Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism (review)

Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism. By Uma Narayan. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Reviewing the emergent field of postcolonial feminist theory, Sara Mills remarks, "perhaps the most important area in which post-colonial feminism can develop is in the theorizing of difference, whereby women can speak across national and cultural barriers, not to assume that their contexts or concerns are the same, but rather to develop a set of theoretical principles of 'translation', so that alliances can be formed in spite of, and perhaps (paradoxically) because of, differences in power and differences in culture" (Mills 1998, 109). While we may disagree about this being "the most important area," it is this area that is admirably covered by the book under review. An insightful and competent translator, Uma Narayan writes about the "barriers" of culture, tradition, and national identity by pointing out how each of these needs to be scrupulously historicized, especially so when the referents in question are Third World and the writers are of the First. Although Narayan's examples are specific to the national cultural context of India, the cautionary principles are applicable to First World feminist attempts to understand Third World feminist issues. This is so because Narayan is primarily concerned with the continuing effects that colonialist discourses of cultural difference have upon our understanding of Third World feminist issues in the present. These effects are variously produced from different locations in the postcolonial present: from within Third World national spaces and from First World writings about Third World feminist issues. It is this preoccupation with postcolonial culture that lends coherence to this collection of five discrete essays; written with clarity, and interspersed with personal narrative, this is engaging and illuminating work. Chandra Mohanty (1991) has already articulated the problems with certain Western feminist approaches to Third World women's issues, such as the universalizing tendencies in their theoretical work. Uma Narayan's work is a welcome addition to Mohanty's as it extends the latter's critique in significant and new ways that are enabling for both First and Third World feminists.

The first chapter deals with the notion of "Westernization": the debilitating accusation against Third World feminists (one meant to silence them) leveled by various interlocutors, not restricted to fundamentalist groups, that feminism is a western intrusion, inauthentic to national "non-Western" culture, making it worthy of dismissal. Narayan points out how, in a postcolonial reality, it is no longer easy to separate a Western component from the non-Western. Further, the accusation of "Western" to Third World feminism acquires meaning because historically, in the nationalist imaginary, women came to figure a non-Western cultural essence against Western culture. So, when contemporary fundamentalists recall this binary opposition, itself carefully constructed by the colonizers, they are re-invoking a nationalist rhetoric once usefully deployed against colonialists. Narayan exposes this strategy by noting "the selective, self-serving, and shifting ways in which certain social changes in Third-World contexts (notably, but not exclusively, those involving gender roles) are castigated as symptoms of 'Westernization,' while other changes are regarded as innocuous . . . " Narayan 1997, ix).

For those who would dismiss Third World feminism as an imported discourse, Narayan locates her own early development as a feminist in the witnessing of her mother's suffering under patriarchal codes within the familial/cultural context. This maternal pain was instructive and "earlier than school and "westernization," a call to rebellion that has a different and more primary root, that was not conceptual or English, but in the mother-tongue" (1997, 8). Recognizing the ethical vision and work involved in the feminist effort of contesting culture and building a political movement within the nation, Narayan resolutely returns Third World feminism to its own "national political landscape" (13; italics in original), where feminist contestations of "national identity" and "national traditions" are as native as other ongoing political projects of the nation.

In the second chapter, "Restoring History and Politics to 'Third-World...