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Decolonizing Literacies: Transnational Feminism

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Decolonizing Literacies: Transnational Feminism DECOLONIZING LITERACIES: TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM, LEGACIES OF COLONIALITY, AND PEDAGOGIES OF TRANSFORMATION KAREN RUDDY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAMME IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO May 2015 ©Karen Ann Ruddy, 2015 ABSTRACT Since the onset of the U.S.-led “Global War on Terror” (G.W.O.T.) and Afghan War in 2001, the literacy crisis of Afghan women has been central to the U.S.’s counter- terrorism and counter-insurgency doctrines, and to its post-conflict reconstruction efforts in the country. While many aspects of the G.W.O.T. have been subject to critical scrutiny over the last decade, literacy remains curiously absent from such discussions. This silence is primarily due to the widely-accepted views that literacy is a necessary precondition for female empowerment, and that the extension of literacy education to Afghan girls and women is therefore one of the few undisputed successes of the Afghan war. Troubling this conventional wisdom, this dissertation deploys an anti-racist transnational feminist framework to argue that the narratives of Afghan women’s literacy crisis that have circulated within the Western imaginary since 9/11 are enmeshed in, and are forms of, the epistemic, semiotic, and political-economic violence that characterizes present-day practices of neo-liberal war and dispossession. They have been central to U.S. foreign policy discourse because they install a civilizational divide between the “post-feminist,” literate West – where gender and sexual justice allegedly have been achieved – and the racialized and gendered figures of the Afghan woman as an “illiterate Third World woman” in need of saving from “dangerous Muslim men” (Razack 2008, 5). As such, these narratives have served to legitimate not only the Afghan war, but also the modernization of Afghan women according to a Western neo-liberal agenda and the normalization of a particular image of Western gender and sexual exceptionalism that conceals continuing gender, sexual, colonial, racial, and class disparities at “home.” ii This study traces the disavowed and forgotten colonial legacies of this divide between the literate West and the illiterate Other to the colonization of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the history of racialized slavery in the U.S., and the institutionalization of the literacy/orality divide in mid-twentieth century sociolinguistics and anthropology. Moreover, it explores how such legacies of coloniality are reproduced in the liberal feminist internationalism of Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to international development – which emphasizes female pain and suffering in the global south – and some forms of third-wave international feminism – which celebrate female empowerment and the pleasures of trans and gender-variant subjects. Finally, this study contends that feminists committed to the liberatory potential of literacy must grapple with the promises and failures of anti-colonial (Paulo Freire) and postcolonial (Gayatri Spivak) theories of literacy in order to elaborate literacies of decolonization: ways of reading and writing the word and the world that challenge the epistemic domination of subaltern knowledges, while also elaborating alternative political imaginaries and pedagogies of hope and transformation that move beyond the necropolitics of the neo- liberal global order. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply indebted to the members of my dissertation committee for their support for this project. I would like to thank Patrick Taylor, my supervisor, for his advice, mentorship, and generosity throughout the entire process of writing this dissertation. From the dissertation proposal to the final draft, he has been an engaged and enthusiastic reader of my work, offering invaluable insights and constructive critiques that helped me clarify the focus and argument of this manuscript while also respecting the integrity of my project. I thank Shannon Bell for her feedback on my work, for inspiring me to break with disciplinary strictures and to take the risk of creating something “new” from the old, and for her unwavering support for my development as a scholar since the time I first took a course with her during my M.A. I also owe a considerable debt to Isabella Bakker, who offered thoughtful and encouraging comments and questions on the final drafts of this dissertation. I am grateful to the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought at York University for providing me an intellectual space to purse this interdisciplinary project, and to Judith Hawley for her administrative support. I thank Kamala Kempadoo for her feedback on a previous version of Chapter One. My heartfelt thanks goes as well to Roxana Ng (OISE/UT), who first encouraged me pursue this project. This dissertation would not have been possible without the work of community- based educators at St. Christopher’s House and Frontier College whose commitment to education as a form of self and social transformation provided me with a space to explore the possibilities for decolonizing literacies. I would like to thank the staff at St. iv Christopher’s House, in particular, for their support during the time I worked there. I would also like to acknowledge my adult students whose daily struggles to access literacy and unexpected responses to learning taught me to question the conventional views of literacy as a panacea for social inequalities and of the educator as saviour. Financial assistance for this project was provided in the form of two Ontario Graduate Scholarships, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship, and a Valuing Literacy in Canada Doctoral Fellowship (SSHRC). Thank you to my parents, Bev and Pat Ruddy, and to my grandmother, Dorothy Jennings-Labonte, for your love, support, and encouragement throughout my long journey of post-secondary education. Finally, and most of all, thank you to Neil Braganza for supporting me through the ups and downs of writing this dissertation, for reading the entire dissertation and posing interesting questions, for helping me to keep in view the curiosity and political commitment that motivated this project, and for reminding me to have some fun along the way. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ........................................ .................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................. vi Introduction ........................................................................................................................1 I. Transnational Feminism as Method .................................................................13 II. Cultures of the New Imperialism .....................................................................18 III. Feminism and the Politics of Empire ...............................................................31 IV. Literacies of Decolonization ............................................................................41 V. Chapter Overview ............................................................................................45 PART ONE: THE DECOLONIZATION OF LITERACY Chapter One: The New Imperialism and the Production of the “Illiterate Third World Woman” ...............................................................................................................53 I. Hypervisibility and the Creation of a Crisis .......................................................59 II. The “Illiterate Third World Woman” as Non-Event and Fetish .......................71 III. Civilizational Thinking and Western Gender Exceptionalism ........................81 IV. Post-War Reconstruction and the Remaking of Gendered Subjects ...............97 V. Conclusion ......................................................................................................115 Chapter Two: Writing at the Limits of Humanity: The Coloniality of Literacy and the Necropolitics of Salvation ................................................................................119 I. The Invention of Literacy and Colonization in the Americas ..........................126 II. Cannibalism and the Bestiality of Orality .......................................................134 III. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”: Slavery, Literacy, and the Limits of Humanity....................................................151 IV. The Institutionalization of the Literacy/Orality Divide in Sociolinguistics and Anthropology ......................................................................166 V. Conclusion ......................................................................................................177 Chapter Three: Pedagogies of Empire: Literacy and the Politics of International Liberal Feminism ...........................................................................................................182 I. Literacy and Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach ................................191 II. Nussbaum’s Colonial Legacies .......................................................................198 III. Melancholic Subjects and Suffering Objects .................................................210 IV. Third-Wave
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