A Degree of Rage History, Her

A Degree of Rage History, Her. IF EVEN MINIMALLY SUCCESSFUL, THE READINGS WILL INCITE A Degree of Rage AGAINST THE IMPERIALIST NARRATIVIZATION OF History, THAT IT SHOULD PRODUCE SO ABJECT A SCRIPT FOR Her. EDITED BY — Tiger Dingsun Joaquín Torres García “América Invertida (Inverted America)” (1943) Ink on paper, 8 11/16 × 6 5/16 inches Museo Torres García, Montevideo PREFACE UNIVERSAL CROPTOPS Tiger Dingsun — 11 FOR ALL THE SELF-CANONIZING SAINTS OF BECOMING THREE WOMEN’S TEXTS Juliana Huxtable — 101 AND A CRITIQUE OF IMPERIALISM Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — 15 CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — 111 THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — 15 UNTITLED(FOR STEWART) Juliana Huxtable — 163 DO MUSLIM WOMEN REALLY NEED SAVING? FEMINISM IS FOR EVERYBODY Lila Abu-Lughod — 51 bell hooks — 167 TOWARD A DECOLONIAL FEMINISM RACE, MULTICULTURALISM, María Lugones — 56 AND PEDAGOGIES OF DISSENT Chandra Talpade Mohanty — 174 UNTITLED (FAÇADOMY) Juliana Huxtable — 82 DEAR IJEAWELE, OR A FEMINIST MANIFESTO POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY IN FIFTEEN SUGGESTIONS Audre Lorde — 93 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — 217 PREFACE TIGER DINGSUN This project was originally going to be about margins. But if the margin is there to be at the service of the center, perhaps it is neces- sary to reformulate the margin—to recast both its geographical and psycholog- ical implications. Or perhaps, the goal is to reiterate the margin as ultimately unknowable, its territory ambiguous, the boundaries between its paratext and the central text unresolvably blurry. Margins, after all, only become possible 10 objects when a political distinction is made between the margin and the center. But even this goal of ambiguity may be an act of totalization, an act of cementing the margin’s inherenty quality as something that is unknowable. We learn from Said (and, perhaps, the way that imperialism has infiltrated the most minute details of our day-to-day interactions) that the western imperialist perceives the subaltern as “knowable and unknowing”. This is the idea that through colonialism, one can conceivably understand all aspects of a culture; a culture that is perhaps too underdeveloped, immature, or ignorant to understand themselves. On the other hand, it is often the case that the well-meaning post-colonial theorist becomes complicit in an epistemological othering, and posits the subaltern as unknowable and disenfranchised from knowing. Both ultimately leave no space for the “third world woman” to speak for herself. I began this project with a desire to reposition these texts from margin to center. But I soon became paralyzed with insecurity and uneasiness that I myself, while reading and compiling all of this postcolonial feminist theory, was buying into the voyeuristic impulse of aestheticizing and fetishizing marginality and the “third world woman.” I felt uneasy even with the act of anthologizing, of bringing texts together. I felt uneasy with the possibility that I was essentializing all discourse about the “third world women” as a monolithic text block — a literal volume, with distinct boundaries. Ostensibly, the texts in this book center around the figure of the “third world woman,” but it is worth taking the time now to point out that this analytic category of “third world woman” is colonialist for two reasons: one, it is a homogenizing categorization, and ignores the huge amount of heterogeny between actual “third world women”; two, the composite “othering” of third world women helps western feminism centralize and define itself against the backdrop of a margin. While I was working on this project, someone suggested to me that this anthology is also a project about pushing back against the splintering of knowl- edge — through compiling these texts, I am also breaking through pay-walls, dead links, and unsearchable PDFS, to make them more accessible. And while that provided some reassurance that what I was doing wasn't totally useless, the question still remained. This act of anthologizing, of consolidation: is it perhaps more harmful than it is productive? But over time I have come to see this anthology not simply as a rect- angular block, but as the intersection of splintering, multifaceted pathways. This book is merely the nexus where these heterogeneous texts intersect, but one must never forget that they extend far beyond this moment — in multiple directions and in multiple dimensionalities. This is reflected in various formal decisions that I have made. Different colored text provides the opportunity for both simultaneity and differentiation. Positioning more than one text on the Unknown Artist 11 12 same page fractures and decentralizes the monolithic text-block. Redrawing circa 1800 the margins allow for a fluidity between text and page. These texts provide a wide swath of different perspectives that will These pictures are made by Indian artists for hopefully illuminate the complexity that comes when one finds themself in the the British in India and are called Company intersections of multiple global hegemonic systems of oppression. Hopefully, paintings. This one depicts the practice of sati through close readings of these texts, and an integration of what these texts (suttee) or widow-burning. have to say with our own worldview and practices, we will become more aware of our inherent biases, of how empire is the backdrop against everything we do, of the violent undercurrent of colonialism that still remains, ever present. A constant critique is needed. And then a constant critique of that critique is needed. This anthology makes no pretensions about being anything more than the mediator between these texts and the reader. But if it brings us even one step closer to that ever unreachable goal of universal liberation, if it leads to the decolonization of even one aspect of our minds, our biases, and the way we go about the world, if it, as Spivak puts it, incites even a degree a rage against the imperialist narrativization of history, then I will have considered this project a success. It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious “facts” continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and THREE WOMEN’S dispersed into more modern forms. If these “facts” were remembered, not TEXTS AND A only in the study of British literature CRITIQUE OF but in the study of the literatures of the European colonizing cultures of IMPERIALISM the great age of imperialism, we would produce a narrative, in literary history, 14 of the “worlding” of what is now GAYATRI called “the Third World.” To consider CHAKRAVORTY the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary SPIVAK heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in 0:11 I’m a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call “the danger of the single story.” I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children’s books. THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE 0:38 to ignore the lessons of deconstruction. A deconstructive critical I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the approach would loosen the binding of the book, undo the opposi- age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor tion between verbal text and the biography of the named subject mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories “Charlotte Bronte,” and see the two as each other’s “scene of I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they writing.” In such a reading, the life that writes itself as “my life” played in the snow, they ate apples, is as much a production in psychosocial space (other names can be found) as the book that is written by the holder of that named 1:03 life-a book that is then consigned to what is most often recog- (Laughter) nized as genuinely “social”: the world of publication and distri- bution.4 To touch Brontë’s “life” in such a way, however, would 1:05 be too risky here. We must rather strategically take shelter in an and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the essentialism which, not wishing to lose the important advantages sun had come out. won by U.S. mainstream feminism, will continue to honor the suspect binary oppositions — book and author, individual and history — and start with an assurance of the following sort: my readings here do not seek to undermine the excellence of the English translation fosters the emergence of “the Third World” individual artist. If even minimally successful, the readings will as a signifier that allows us to forget that “worlding,” even as it incite a degree of rage against the imperialist narrativization of expands the empire of the literary discipline.1 history, that it should produce so abject a script for her. I provide It seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent these assurances to allow myself some room to situate feminist perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of individualism in its historical determination rather than simply 15 16 imperialism. A basically isolationist admiration for the literature to canonize it as feminism as such.

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