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Urna Narayan. Dis/hcating Cultures/Identítites, Traditions, and Third World Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1997. 226p. Azfar Hussain Washington State University This book is an impressive intervention in a field that has meanwhile come to be known as "postcolonial feminism" — a field inhabited by theorists and critics like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sara Suleri, TrinT. Minha-ha, Lata Mani, Kumkum Sangari, and ChandraTalpade Mohanty, among many others. Postcolonial feminism offers a wide range of theoretical and historical approaches, dwelling upon various complex constellations ofconcerns. Yet, perhaps, some ofits general contours are well-exemplified in its persistent critiques ofWestern imperialism and its problematic representations ofthe "Other." Also, postcolonial feminism radically and strategically situates theThird-World female "subaltern" in an attempt to complicate and contest the dominant feminist (in Spivak's words, "hegemonic feminist") narratives produced, packaged, and circulated from the metropolis. Variously enacting its confrontational politics and praxis geared towards social change, postcolonial feminism confronts and contests unequalpower-reUtionsand production-reUtions on both local and global scales. Narayan's book can certainly be located in this very contestatory tradition within which it raises some crucial questions and concerns at a time when globalization is continuing to perpetrate epistemic-cultural-economic violences on the discursive and material spaces ofthe Third-World subaltern. Neatly divided into five chapters respectively titled "Contesting Cultures," "Restoring History and Politics to 'Third World Traditions,"' "Cross-Cultural Connections, Border-Crossings, and 'Death by Culture,'" "Through the Looking Glass Darkly," and "Eating Cultures," the book begins by interrogating the author's own location and position as a "Third-World feminist." Such a self-critical interrogation begins to complicate the very question ofidentity itselfin ways in which the continuing "colonialist" process ofconstructing "Third-World" identity and also even the practice ofconjuring rhe ghost ofauthenticity haunting that very identity (as exemplified in various brands ofcounterproductive, essentialist identity-politics these days) are all brought into productive crises. For Narayan, indeed, the question of identity continues to constitute a predominant concern throughout the book. And her insistence on historicizing and contextualizing identity and difference within the deeply specific national contexts — instead of just celebrating or, worse,fietishizingthem — seems right on the mark. According to her, the fetishization ofdifference and identity only renders them vulnerable to ongoing hegemonic appropriations in the metropolis. FALL 2000 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * 143 Related to the question ofidentity is the very question of"representation" itself — a crucial issue that Narayan engages at some length in the second chapter of her book. In the Nietzsche-inspired post-representationalist domain of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories, the question of "representation" is not merely caricatured but is decisively dispensed with — or even declared dead - - on the very assumption that representations are no longer possible in the way that the signified is now impossible. Spivak — as well as Marxist critics like Aijaz Ahmad from India — already advanced critiques of such poststructuralist postrepresentationalism , dominated as it is by the despotism ofthe signifier. Narayan ofcourse does not dispense with the question ofrepresentation as such, but rather confronts it through zeroing in on the very problematic ofrepresentations themselves from the perspectives offeminist colonial discourse analysis. She states: "My aim ... is to explore representations of'Third-World traditions' that seem to replicate what I shall call a 'colonialist stance' toward Third-World cultures, to explain why these representations are both problematic and 'colonialist,' and to describe other representations of'Third World traditions' that present a very different picture ofwhat these 'traditions' are" (43). With the above end in view, then, Narayan ably enacts a historically engaged postcolonial hermeneutic in an attempt to read and deconstruct the representations of the "'Indian tradition' ofsati or widow-immolation" (43) in mainstream Western feminist discourses and particularly in Mary Daly's book GynlEcology: The Metaethics ofRadical Feminism. Narayan thus contests the very ahistorical colonialist power/knowledge networks of Western feminism that tend to epistemologize and ontologize — rather fix and freeze — the entire "Indian culture " as being "patriarchal" vis-à-vis the practice ofsati. Indeed, in her preoccupations with the question ofsati — which has hitherto constituted a crucial site of contestation and intervention in postcolonial feminist theory and colonial discourse analysis — Narayan seems to be sharing some ofthe positions already articulated by Gayatri Spivak...

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