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One Between Third World/Women of Color Feminism and Decolonial Feminism

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One Between Third World/Women of Color Feminism and Decolonial Feminism Notes One Between Third World/Women of Color Feminism and Decolonial Feminism 1. By alter-modern here I mean other than modern or a demodern stance as a way of delinking from modernity and its discourses (Mignolo 2007). For more details see chapter two. 2. One of the new grounds for uniting the women of color discourses is the decolonial option discussed in detail in chapter two. 3. Jayawardena’s later works such as The White Woman’s Other Burden (1995) and Nobodies to Somebodies (2000) reconsider and problematize some of her initial Marxist interpretations concentrating on transcultural and trans-epistemic encounters between Asian and Western women. 4. Sandoval’s critical dialogue with modernity and postmodernity is more flexible and open than many male heterosexual variants of non-Western emancipating discourses. Instead of the intellectual operation of denounc- ing modernity in all its manifestations she attempts to find certain impulses, ideas, and drives in critical modern philosophy that would echo the decolonial agendas and thus be used as a ground for dialogue. Two Decolonial Feminism and the Decolonial Turn 1. For more details see Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006. 2. The first or Christian phase of modernity in decolonial option stretches from the sixteenth century and until the enlightenment while the second secular modernity is a post-enlightenment phase. 3. For the argument on intersections and differences between the decolonial option and postcolonial studies see Mignolo and Tlostanova 2007. 4. Race is fundamental in the shaping of the modern/colonial imaginary and its reverberations can be felt in distorted forms even in such countries as Russia and its former and present colonies. However, the complex European history and the critical view of European scholars, linked with a not always conscious guilt in their reflections on the legacy of racism and slavery, imbues their understanding of decoloniality with additional overtones seldom felt in the Americas where the picture of modernity/ coloniality is drawn with wide strokes and is more straightforward. 208 Notes 5. For a detailed analysis of the views of these authors see 2.3 and 2.4. 6. The possible ways of decolonial rethinking of humanities in such locales I will try to demonstrate in part III. 7. A Nigerian scholar Oyèrónke Oyěwùmi shows that an obsession with gender is an entirely Western phenomenon which was forced onto Yoruba culture together with colonization and destroyed all previous social, gender, linguistic and cultural discourses based on different principles (Oyěwùmi 1997). In her view it is the Western society that is patriar- chal, body-centric, highly visualized and based on the ideology of bio- logic determinism while gender as a category is read into reality by scholars, relying on Western values. 8. Western cultural feminism has recently started to question the absolute nature of egalitarian claims, symbolically creating an advantage out of deficiency, and postulating the specificity of women’s way precisely as an advantage. In this sense cultural as well as ecological feminism stand close to non-European colonized and gendered subjectivities. 9. An African American gender theorist K. Crenshaw analyzes this para- dox in its modern manifestation in the lives of African Americans dem- onstrating that particular gender models and stereotypes are interiorized by them as role models or negative examples. However, they are imme- diately negated by racism: a Black man is never regarded as a manifesta- tion of power or a defender, and a Black woman does not correspond in the eyes of the society to the White female stereotype of passivity and purity (Crenshaw 1989, 155). 10. For a detailed analysis of this essay see Tlostanova, 2000. 11. One of the interesting examples of the interpenetration of decolonial and gender discourses of trans-epistemic nature is to be found in the philosophy of the Caribbean thinker, poet, historian Sylvia Wynter, who reconsiders western humanism and the meaning of the human in order to shift from the concept of Man (White European) to the concept of Human and Humanity, uncontaminated by previous limitations. Similarly to Lugones, Wynter is not after totalizing gender. She wants to regard it in a dynamics with other elements of coloniality of being and of knowledge. She understands gender as a function of genre (kind) of man (male). Wynter uses the world “genre” in a specific sense, stressing its mutual origins with the world “gender.” Both for her mean a kind. Gender, in her idea, has been always a function of the “instituting of kind” (Thomas 2006). Another point of crossing with Lugones is that Wynter questions the bases of Western knowledge and feminism as one of its disciplines. She argues that the struggle of non-White women lies in the rejection of the very genre of man as a European male. Its negation would be expressed in and by the non-White population—men, women and children. For Wynter gender becomes a part of the more fundamen- tal task of setting oneself free from the narrow and closed systems of thought which the humanity has been confined to for many centuries. In this respect she is neither in the position of Marxist feminism, nor in the Notes 209 liberal Western feminist stance, but rather within the decolonial discourse. 12. The Soviet modernity brought colonial women forcefully into the public sphere as I will show in part II. Three Race/Body/Gender and Coloniality in the Russian/Soviet Empire and Its Colonies 1. Although the position of Caucasus within the cultural imaginary of the West was more complex as I will show later in this chapter. 2. For more details on Russia as a Janus-faced empire see Tlostanova 2003. 3. Thus, only an intersection of racism and gender discrimination can explain the fact that in Central Asia it was the local women and children (and not the Russians) who worked at the cotton and tobacco fields in the worst possible conditions and mostly for free. 4. In 1819 a land-owner Anna Strelkova was vacationing in Caucasus when someone introduced her to Shora Nogmov—one of the first “enlight- ened Circassians.” She was offered to look at Nogmov’s bride. Later Strelkova depicted this encounter in Eurocentric terms, though in the social sense the situation was different: Nogmov’s bride was not a cap- tive and stood on top of the Circassian society. Strelkova finished her ethnographic description of the dress and the house of the bride with a stereotype: “The Asiatic princess greeted us with just one small nod and did not even attempt to get up” (Tekuyeva 2006). 5. Maxim Maximych first describes Bela in conventional terms as a beauti- ful girl, tall and slender, with black eyes “as those of a mountain cham- ois,” which “fairly looked into your soul.” Later he takes a resolutely negative position on Bela’s kidnapping calling it a rotten business, but gets Pechorin’s rebuke that a “wild Circassian girl” ought to be happy with such a charming husband as himself (Lermontov 2001). 6. Translation is mine—M.T. 7. As a Northern Caucasus ethnographer M. Tekuyeva points out, they “did not shun from giving their favors to local males who were loyal to Russians. It is then that the first cases of venereal diseases came to be known in Caucasus under the name of metushke uz—literally, the dis- ease of Russian women” (Tekuyeva 2006, 68). 8. D. Northrop gives an example of such discourse in the early Soviet period when Oriental backwardness began to be opposed to Soviet modernity. He quotes an Uzbek communist who in 1927 proclaimed at a local party meeting in Andizhan: “Together with the growth of Socialist elements in the economy, there will be a decline in the debauchery of women . Almost everyone knows that various forms of dissipation thrive among those who wear a paranjee. For example, the love of one woman for 210 Notes another: this unhealthy phenomenon is very widespread among Uzbek women, from this fact you can see that the paranjee does not at all ward off debauchery” (Northrop 2004, 65). 9. Mainly it refers to timber, before most of the forests were destroyed by the Russian colonization. 10. Later it resulted in a higher racial and human status of Circassian diaspo- ras in the Middle East, than that of their compatriots who stayed in Russia. 11. In fact the term is still around in some of the U.S. questionnaires. Four Quasi-scientific Racism and Gender in Russian and Soviet Discourses 1. Some Western specialists in Eurasian studies today tend to question the formula “divide and rule” and justify the Soviet imperial policies claim- ing that the Bolsheviks attempted to build a new and more progressive kind of colonialism (Hirsch 2000). Such an approach is based on erasing of race as a fundamental basis of coloniality in all variants of modernity, including the Soviet one. 2. This logic is also at work in the construction of Western museum start- ing from the eighteenth century onward. As is known, museums divided almost immediately into the reservoirs of art which constructed, pre- served, and transmitted to future generations the memory of Western culture, and the museums of natural history representing the non- Western world including the natural and the provisionally human. 3. As a result of this anthropological mythology, particularly in the Soviet period, which was the most radical in its nation-building colonial dis- courses, the previously existing Central Asian category of Sarts com- pletely vanished, as it did not correspond to ethnic-racial hierarchy invented and imposed onto this transcultural space. Scholars still argue on the origins of the word Sart (Abashin and Bushkov 2004, 40–43).
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