From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic

Conclusion: Non progredi regredi est: The Making of Transformative Visions

Post-colonial Quandaries Post-colonial studies have provided us with a critical language to address the problem of the other.1 Edward Said, in his landmark text Orientalism, contributed significantly to this discourse by advancing a critique of systems of thought that ruptured the world into two: Occident versus Orient. What Said demonstrates, of course, are the ways in which the West created an imaginary Orient by which it could distinguish the parameters of its own existence. This is not unlike Lacan’s “mirror-stage” theorem, in which he contends that all human beings (though all are figured as male) arrive at a concept of self through the other “who is not me.” Said’s discussion, however, was an indictment of this system of thought rather than its naturalization à la Lacan. One need only be reminded here that though Lacan sought to de-gender his concepts of identity formation and desire, the crux of his arguments centre on the “phallus” (not to be confused with the male genitalia, yet its shadow). My tangential recourse to Lacan here is instructive, for it bears on the gendered nature of imperialism as an ideological system. Anne McClintock notes in her landmark text Imperial Leather, In Lacan’s texts, women are doomed to inhabit the tongueless zone of the Imaginary . We are forbidden citizenship in the Symbolic, exiled from the archives and encyclopedias, the sacred texts and algebras, the alphas and omegas of history. If CONCLUSION Non progredi regredi est: The Making of Transformative Visions 295 women speak at all, it is with male tongues, as ventriloquists of phallic desire. If we look, it is with a male gaze. In this way, Lacan’s vision bears an uneasy affinity to the nineteenth-century discourse on degeneration, which figured women as bereft of language, exiled from reason, and properly inhabiting the prehistory of the race. For Lacan, as for the discourse on degeneration, women’s difference is figured as a chronological one; we inhabit an earlier space in the linear, temporal history of the (male) symbolic self. Pre-oedipal space (the space of domesticity ) is naturalized by figuring it as anachronistic space: out of time and prior to symbolic history. Women’s historically gendered relation to power is represented as a formally different relation to time: the imperial gesture itself. (193) McClintock’s reading here of Lacan is strikingly similar to post-colonial readings of works by authors of colour, especially women; writers from “Third World” nations are, by virtue of their resistance to linear time, labelled postcolonial so that they may be inscribed in a historical moment the writings themselves often refute or refuse. My effort throughout this text has been to reclaimthese“tongueless”womenwritersand,throughtheirvoicesandimages, recapture vestiges of memory not exposed in official and standardized versions of history. Theirs are more than resistance narratives; they are prescriptions for developing a new consciousness of the possibilities for reconstructing Caribbean national identities. Their visions alter notions of linearity and thus popular conceptions of time. The construction of time through imperial dictates as both “natural” and linear does not originate in the nineteenth century, nor does it originate with European expansion into the “New World” at the end of the fifteenth; however , the use of time as an instrument of disguised power becomes singularly marked in the imperial project. As José Rabasa notes in his essay, “Allegories of Atlas,”“Eurocentrism…ismorethananideologicalconstructthatvanishes with the brush of the pen or merely disappears when Europe loses its position of dominance. The trace of European expansionism continues to exist in the bodies and minds of the rest of the world, as well as in the fantasies of the former colonies” (358). Rabasa’s point is that constructions of space and time through maps have resulted in the naturalization of systems of meaning that implicitly and explicitly favour European points of view; the saving grace of such a system is that its very creation suggests it can be unmade, its imperfections serving as “a source of hope for the reconstitution or reinvention of the world from native points of view” (358). An examination of Mercator’s world map (1636) reveals both gendered and racialized hierarchies: “in the allegory of the four continents, the presence of the male principle in the female 296 CONCLUSION personification of the continents formulates a hierarchy in terms of their subordination to masculinity. Asia, Africa and America in their degrees of nudity lack propriety; that...