Engendering Critique: Postnational Feminism in Postcolonial Syria

In his much-cited essay, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson controversially maintained that “all third-world texts are necessarily … allegorical” (1986, 69). For Jameson, nationalist allegories substituted in postcolonial societies for modern European literature’s focus on the individual. “In the third-world situation,” Jameson specified, “the intellectual is always in one way or another a political intellectual” (74). In foregrounding the primacy of the political in postcolonial contexts, Jameson maintained, third world texts preclude the concept of art’s autonomy from the social realm that has so heavily informed European modernism. According to the Jamesonian thesis, in postcolonial societies, “private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (69). Although Jameson’s assessments were intended less as a judgment of a limitation than as a value-neutral taxonomy of differences, his axiom continues to arouse controversy among theorists of the postcolonial condition.¹

Jameson read postcolonial literature from the vantage point of the metropole. As such, the analytical framework he offers, so helpful in elucidating the transnational ambit of postcolonial literary form, risks obscuring the local contexts that are equally salient to grasping the politics of literature. As Therese Saliba and Jeanne Kattan argue, claims to the “fluid movement of texts across national borders” all too frequently ignore “the reception of these texts within their own countries, thereby obscuring the roles of power, economics, literacy, and the marketing of so-called Third World authors, particularly women, in the global economy” (2000, 84). Militating against such disjunctures, and in an effort to better track what Samer Frangie (2011) has termed “the broken conversation between post-colonialism and intellectuals in the periphery,” this essay briefly documents the attempt of a Syrian graduate student, whom I will call Zahra, to cultivate her own conception of transnational feminism by bringing together critical strands in postcolonial theory and Arabic women’s literature.²

While the desirability of engaging postcolonial literature transnationally is self-evident, transnational engagements cannot displace the need for engaging with postcolonial texts in their local contexts and, in particular, for tracing the reception of these texts among readers who are the object of their representations. Attending to the interface between transnational and local, national as well as pan-Arab, receptions will enable us to better discern the tensions that enrich and complicate the postcolonial feminist agenda. Far from aspiring to produce a pure or authentic account of indigenous Syrian feminism, I aim here to problematize the geography of contemporary feminism, including my own location within this intellectual movement.

The conflation of postcolonial literature with third world nationalism has been the subject of multivalent contestations. Meanwhile, the implications of postcolonial allegory for transnational feminism have been less thoroughly scrutinized. Allegories frame literary discourse as generically masculine. But what if a feminist writer who undertakes to speak for, to, and against a given national formation refuses to subordinate her gender to the nation’s supracommunal claims? As a category of analysis, gender cuts through allegory’s surface, modulating monologic representations to resistant female, or feminist, voices. It follows that postcolonial literary texts read in locally grounded feminist contexts will refute the mainstream Jamesonian model of third world cultural dissemination.

By way of engendering our understanding of the postcolonial political self while diverging from the still-normative conception of third world literature that reduces all texts that emerge from this world to mono-dimensional representations, this essay considers the nexus between nationalist and feminist postcolonial agendas in contemporary Syrian academic life and discourse. By focusing on the reception of transnational texts in a postcolonial environment, I look beyond the traditional scope of literary criticism. Elizabeth Thompson’s proposition that “even as colonial peoples waged nationalist battles for independence they inevitably participated in the very political order they rejected” (2000, 1), made with respect to Syria during the French Mandate (1920–46), is substantiated by the material adduced in this essay. Looking beyond literature even as I read literary texts in the contexts of their most powerful political signification enables me to track...