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Postcolonial Feminists in the Western Intellectual Field:
Anthropologists and Native Informants?

Mary E. John

What makes us decide we have to re-educate ourselves, even those of us with "good" educations?
--Adrienne Rich, Notes Toward a Politics of Location
As for how I came to be in Delhi, these were for reasons ... that have more to do with an "unexamined life" ...
--Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Interview

What we are grappling with today--in the first world and "elsewhere"--is not only the model of the "universal" intellectual but also the model of the "specific" intellectual. Michel Foucault has quite possibly been the latter's most persuasive proponent. He has argued for a mode of political activity based on a specific relation to local power through expertise. More importantly, the particularities of such an intellectual's field of specialization can connect with the general functioning of the production of truth, with the university playing a privileged role:

[T]ransverse connections have been able to develop between different areas of knowledge, from one focus of politicisation to another: magistrates and psychiatrists, doctors and social workers, laboratory workers and sociologists have been able, each in his own field and through mutual exchange and support, to participate in a global process of politicisation of intellectuals.(Foucault, Radical 12)


What further questions could one raise about the specificity of such specific intellectuals? I have in mind not just their social and intellectual history but also their very site of enunciation, their location and audience--issues which in Foucault's scheme of things (for all the attention he once paid to the formation of enunciative modalities) remain unexamined. What might it mean for me--a Third World feminist whose current institutional home is in the first--to take the following commitment seriously?

[A]t every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, with what one is.... I have always been concerned with linking together as tightly as possible the historical and theoretical analysis of power relations, institutions and knowledge, to the movements, critiques, and experiences that call them into question in reality. (Foucault Reader 374, emphasis added)


It has become almost commonplace to engage in such a confrontation by positioning oneself along the axes of race, class and gender--in my case, this would yield the inventory: upper middle class, heterosexual woman, Indian national. Its ritual aspect has increasingly become dissatisfying; but more importantly, the pointillistic and static connotation of "positions," however multiple and contradictory they may be, can sometimes elide the need to confront "what one is" through a more extensive questioning of the intrications of one's history within History. The ironies that accompany the following effort of reconsidering my present identity as a graduate student here in the U. S., this country placed at the culmination of History, should not be lost on anyone. But perhaps this is one way to make a connection between one's claims as a "specific" feminist intellectual and the realisation that one's site of enunciation is both a home and a historical choice.

Departure

Let me begin, then, with a sketch of an Indian intellectual's formation and her choice to come westward, make the West her site of enunciation. Such a decision is, no doubt, overdetermined by class aspirations. Though the characterization of the economy of a colonial society like India's has been the subject of unflagging debate (are we semifeudal, capitalist, something else?), the nature of its middle class--the composition of the petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia--has not been studied with the same zeal as our mode of production. A common point of reference is the peculiar nature of our creation as a class under colonial rule, beginning in the eighteenth century. Here is a standard description:

The British attempted as part of their educational policy to create a class comparable to their own, so that it might assist them in the administration of the country and help in the development of its internal resources, necessary for the payment of the increasing imports of British manufacture ... were implanted in the country without a comparable development in its economy and social institutions. (Misra 10-11)
The main reason why this description is so standard is that it takes the social structure of the West as its norm. Keeping the beginnings of the British middle classes as backdrop--where the rapid expansion in trade and industry threw up a concomitant group of professionals--the discrepancy of the Indian case stands out in sharp silhouette. Our antecedents emerged within an economy that, far from creating an autonomous home market, was being subjected to a colonial machinery for the development of Empire elsewhere. Of course, it should go without saying that the Indian middle classes were (and are) a composite and heterogeneous group, landed and mercantilist, as much as professional and administrative. It is a sign of my own bias that I am expressly concentrating on the sliver of the middle class which we have come to designate the intelligentsia--indeed, to construe matters more narrowly still, on those within the intellectual field structured by academic institutions.

At least amongst the intellectual avant garde, it has become more common to question the notion of development, with its underlying implication of holding up Western history as the only model of progress. And yet, in listening to a discussion on the self-conceptions of the Indian intelligentsia today--here between the Indian art critic Geeta Kapur and the Sri Lankan feminist Laleen Jayamanne--one is forced to wonder what kind of rupture these intervening centuries and the achievement of political independence have wrought. Drawing upon a distinction between socio- economic and cultural processes of modernization, cultural processes are lauded for being "several steps ahead," "not hav[ing] to bear the burden of 'underdevelopment' or remain backward with regard to the 'developed' world," a "congenial and hopeful situation for so-called 'developing' countries" (Jayamanne, Kapur, and Rainer 44). While the use of scare quotes is meant to question evaluations of development, these critics actually end up subscribing to them wholeheartedly, thus enacting a deep schizophrenia. A pious wish that matters were otherwise would be out of place. We should simply acknowledge the extent to which connections can be drawn between Macaulay's group of "interpreters" in his famous Minute on Education of 1835, [1] and the contemporary professional middle class, a class now investing in a Western education to qualify for membership within the new international cultural bourgeoisie. In Ashis Nandy's words, therefore, the modern West is less a geographical or temporal category than a psychological space (and surely a social, economic and cultural space as well): "The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside: in structures and in minds" (xii). What name, then, might one give to such a configuration of "the West" as a transnational category, capable of extending beyond geographical determinations and creating new and specific loci of power/knowledge?

If the historical formation of the class that effectively came to direct the Indian nation is often alluded to, so is the conspicuous presence of women amongst its professional ranks. Indeed, one of the legacies of the Indian nationalist movement is that middle- and upper-class women have been far less invisible within academic and public institutions than their counterparts in the geographical West. To give a particularly striking historical example, two women graduated from Calcutta University in 1883, before women in Britain were granted academic credentials. Or think of Toru Dutt (1856-77), who published her first book of verse translations A Sheaf Gleaned from French Fields at the age of twenty. That this was by no means an uncomplicated process of westernization is evident, particularly when it was precisely such women who were subjected to profoundly modern reinventions of tradition in the battle for a national culture. [2]

In the oft-cited case of Bengal, for example, Partha Chatterjee has referred to the literal domestication of the nationalist project within the home, combined with a general demand for formal education amongst middle class women:

Formal education became not only acceptable, but in fact a requirement for the new bhadramahila (respectable woman), when it was demonstrated that it was possible for a woman to acquire the cultural refinements afforded by modern education without jeopardising her place at home, i.e. without becoming a memsahib (Englishwoman). (American Ethnologist 16)


How to unravel specific mobilisations around "technologies of gender," to use Teresa de Lauretis' description in such a complex web of contending forces and scrambled discourses of modernity and tradition? I am not sure. Dealing as we are with a vastly uneven and unequal exchange between patriarchies, it is tempting to conclude, as Kumari Jayawardena has done, that

revolutionary alternatives or radical social changes did not become an essential part of the demands of the nationalist movement at any stage of the long struggle for independence, and a revolutionary feminist consciousness did not arise within the movement for national liberation. (107-08)
At this preliminary stage in my own reflections, I am ready to recognise moments of continuity between my own history and this crude sketch of History. Looking back on my intellectual formation as a "daughter of independence," I am struck by the extent to which I could take the presence of women as peers and teachers for granted, even as powerful and diverse struggles by women were taking place, but overwhelmingly outside academic walls. There can be no question that men are still far more likely than women to know the prestige and privileges professional qualifications bring. [3] Even so, some of the more ambitious amongst us do push for inclusion within the new international class and, given the often impossible complexities of our personal identities, can experience as a special lure the promise of an independence from gender and culture which this class holds out. Given the continuing satellite status of Third World educational systems, the subsequent move to a U.S. academic institution is then but a culmination of processes already in place at home, the geographical West representing the obvious goal in the pursuit of excellence.

Indeed, a closer look at my own generation of academic women, born well after Indian independence, reveals new twists in the mixed legacy of modernity and tradition. If earlier generations wrestled much more closely with the hub of "tradition" bequeathed by the nineteenth century, marking their subjectivity in terms of degrees of containment within its frames--the home, religiosity, caste, and so on [4] --"the West" has now come to norm our questions and desires in a far less circuitous way. I might only be arguing for a shift in the complex of forces, one that has been possible at least partly because of refurbished Western connections in India's educational system since the electronic revolution and the dwarfing of Great Britain by the U. S. as "our" present metropolis. The promises of the new class are more completely emblazoned in the languages of English and the sciences than ever before. Education is more obviously a process by which we learn to avow and remember certain knowledges and devalue and forget others. We grow up repudiating the local and the personal in favor of what will get us ahead and away--thus coming of age within an intellectual field that by no means arbitrarily creates disinterest and oversight in some areas while directing desire elsewhere. It is within such an interlocking mechanism for the production of knowledges and "sanctioned ignorances" [5] that our subjectivities are forged--one that makes our transition to first world institutions quite possibly amongst the smoothest within the Third World system.

What happens to us after we come West? In her powerful and arresting essay, "Notes Toward a Politics of Location," the U.S. feminist Adrienne Rich addresses her Dutch audience with the question of a woman's "struggle for accountability," as she put it. Her "notes" consist of a series of accounts by a feminist who, while deeply disloyal to the civilization that continues to place her in the oppressive position of Woman, found that she could no longer quote Virginia Woolf's statement, "As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world" (Rich, Blood 211).

Taking my cue from her example, the subsequent reflections might have been entitled "Notes Toward a Politics of Arrival." In contrast to Rich's more aphoristic style, these "notes" have been collected within scenarios, in the form of real and imaginary sites of questioning and self- questioning around three plausible subject positions. As much impositions as inventions, they are uncertain explorations around the problematics, possibilities, and disturbances that this new institutional home has thrown up. None of them is complete or consistent, nor could it be. These scenarios also feed off one another and have been held apart as an enabling device for foregrounding questions that might otherwise get lost. In what follows--not unlike what has come before--the problems with the "I" and "we" slots are obvious. Each of them asserts too much: the "I" too much authenticity, the political becoming purely personal, and the "we" too much commonality, when the identity of this "we" is precisely what needs to be discovered and demonstrated, not assumed. The strategy of shifting uneasily between them is a poor one; but perhaps it is indicative of where I/we stand.

Immigrants

Often I have caught myself wondering what it would be like to make this country into a permanent home--almost everyone presumes that I have come to stay. After all, isn't this the most common scenario for anyone headed West? Just a brief glance at the history of worldwide immigration into the U.S. reveals the fact that by 1920, "women outnumbered men among West Indians, Bohemians and Jews, and in the decades following World War II the majority of all immigrants were women" (Seller 5). This picture is surprising; it is, however, also a little misleading in that the great unevenness in U. S. immigration history remains largely invisible. Since we do not have a good sense of the contradictory logics operative for different women, it is crucial to hold onto the distinctness amongst the variety of reasons which have been offered so far: the creation of a service-oriented labor market more "attractive" to Third World women; the post-war change in immigration laws which gave preference to relatives of communities that had initially been predominantly male; the reopening of the U. S. to immigrants from Asia, after they had been subjected to immigration exclusion laws in the first decades of this century; the desire to escape forms of economic, political, and religious oppression shared amongst men and women as well as those unique to female experience.

The choice of the term itself is telling--not emigrant, but immigrant. One comes across less about where women have come from and much more about what women have come to--here the language of arrival has been truly valorized. Thus, in a collection of oral histories by women who made their way to the U.S. over the course of this century, barely one-tenth of its three hundred pages have been brought together under the heading "Why They Came." It is rather their modes of survival in this new land that are extensively addressed (Seller). Moreover, essays by new arrivals are often to be found mixed with those whose ancestors were brought as slaves centuries ago, those whose lands were taken away, and the descendants of immigrants. This Bridge Called My Back, for example, intersperses the experiences of newly immigrant women with Native Americans, Blacks, Chicanas, and Asian-Americans. Surely this has something to do with America's raison d'etre as an immigrant nation (the extreme difficulty of "keeping faith with the continuity of our journeys," as Adrienne Rich put it)--its inexorable demand that people reconstitute their identities within its borders alone.

At the same time, however, it has become obvious that the U.S. is not simply heading towards the "melting pot," if it ever was. With the rise of the "new ethnicities" in the social ferment of the '60s, what is visible now is the enormous complexity of its internally colonised communities, leading to very particular fears and uncertainties. As the Cuban immigrant Mirtha Quintanales put it, in reference to the complex hybrid and hyphenated identities emerging amongst domestic Third World women:

[n]ot all Third World women are "women of color"--if by this concept we mean exclusively "non-white." And not all women of color are really Third World--if this term is used in reference to underdeveloped or developing societies.... Yet if we extend the concept of Third World to include internally "colonised" racial and ethnic minority groups in this country, so many different kinds of groups could conceivably be included, that the crucial issue of social and institutional racism and its historic tie to slavery in the U.S. could get diluted, lost in the shuffle.... I don't know what to think anymore. Things begin to get even more complicated when I begin to consider that many of us who identify as "Third World" or "Women of Color," have grown up as or are fast becoming "middle class" and highly educated, and therefore more privileged than many of our white, poor, working class sisters. (151, emphasis added)
Quintanales' worry is a powerful expression of the predicament of a politics of identity amongst U.S. minority women today, when the multiple axes of oppression themselves resist easy definition. Within such intertwining processes of complexity and dilution, it is crucial not to generalize about the reasons and motivations for the kind of dislocation that coming to this country entails. While many recent immigrant women, particularly lesbian women of color, may well see themselves, in Cherrie Moraga's phrase, as "refugees of a world on fire," [6] how might I position myself as an aspiring intellectual, and one, moreover, who shares the advantages of heterosexual privilege?

Arguably, most Indian women arrive on these shores as the wives of green card-holding professional men. Only a small percentage come singly; even fewer recognise or question their socialization into "compulsory heterosexuality." Whether married or not, the majority have educational and professional ambitions of their own. It becomes all the more urgent in such a context, therefore, to examine as sharply as possible just what kind of immigrants postcolonial Indians like myself--neither exiles nor refugees--would be. As a recent addition to the present wave of overwhelmingly urban and highly educated graduate students entering the U. S., I was not even aware of the battles against racism faced by early Indian labor immigrants after the turn of the century, and not simply because they only numbered a few thousand. [7] For, as a potential academic, I inhabit a different social space, one which also sets me apart from the victims of New Jersey's "dot-busters." [8] Indeed, I might well be led to believe that the promises of universalism that brought me here will not let me down; and I will, moreover, reap the benefits of the civil rights and feminist movements that preceded me.

Through which routes and at what point does a vastly different sensibility creep in, as I look at the uneasy co-existence of confident public identities coupled with a tendency to ethnicize and privatize the rest, including gender relations, amongst Indian professionals in this country? In his detailed study of Asian immigration into the U. S., Ronald Takaki has emphasized the danger in perpetuating the myth of the "model minority," the manner in which Asian Americans are being celebrated (and, perhaps, also resented) in America. Even while there is no doubt in my mind that as far as the advantages of a first world educational system and the very real need of financial security are concerned, I could not be better off, the other side of the picture remains to be explored. Takaki refers to "a glass ceiling" in the high-tech job market--"a barrier through which management positions can only by seen, but not reached, by Asian Americans" (476) --and there is no reason to suppose that academia should turn out to be more benign. At some stage, then, I will discover the deep cracks of marginality in an identity sheathed by the significant, but by no means exclusive, determinations of class privilege. Such realisations have, in fact, led many Indians to becoming highly effective "specific intellectuals," in the Foucauldian sense, linking up with local struggles both within and outside university politics.

In order to be able to insert the contemporary postcolonial intellectual within the larger immigrant scenario, it should be obvious by now that dislocations and alterities be marked carefully, not conflating processes that to my mind are discrepant. What I would hold in tension with each other are the general dislocations characteristic of the widespread migrations of Third World peoples who have been heading westward before and after decolonization; the more specific "brain drain" amongst the professional classes and intelligentsia which received a new impetus since the 1960s, particularly in the U.S.; and the experiences of dislocation more unique to women, that I take to be the subject of feminism. It is my belief that a good many post-colonial women, including self- identified feminists, find themselves gazing and coming westward for reasons that cannot be rendered intelligible in the language of a presumed or proposed international feminism alone.

Discrepant dislocations do, nonetheless, produce unintended effects: For some of us, the dislocation from a sheltered Indian middle class environment, where a consciousness of privilege predominates, to a milieu as highly sexualized, and with such intensified and refined technologies of gender as this one, does lead to the espousal of a more explicitly feminist politics. What might earlier have passed as privilege now becomes recognizable as disavowal and "sanctioned ignorance," demanding a reconstitution and renarration of identity all its own. Of course, I do not for a moment mean to imply that it is this particular dislocation from the safety and blindnesses of "home" that is most conducive to feminism. The feelings of "extreme dislocation, 'craziness' and terror" which Rich has linked to the "leap of self-definition needed to create an autonomous feminist analysis" ("Disloyal" 290) does not usually require that we come this far--hence my urge to hold dislocations apart.

As immigrant feminists, predominantly, though by no means only, in the social sciences and humanities, [9] what kind of political functions in our new locations might we take on, what kind of "specific intellectuals" might we become? At the cost of an apparent digression, let us look more closely at what Foucault's conception of the specific intellectual entails. In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's view, the danger lurking in this model--particularly as Foucault (articulated it in conversation with Gilles Deleuze (Foucault, Language)--lies in its unrecognized specificity. In his constant distancing from questions of representation (Foucault's hope being that the "oppressed" will be able to speak for themselves, with intellectuals ideally only performing a relaying function between groups and struggles)--Spivak finds denigration, an abdication of responsibility. The specificity that is to take the place of an older Western universalistic humanism is no less geopolitically delimited, though it still masquerades as something more: Having invoked Maoism, Vietnam, and immigration restrictions, Foucault gives out an impression of geographical discontinuity while passing over the effects of the imperialism and the international division of labor elsewhere. In other words, Foucault's model of an alliance politics between heterogeneous groups can be realised only within the First World.

If we are to take seriously Spivak's demands for less transparency and more attention to representation, perhaps the best place to start is not by pointing out how easy it is for Western intellectuals to forget the advantages of "hard currency" and a "strong passport" (273) but to turn our gaze upon ourselves. Is she suggesting that the model of an alliance politics works best when we are immigrants and can thus perform representative functions here in our own right? Furthermore, how might we include our Third World status within our First World location? If our Third World identities are to play a directly representative role--that is to say, reflecting the demands and needs of a new U.S. domestic minority--will we participate, however unintentionally, in the diluting process Quintanales highlighted so well?

Anthropology in Reverse

My second scenario is in certain senses an extension of the first. If I have been sketching the pull of the universalist and "unmarked" attractions that bring many of us here and have hinted at the dilemmas around identity and community that immigrant women face, this section contains notes on a deepened appreciation for the kind of identity politics that has come to characterize U.S. feminism in the '80s: a pervasive interrogation of the sanctioned ignorances that universalistic assumptions have contained. Why have I called it an anthropology in reverse? Chiefly because this scenario of a "politics of arrival"--unlike the previous one, has questions of return on its horizon-- is fueled by the anticipation of return. For if Rich is right to challenge Woolf's claim that to her as a woman, her country is the whole world, we have a choice to make and to be accountable for. What sort of experiences, what sort of "fieldnotes" would I wish to see carried back to a Third World nation like India?

As David Scott has pointed out so clearly in his essay in this volume, the anthropologist by definition must leave home, but only to be able to return to it. It is "there" wherever home is, that the writing--that skilled act of translation from this culture into the idiom of the other--is done. However, given the history of the institution of anthropology (the West leaving home to know the rest) and the relations of power that have brought me here, is the notion of a reverse anthropology intelligible at all? For one thing, what is this "other culture" into which I might translate the "truths" of this one? Unlike the Western anthropologist who has to undergo specialized training to ready herself for fieldwork in a distant place, one that her culture does not prepare her for, isn't it clear that in sharp contrast everything can collude to bring us westward, and hardly for anthropological reasons? In spite of--or within--these obvious contradictions, let the following scenario on the heterogeneity of first world feminists be held within a reverse anthropological frame, fragile and dissembling though it might be. These notes, or rather, "fieldnotes," are questions that await their transcription elsewhere.

One of feminism's central demands has been to break out of universalistic assumptions and realize that it takes a very particular perspective--"trained on a determinate and particular field of experience" [10] --to render visible the contradictory statuses of women and men. It would, however, be extremely misleading to claim that it is women, and not men, who perceive "technologies of gender," because women are so directly affected by them. Being and knowing have never been immediately connected; as Donna Haraway has put it, "[i]dentity, including self- identity does not produce science; critical positioning does...." (15) Far from being a priori, the connection between women and knowledges about them is a result, struggled for, constantly renegotiated, and learnt anew.

Perhaps another way of posing this is to say simply that feminism is a politics before it is an epistemology--where questions of representation must deal with who speaks for whom as much as with what is being said. Indeed, feminism could be described as a narrative about the discovery of representation itself--from the prior moment when women's identity as women was either largely accepted or disregarded to a time of making it their subject, politically and interpretatively. Men need to cultivate the necessary vision "to learn how to see faithfully from another's point of view;" (Haraway 11) indeed, this may be the only way men can recognize their own implication and accountability within the gendering process. Such considerations still make men's place within feminism "an impossible one," as Stephen Heath put it so well. "Their voices and actions, not ours.... Women are the subjects of feminism, its initiators ... the move and join from being a woman to being a feminist is the grasp of that subjecthood." [11] I agree, particularly since "the move and join" between female experience and feminism turns out to be as hard as it is necessary. Female experience is not simple "there" and whole, waiting to be organized, but more likely to be contradictory, at once too scrutinized and opaque. And yet, or rather, for precisely these reasons, women must represent themselves.

But to which women am I referring? It goes without saying that the "West" arrives on other shores in monochromatic terms; it travels elsewhere considerably whitened. Indian school and college students learn considerably more about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington than the American institution of slavery; and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., possibly plays the analogous role that Gandhi does here. The histories of oppression of black women and women of color on this soil are nowhere. What would it be like to read Harriet Jacobs or This Bridge Called My Back in India? There is also another side that we do not see--a white woman's attempts to come to terms with her complicities and sanctioned ignorances, of "unlearning her privilege as loss," as Spivak phrased it in a different context. It has been astounding to discover the degree to which U. S. feminists today are not primarily addressing men but one another. The position of men in feminism is perhaps less a matter of concern than the relationships between the identity politics of different groups of women, to the point that these questions could be setting the conditions for Western feminism's future. [12]

"Let's face it. I am a marked women, but not everybody knows my name." So begins Hortense Spillers in an essay that unravels the negativity at the heart of a black woman's identity, an identity buried within the overdeterminations and simplifications wrought by too many names: "In order to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip away through layers of attenuated meanings, made in excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order" (65).

Spillers must break open the presuppositions embedded in the officially sanctioned truths of the Moynihan Report dealing with the "pathological" status of the "matriarchal" black family: no father to speak of, and the fault lying squarely on the power of the female line. Her search for legibility in the history of Afro-Americans--through the narratives of the first captives, the conditions of "Middle Passage," and subsequent slavery--doesn't remain with the revelation of the complete breakdown of anything that might resemble the family structure in such situations, but of bodies reduced to "hieroglyphics of the flesh," indecipherable in their gendering. Beyond being the target of rape, the African female was subjected to forms of torture one would have thought the prerogative amongst men; as a means for reproduction, she was more a piece of property than a wife or a mother. Thus, "the problematizing of gender places her outside the traditional symbolics of the female ... leading to a radically different text of female empowerment" (Spiller 80). Female empowerment emerges only through a process of remembering, a necessarily inventive tracing of the history of Afro-American women within the violence of colonialism and slavery.

On a different register, white women in the U.S. have had to be interrogated on the extent of racism within the women's movement, discovering the degree to which their very choice of listening or remaining deaf to women of color was a part of their race privilege. It is one thing for Spillers to come to terms with the imbrication of her history within History, quite another for a white woman to learn where her location and the best of educations have brought her. As Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty have put it, it is not so much a question whether "white" or "Western" feminisms are relevant to women of color or Third World women, but a challenge of the assumption that "the terms of a totalizing feminist discourse are adequate to the task of articulating the situation of white women in the West." [13]

Martin and Mohanty choose to focus on Minnie Bruce Pratt's autobiographical essay, written in astonishment and pain, as she tries to unmake an identity so pervasively woven out of the sanctioned ignorances and official knowledges that come from being middle class, white and Southern. Over and over again, she questions every truth that she has held, such as her oblivion to the history of race, those "old lies and ways of living, habitual, familiar, comfortable, fitting us like a skin" (Pratt 39). Like Spillers, Pratt's narrative too is a stripping away, though from her position of accountablitity, it goes right down to the frightening possibility that the culture she was raised in may embody nothing worth saving. Such a mode of self-questioning sometimes runs the danger of implying a desire for an impossible position of innocence. But Martin and Mohanty's fine reading emphasizes the absence of any simple linear progression in Pratt's narrative, her constant shifting, her refusal to remain with rigid stabilities. As they also continue to point out

only one aspect of experience is given a unifying and originating function in the text: that is, her lesbianism and love for other women, which has motivated and continues to motivate her efforts to reconceptualise and recreate both herself and her home. (202)
These qualities are striking, as is Pratt's ability to avoid the pitfalls of high, arid abstraction and guilt-ridden self-absorption. I have been overwhelmed by the relentless quality of the interrogation Pratt undertakes: the weaving of her personal history within History is so fraught with loss, precisely because so much of her identity has been bound up with the habit of considering her culture "as the culmination of history, as the logical extension of what has gone before" (19).

On the one hand, we are strongly reminded of the shift in perspective necessary to bring technologies of gender into view--of what it takes to pull back from the lure of universality--and to imagine a different dislocation from the fixity of woman. On the other hand, what could remain subdued in the earlier discussion of gender and has become so sharply foregrounded here is the question of History, showing how women's narratives have been written within and against History's delineations. To be a "specific intellectual" in the context of contemporary U. S. feminisms thus goes way beyond what Foucault might have envisaged: One's "local" position within the First World turns out to demand extended levels of accountablity, even before more "global" configurations are broached.

Native Informants

It is difficult, from this vantage point, to imagine what a "transference" of these experiences to a different geo-political location would be like, in the mode of an anthropology gone awry; and I have learnt to desist from offering ventriloquilistic fantasies, of speaking from a location where I am not, even as memories and imaginations take me there. At the same time, there is an important sense in which the foregoing considerations do re-emerge in my third--and final--scenario for a Third World feminist like myself: "the native informant." It might be staged by the "hunger of memory" [14] or, as in the example by Trinh T. Minh-ha from being interpellated by difference:

My audience expects and demands it. Otherwise people would feel as if they have been cheated: We did not come here to hear a Third World member speak about the first world. We came to listen to that voice of difference likely to bring us what we can't have, and to divert us from the monotony of sameness.
(emphasis original)

Contrary to the assumptions that brought some of us here, we may thus find ourselves forced to contend with our places of departure, asked to function as native informants from "elsewhere." From what position of authority would we then speak? The very attempt to become such cultural representatives, the falterings of our memory, could lead to a different realization: the need for an examination of the historical, institutional, and social relations that have, in fact, produced subjects also quite unlike "the native informant" of old.

As is well known, scholarship on distant Third World spaces is by no means absent from the First World's intellectual field. The discipline of feminist anthropology contains a rich and varied history, of women--predominantly white--who have brought the lives of other women-- predominantly Third World--to First World ears. [15] Feminist anthropology itself is an offshoot of the larger anthropological discipline, which in turn has been but one of many modes of knowledge production by which the "East" was rendered into an object to be laid bare and understood at every level. This is where, to my mind, the full paradox of the "sanctioned ignorances" amongst postcolonial women can come into view. How might one account for the discrepancy between the exorbitant writing on other non-Western cultures--sometimes including, sometimes effacing women--that has been the hallmark of the West, and our emergence as postcolonial subjects, produced by the kind of Western oriented education to which I alluded earlier? It would be deceptive only to focus on the proliferation of discourses, while losing sight of the incitements to ignorance which have accompanied them, indeed, intrinsically structured the precondition to knowledge.

Let me back up a bit and try to pinpoint the issues as I see them. We are witnessing the emergence of Third World feminists like myself, eager to delve into archives or engage in fieldwork in order to lay claim to a lost and repudiated history. We also perform indispensable tasks in the critical evaluation of our discursive inheritance of the lives of women who inhabit non-First World places. Thus, for example, Chandra Mohanty has convincingly demonstrated how too many contemporary accounts are scored through by an "ethnocentric universalism," the tendency of presuming "women" as a category of analysis:

The homogeneity of women as a group is produced not on the basis of biological essentials, but rather on the basis of secondary sociological and anthropological universals. (337)
On the one hand, these analyses tend to assume a universal "woman," both analytically and politically, thus also generating prescriptions on the issues around which all women should organize. On the other hand, as Mohanty goes on to demonstrate, since what separates the lives of such women from the self-conception of the feminist researcher is equally obvious and glaring, a difference is also supplied: the "Third World difference." Indeed, Mohanty goes so far as to suggest that the true subjects of these histories are the researchers themselves. From a different perspective, Spivak has urged against acts of obliteration--the insidiousness of conflating the Third Worldism of the indigenous elite woman abroad with the range of women who, whether deeply imbricated in the circuits of capitalism or not, do not speak on a First World stage. [16]

The need for such critiques is urgent and undeniable--I am only trying to stress the nature of the difference between the researcher and the researched more emphatically than Spivak and Mohanty do. For as Mohanty herself has pointed out, the researchers in question are not only Westerners:

[E]ven though I am dealing with feminists who identify themselves as culturally or geographically from the "West," what I say about the[ir] analytical strategies or implicit principles holds for anyone ... whether Third World women in the West, or Third World women in the Third World writing for the West. (336, emphasis added)
Mohanty's general indictment of ethnocentric universalism may sound dated to some ears--it is, after all, a problem that has been increasingly acknowledged and genuinely felt, even if the task of producing more differentiated and multi-coordinated analyses still remains more of an aim than an accomplishment. I am more narrowly concerned here with the less obvious aspect of her critique. For what she seems to be highlighting in the passage I just quoted is the institutional production and reproduction of the "West" as an effective site of enunciation, and not just in the geographical West alone, but through non-Western subjects who are facing West, if not centrally located within it.

Even in the very attempt to speak our difference from the West, institutions bind us to Western locations: For one thing, only a tiny percentage of crucial archival materials remain in, or have been brought back to, non-First World centers--knowledges are overwhelmingly stored in Western libraries. (This also effectively prevents those who are unable to gain access to the financial resources and cultural credentials necessary for travel here, from believing that they could be undertaking first-rate academic research.) Speaking more than ten years ago about the condition of students from Arab and Islamic nations, Edward Said remarked that

no Arab or Islamic scholar can afford to ignore what goes on in scholarly journals, institutes, and universities in the United States and Europe; the converse is not true.... The predictable result of all this is that [the] Oriental student (and Oriental professor) still want[s] to come and sit at the feet of American Orientalists ... in his relations with his superiors, the European or American Orientalists, he will remain only a "native informant." (323-24)
The force of this rendition lies at least partly in that it is not specific to the intellectual relations between the Middle East and the West, and that it continues to be true. What I am trying to come to terms with here is the elusive complexity of our relation with the West: A relation that has set "us" up as an object of knowledge, while simultaneously rendering us especially susceptible to disappearing into universality when there is a chance, i.e. coming westward.

It would be easy to conceptualize this relationship purely epistemologically. As Partha Chatterjee has put it, one is quite simply "always a Western anthropologist, modern, enlightened, self- conscious, (and it does not matter what his nationality or the colour of his skin happens to be)" (Nationalist 17). Or, more accurately in this case, I would be a peculiar mix of anthropologist and native informant, a shuttling of identities and locations in order to claim a history that faces West. But too much is left out of the picture if we remain with the following formulation: "It is the epistemic privilege which has become the last bastion of global supremacy for the cultural values of Western societies ... while assiduously denying at the same time that it has anything to do with cultural evaluations," the Cunning of Reason (Nationalist 17).

This is where the struggles of Pratt and Spillers in the second scenario may offer a different perspective on our situation--neither author could view the negativity at the heart of identity as a purely philosophical problem. Thus, though Pratt and Spillers would surely concur with Barbara Johnson that "if identities are lost through acts of negation, they are also acquired thereby, and the restoration of what has been denied cannot be accomplished through simple affirmation"(Johnson 4), they would place this more squarely within the terrain of history. For Spillers it is a matter of discerning the roles played by white men, white women, and black men in the narratives on and by black women, and of the possible redemption of the historically severed relations between fathers, mothers and daughters in the black community. We, too, must learn more about the co-constructed histories of British and Indian women in all their surprising detail, including the imbricated history of Western feminism within imperialism. [17]

In these and other ways, we will, no doubt, acknowledge the intricacy of our relation with the West and its enabling constraints. I would also like to sharpen this interrogation of "the West" as an institutional site of enunciation, and my own sense of having "disappeared," around concerns that might be peculiar to my own subject formation. I have been brought up short, for instance, by my complete inability to be a specific intellectual and carry out a discussion like this one in an Indian language. Whatever the complexities of India's linguistic heritage, this, to my mind, is sanctioned ignorance. Enunciation, understood as the very possibility of raising such questions, is ineluctably bound up with the hegemony of English (the cultural capital of German and French notwithstanding), and the depth of my intellectual development within it, right up to this present effort to name my condition.

While having become the bearer of conceptuality, and History's language now, English is a language with which only a section of professional Indian women are conversant. Thus, such a realisation comes into play long before the more basic aspect of literacy is brought into view. It should not be conflated, therefore, with the following response to Gail Omvedt, an American who has been living and working in parts of the Indian State of Maharashtra since 1974, by Kaminibai, an illiterate agricultural laborer. Omvedt had been interviewing Kaminibai in order to write about political organisations amongst women in rural areas. When the value of such a study was impressed upon her, she replied

Yes, but will she write to us? She'll write something worth reading and writing, but it will be in thin small letters and we won't be able to read it, not at all, there will be no profit or loss to us. (18)
At the same time, the possible lesson for me is that Kaminibai's cynicism could well be generalised to a much wider group of Indian women, by no means illiterate, for whom this essay's thin small letters are also neither profit nor loss. Furthermore, what might be the best way to name the irreducibility of the difference in my agency and Omvedt's--the difference between the politics surrounding a white woman's decision to make her home in a postcolonial nation such as India, and a politics of return?

Coming from a very different set of considerations, think of the discrepancy between my relation to the transnational entity I have been calling the West, and to India's neighbors, whether in the Middle East and Africa, or in Southeast Asia. Many of them have had significant Indian immigrant populations; even in such cases there has been no effective intellectual pull to attend to the histories and theories by women living there. In my travels so far, these countries have literally only figured as stopovers on the way. This, too, is sanctioned ignorance. What set of determinations--with geo- politics at its center--would we have to bring into play in order to confront the sanctioned ignorances that have framed our identities and sites of enunciation as postcolonial feminists, ones which would make the potential of "specific intellectuals" within an international feminism more plausible?

Acknowledgements

This essay grew out of conversations with many friends, especially Faith Beckett, Satish Deshpande, Vivek Dhareshwar, Ruth Frankenberg, Lata Mani, David Scott, Yumi Yang. I am grateful for their suggestions and support. I would also like to thank Profs. Donna Haraway and Teresa de Lauretis for their valuable comments on an earlier draft.



Notes

1. See H. Sharp, Selections from the Educational Records, Part I, 1781-1839. In Macaulay's formulation, this class was defined by its differential status: "a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern--a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in morals and in intellect" (116, emphasis added). It would be worth investigating how this differential identity has changed. Back to main text

2. For varying assessments of this process based on different historical periods and levels of analysis, see Lata Mani, "The Construction of Women as Tradition in Nineteenth Century Bengal," in Cultural Critique, Special Issue: The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse II.7 (1987); Veena Maxumdar, "The Social Reform Movement in India from Ranade to Nehru," in Indian Women from Purdah to Modernity, ed. B. R. Nanda (New Delhi, 1976); Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 1849-1905 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Partha Chatterjee, "Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonised Women--The Contest in India," forthcoming in American Ethnologist. Back to main text

3. See Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, Daughters of Independence, Gender, Caste and Class in India (London and New Delhi: Zed Press, 1986), especially chapter 17 "Education: The Path to Emancipation?" for first person accounts by Indian women with professional occupations. Back to main text

4. An excellent example of such a view of an Indian woman's subjectivity is Rama Mehta's The Western Educated Hindu Woman (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1970). Back to main text

5. The term "sanctioned ignorance" comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's powerful critique of Michel Foucault's position as a self-contained Western intellectual. She focuses on his "blind spot" concerning the techniques for the appropriation of space that ravaged the colonies during precisely the same historical period that held his attention, but for other matters. His excavations remained with the new inventions of power-in-spacing in the European theater alone--in prisons, asylums and hospitals, through Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. See her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313. Her point is well taken. The purpose of this paper, however, is not to stop with production of sanctioned ignorances amongst Western intellectuals (where they are, after all, hardly surprising), but to examine our own. Back to main text

6. This Bridge Called My Back, Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983). This phrase is the title of Moraga's foreword to the second edition. Back to main text

7. The relatively insignificant numbers of these immigrants, overwhelmingly Sikh (but called "Hindus" or "ragheads"), was due to systematic racial discrimination by the U.S. government and the INS. This was backed by a strong, predominantly working class movement for "Asiatic Exclusion" that was securely in place by the time of their arrival of the Canadian and U.S. West coast. The first immigrants were men, with women only joining in considerable numbers after 1946. There is now a growing body of literature on their history in this country--see for example, Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India, Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988); South Asians in North America, An Annotated and Selected Bibliography, ed. Jane Singh, Occasional Paper No. 14 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Sucheta Mazumdar, "Punjabi Agricultural Workers in California, 1905-1945," in Labor Immigration under Capitalism, Edna Bonacich and Lucie Cheng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 549-578.

At a total of around fifteen hundred prior to World War II, the Indian-American community has grown from ten thousand in 1965, when immigration laws against Asians were first repealed, to well over half a million in the following twenty years. Back to main text

8. According to newspaper reports, a group calling itself the "dot-busters" (the "dot" referring to the practice amongst Indian women to wear a red spot or bindi on their foreheads), claimed responsibility for a series of assaults on businesses and individuals from the Indian community in Jersey City, beginning in October 1987. In some reports, the assailants were identified as belonging to Jersey City's other minority communities. Their demand was that "Indians get out of town." Back to main text

9. Here is an interesting aside concerning the differential working out of the power webs between the sciences and technology, on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities, on the other, in terms of the relative proportions of Indian women students in these disciplines: While the number of such women in India (as in the U. S.) decreases sharply from the humanities to the "hard" sciences, the select group making its way here is stratified in the opposite direction--most of my female peers graduate with degrees in engineering, medicine, the sciences and economics. Back to main text

10. Michele le Deuff, "Women and Philosophy," in Radical Philosophy 17 (1977), quoted in Meaghan Morris, "Amazing Grace: Notes on Mary Daly's Poetics," in The Pirate's Fiancee, Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988) 43. Back to main text

11. Stephen Heath, "Male Feminism," in Dalhousie Review 64.2 (1986) 270. A little further on he briefly engages with the possibility that men take up their very masculinity in response to feminism's challenge ("Pornography is the theory and rape the practice"). But he subsequently shies away and the essay becomes more noisy. It is as though the shift from "universal" to "masculine," though easy to name, is still being resisted. Back to main text

12. For a range of examples within the U. S. see Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology, The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978); B. Ruby Rich, "Feminism and Sexuality in the 1980s," Review Essay, Feminist Studies 12.3 (1986); This Bridge Called My Back; Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Barbara Smith (eds.), Yours in Struggle, Three Perspectives on Anti-semitism and Racism (New York: Long Haul Press, 1974). This kind of cross-questioning is taking place elsewhere as well: The Nigerian critic Chikwenye Okonjo Ogumyemi, addresses Buchi Emecheta in London, white feminists, and, more interestingly, Alice Walker, in her essay "Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English," Signs 11 (1985): 63-80. Gayatri Spivak, the diasporic woman abroad, is questioned by university women in India in an interview in The Book Review 11.3 (May/June 1987). Back to main text

13. Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "What's Home Got to Do with It?" in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Indiana: Bloomington University Press, 1986) 193, emphasis original. Other examples of feminists who have treated the question of racism are Marilyn Frye, "On Being White: Thinking toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy," in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (New York: The Crossing Press, 1983) 110-127; also Adrienne Rich, "Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia." For a critical response to Rich, see Doris Davenport "The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third Wold Wimmin," in This Bridge Called My Back, 85- 90. Back to main text

14. I take this phrase from the title of Richard Rodriguez' book. Back to main text

15. For a recent and comprehensive account of its history, see Henrietta Moore, Feminism and Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Back to main text

16. See her fine essay, "Who Claims Alterity" in Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, Discussion in Contemporary Culture 4, Dia Art Foundation (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989): 269-292, and "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Back to main text

17. As Janaki Nair has shown, studies amongst feminists (not only located in the West) veer more closely toward an affirmative recuperation of the role of Englishwomen in India. "Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen's Writings, 1813-1940," unpublished ms. Back to main text

References

Chatterjee, Partha. "Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonised Women--The Contest in India." American Ethnologist. Forthcoming.

---. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, A Derivative Discourse. London: Zed Press, 1986.

Foucault, Michel. "Intellectuals and Power." Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. 205- 217.

---. "The Political Function of Intellectuals." Trans. Colin Gordon. Radical Philosophy 17 (1977).

---. "Politics and Ethics: An Intervierw." Trans. Catherine Porter. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988).

Jayamanne, Laleen, Geeta Kapur, and Yvonne Rainer. "Discussing Modernity, 'Third World,' and The Man Who Envied Women." Art and Text 3/4 (1987).

Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books; India: Kali Press for Women, 1986.

Johnson, Barbara. Introduction. A World of Difference. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Lauretis, Teresa de. Technologies of Gender, Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Especially chapters one and two.

Martin, Biddy, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. "What's Home Got to Do with It?" Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Indiana: Bloomington University Press,1986. Minh-ha, Trinh T. "Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue." Feminist Review 25 (1987).

Misra, B. B. The Indian Middle Classes, Their Growth in Modern Times. London, New York, Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1961. Mohanty, Chandra T. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." Boundary 2 (1985). Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy, Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Omvedt, Gail. We Will Smash This Prison, Indian Women in Struggle. London: Zed Press, 1980.

Pratt, Minnie B. "Identity: Skin Blood Heart." Yours in Struggle, Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Feminism and Racism. Ed. Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith. New York: Long Haul Press.

Quintanales, Mirtha. "I Paid Very Hard for My Immigrant Ignorance." This Bridge Called My Back, Writings by Radical Women of Color. Ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983. Rich, Adrienne. "Disloyal to Civilisation: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia." New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1979.

---. "Notes Toward a Politics of Location." Blood, Bread and Poetry, Selected Prose, 1979- 1985. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1986.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

Seller, Maxine Schwartz, ed. Immigrant Women. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.

Spillers, Hortense. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." Diacritics (Summer 1987).

Spivak, Gayatri C. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271-313.

Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore, A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989.


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