a need to take control of the productive sources because they determine how man interacts with each other and nature. Cabral also understands that culture within a same society differs based on one’s relationship with economic sources. Despite culture not being uniform, Cabral attempts to unite the people. His focus, unlike Marx, is not on class struggle but on the overall liberation of a people and their mode of production. There is an acknowledgment of social, political and economic conflicts that occur in a society with different social classes. Cabral states “history allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalance and conflicts…which characterize the evolution of a society.” However, “culture allows us to know the dynamic syntheses…to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution.” Thus despite internal conflicts, Cabral advocates for a strong recognition of one’s history and culture because the latter ensure the “continuity” of the former despite all problems.

National liberation needs to occur through the “organized political expression of the culture of the people” to remind them of their history not simply for the sake of record keeping but in order to establish a few things. First, acknowledgement of one’s own culture and history is important in competing against the colonial narrative and in negating legitimacy of colonial rulers who wanted to guide these people to civilization. Second, culture helps provide people with their own sense of identity, embedded in their own culture as opposed to fitting into the negative image developing out of the colonizer’s prejudiced mind. Lastly, culture and history remind the colonized to unite and take control of their productive forces and face the conflicts that follow by employing lessons they have learnt over time.

As the dominant constructors of history, one of the most important tools the colonizers owned was time. They could shape the past, present and future of the colonized people in whichever way they preferred. By calling the colonized ‘backward’ and ‘primitive,’ the colonizers established that the former lived in the past, one that the latter had long outgrown. It is in this moment of the past where Dada Amir Haider Khan is traveling the world. He finds himself in Moscow amidst the Russian Revolution where the colorful mix of people surprises him. What Moscow presents Dada with is a sense of self-worth and dignity which the colonizers had stripped him off. When Dada describes Moscow as the “break with the old world,” he describes time in his own terms. The “old world” or the past described here is the world of the colonizer where people of different races were treated as inferior. Similarly, when Sukarno makes his speech in 1955, most of the previous colonies have been liberated and he focuses on the “new departure in the history of the world.” The contexts in which Dada and Sukarno find themselves are different but they both seem to desire the same thing: to break away from the historical time defined by the colonizers and to leave their colonial masters in a newly defined past that the colonized had now outgrown.

What is magical and adds the heavy flavor of hope in both these texts is the turning of tables. The colonizers seem to have been left in the past while the colonized are not only reclaiming time but also moving forward with it. The way in which they move forward is also similar. Dada observes the diversity of people from “colonial and semi colonial east,” all of whom had gathered in Moscow to learn to “assist in their national liberation movements against the imperialist powers.” Under the colonizer, “the individual motive had dominated every aspect” but in Moscow, “the emphasis was on collective action.” This is the communist internationalism that views the struggle of the working class around the world as a singular one. Sukarno appeals to a similar notion of “peace” and “unity” among the Afro-Asian nations. He calls for the “New Asia” and “New Africa” to stand together and protect their “newly recovered independence.”

In this way, despite the difference in time and situation, the two texts seem to be very similar in nature and one seems to follow the other. Dada’s memoir seems to depict the start of the struggle against the colonizer. It shows the assembling of all communities. Sukarno’s speech shows a time when the struggle has been won and break from the “old world” is complete but as the newly freed colonized stand at the epoch of a new world, they are faced with the new anxieties. The task at hand now is to live in the present time and not let any force of power throw them back into the past or the past. Sukarno could have been looking back at Dada’s memoirs and taking notes while writing his speech. He could have been swaying the following Soviet Union communist posters in the faces of the people gathered in Bandung. They depict what he is advocating for: equality, unity, peace, and the will to protect the freedom of the once exploited people.