1/11/2024 0 Comments Critics on amy tan familial bonds![]() Indeed, as previously marginalized materials are inserted into academic curricula, some of us are unconsciously participating in what Gayatri Spivak, in "Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value," calls "new Orientalism": It is at the moment of infiltration or insertion, sufficiently under threat by the custodians of a fantasmatic high Western culture, that the greatest caution must be exercised. ![]() Fetishizing the difference of Third World women is not much better than dismissing them because their works lack universality. ![]() Likewise, because of her refusal to surrender "Third-World women" to the sentimental and often opportunistic enamourment with "marginality," Sara Suleri argues that feminism's investment in the Third World woman depends on an iconicity almost "too good to be true" (763). This voyeuristic desire for the colorful alterity of Third World women seriously compromises the seemingly egalitarian politics of liberal feminism. The "Third-World woman" is everywhere required to exhibit her ineluctable "difference" from the primary referent of Western feminism: "It is as if everywhere we go, we become someone's private zoo" (82). In every such event, Trinh argues, the veneer of cross-cultural, sisterly colloquium disguises an unpleasant ideology of separatism. She criticizes the paternalistic and self-congratulatory tokenism that sustains "Special Third-World Women's" readings, workshops, meetings, and seminars. Minh-ha firmly attributes the rise of the "Third-World woman" to the ideological tourism of Western/liberal feminism. In her book Woman, Native, Other, Trinh T. Postcolonial feminists are cautious about the popularity of native women's stories. Although they have consistently complained that their works are treated as if they provided unmediated access to the experience and knowledge of alterity, these authors find themselves fetishized as transcendental signifiers of authenticity and oppression. Third World women writers, along with their texts, are often treated as unproblematic embodiments of authentic otherness. Interestingly, most of the works selected and privileged by the academy are those seen as most directly addressing and/or deconstructing oppressive representations of "Third World women." As native informant texts, they are used to round out the syllabi of women's studies, postcolonial studies, and literature courses that seek an authentic representation of Third World women's subjectivity and subjugation. Since the 1960s and '70s, the voices of the Third World have been recovered and recognized by the academy in the name of subversive politics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |