Diasporas old and new: Women in the transnational world

Textual Practice

Volumn 10, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 245-269

  Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals

Author keywords

Development; Diaspora; Feminism; Globalization; Postcolonial; Transnationality

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347295261     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502369608582246     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. As I will show later, the complexity of Farida Akhter's position is to be understood from the weave (or text-ile) of her work, not merely her verbal texts, which are, like all translations, not a substitute for the 'originals'. Let me cite, with this proviso, Akhter, Depopulating Bangla- desh (Dhaka: Narigrantha, 1992) and Malini Karkal, Can Family Planning Solve Population Problem} (Bombay: Stree Uvach, 1989). The scene has been so Eurocentrically obfuscated that I hasten to add that this is not a socalled 'pro-life' position, but rather a dismissal of Western (Northern) universalization of its domestic problems in the name of woman. See also Spivak, 'Empowering women?', Environment, XXVII.I (January/ February 1995), pp. 2-3
2. Ranajit Guha, 'On some aspects of the historiography of Colonial India', in Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 8
3. Jacques Derrida, 'White mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy', in Alan Bass, trans. Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1982), p. 209
4. for update, see Diacritics 25:2 (Summer 1995), p.12
5. In Public Culture, 5, 1 (Fall 1992)
6. For the usual debate on civil society between left and right, see Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (New York: Verso, 1994)
7. and Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (New York: Allen Lane, 1994)
8. I use 'sup-pose' (rather than 'pre-suppose', which presupposes the sub- ject's agency) here in what I understand to be Derrida's sense in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 76. The word suppose is unfortunately translated 'presuppose' in the English version. The imaginary map of geo-graphy as we understand it today has been traced by pushing the so-called aboriginals back, out, away, in. The story of the emergence of civil societies is sup-posed in that movement
9. Saskia Sassen, On Governance in the Global Economy (New York: Col- umbia University Press, 1996, forthcoming)
10. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 267
11. Michael Kearney, 'Borders and boundaries: state and self at the end of empire', Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 4, no. 1 (March 1991), pp. 52-74
12. Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976)
13. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1981)
14. Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 11
15. Catherine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmediated: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 63-9
16. Raymond Suttner and Jeremy Cronin (eds), Thirty Years of the Freedom Charter (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986), pp. 162-3
17. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude (London: Tavistock, 1957)
18. Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987). The passage quoted below is from p. 9
19. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni- versity Press, 1976), p. 125
20. I have tried to describe a similar predicament for myself in 'A response to Jean-Luc Nancy', in Juliet Flower MacCannell and Lara Zakarin (eds), Thinking Bodies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 39-48
21. Filomina Chioma Steady (ed.), The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (Rochester: Schenkman, 1981)
22. 'Women and law in post-independence Zimbabwe: experience and les- sons', in Susan Bazilli (ed.), Putting Women on the Agenda (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1991), pp. 215, 236-7
23. Hester Eisenstein, 'Speaking for women? Voices from the Australian Femocrat experiment', in Australian Feminist Studies, 14 (Summer 1991), pp. 29-42
24. Derrida, 'Declarations of independence', trans. Thomas W. Keenan, in New Political Science, 15 (Summer 1986), pp. 7-15. But here too we must remind ourselves that the feeling/thinking ground is what makes the critique persistent even as it foils it: disclosure, alas, in effacement. All uses of 'deconstruction' as verb or noun are practically breached by this double bind. No use talking about infinite regress, for infinite progress is no different, only differant, in(de)finitely
25. Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany: Suny Press, 1987), Chapters 7, 8, 9,10 (pp. 140-221)
26. Noeken Heyzer, Working Women in South-East Asia: Development, Sub- ordination and Emancipation (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986). The passage quoted is from pp. 131, 132
27. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodern- ism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992). The passage quoted below is from pp. 2-3
28. Thomas W. Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Between Literature and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, forthcoming)
29. Friga Haugg's excellent book, Beyond Female Masochism: Memory-Work and Politics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), indispens- able for consciousness raising, legitimizes the European history of the compromising of responsibility-in-gender, by a mere reversal. To tease this out for responsibility-based systems requires a different sense of one's own position ('textuality'), a different agenda
30. I am drawing on a big theme here, which I have merely touched upon by way of the notion of the differance between socialism and capitalism. (See Spivak, 'Supplementing Marxism', in Stephen Cullenberg and Bernd Magnus (eds), Whither Marxism? (New York: Routledge, 1994) p. 118-19
31. Derrida puts these impossibilities in the place of the figuration of the gift, if there is any. But a thinker like Karl-Otto Apel would simply dismiss them as 'utopian' ('Is the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia?', quoted in Benhabib, p. 81). My 'experience' here is of young women working in the garment factories in Bangladesh, displaced from their family, seemingly on a superior footing from the unemployed young men on the street, and yet without any care taken to recode their ethical beings into the public. I admire Carol Gilligan, but to cite her here is an insult; for she must retrain herself with a different group under obser- vation and with the instruction of experts in the field such as Heyzer. Mutatis mutandis, I encounter a similar problem with the industry in revising Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis in the name of feminist cultural studies
32. Shula Marks (ed.), Not Either An Experimental Doll: The Separate Lives of Three South African Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp.207, 209
33. Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modem Muslim Society (London: Al Saqi, 1985)
34. This contradiction is a gendered displacement of the broader contradic- tion, which has been pointed out in David Washbrook's essay 'Law, state and agrarian society in Colonial India' (Modern Asian Studies, 15.3, 1981, pp. 649-721), that if colonial practice operated in the interest of capitalist social productivity, the indigenous practices within which local capitalisms flourished contradicted that interest
35. See Ritu Birla, 'Hedging bets: politics of commercial ethics in late Colonial India', Department of History, Columbia University, dissertation in progress. The contradiction we are discussing is also a classed displacement of the earlier contradiction between emancipation and culturalism for women in the colonies
36. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, et al. (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 1983)
37. Kaye Thies, Aboriginal Viewpoints on Education: A Survey in the East Kimberley Region (Needlands: University of Western Australia, 1987)
38. See Gordon Brotherston, The Book of the Fourth World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
39. and, in the context of contemporary Canadian bilingualist struggle, Merwan Hassan, 'Articulation and coercion: the language crisis in Canada', in Border/Lines 36 (April 1995), pp. 28-35
40. Diane Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming (Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press, 1993)
41. Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991)
42. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp (eds), Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader (London: Blackwell, 1991)
43. Patricia Cicogna and Teresa de Lauretis (eds), Sexual Differences: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)
44. Mirna Cicogna, 'Women subjects and women projects', Australian Feminist Studies, 4 (Autumn 1987)
45. Rosi Braidotti, 'The Italian Women's Movement in the 1980s', Australian Fem- inist Studies, 3 (Summer 1986)
46. Swasti Mitter, 'Industrial restructuring and manufacturing homework: immigrant women in the UK clothing industry', Capital and Class, pp. 27, 47-9, 62, 75-6
47. See Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National-Colonial Question: A Collec- tion of Articles and Speeches (San Francisco: Proletarian Publishers, 1975)
48. and V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (New York: International Publishers, 1939). Although Stalin con- stantly invokes Lenin in order to legitimize himself, Lenin is speaking of the Northwestern European single nation empires and their connections to the march of Capital, whereas Stalin is speaking of the Russian, Otto- man, and Habsburg empires, and the manipulation of their cultures and identities in the interest of forming something like a future new empire. Thus their lines lead toward finance capital and linguistic and cultural politics respectively; in their current displacements, the economic phenomenon of transnationalization and its re-territorialization into migrant hybridity by multiculturalist diasporists, respectively
49. See passage quoted in Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps, trans. Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 212-13
50. In Clarice Lispector, Family Ties, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Austin: Uni- versity of Texas Press, 1972), pp. 88-95