Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 17:43:20 -0800 (PST)
From: " Rahul  Mahajan" <rahul_saumik-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: M-I: How to bring workers together. On Gloria Steinem.


Yoshie:

>On the other hand, the ties between bourgeois feminism/liberalism and
>imperialism go back much further. One of the ways in which imperialists
>tried to justify their domination is to cast their activities as
>"civilizing mission." Look at those barbarians, how badly they treat their
>women, isn't that primitive, etc. White men and women spent much rhetorical
>energy, appointing themselves as saviors of black/brown/yellow women from
>their men. (You can read Lata Mani, Said, Spivak, and other
>post-colonialists/feminists' work to get a taste of what I am talking
>about. Or watch _The King and I_.) As you can see in how black women were
>treated in slavery, most of the times rhetoric was just that. But when
>imperialists actually tried to abolish a certain abominable sexist
>practice, as in the case of the British condemning "sati" in India, things
>get more complex. More on this some other day.
>
>Shall we move this discussion to the marxism-feminism list?

Yoshie, I should tell you that this is actually an abominable misrepresentation
of the outlawing of suttee. My guess is that you got your picture of it from
Gayatri Spivak's miserable article on how the subaltern cannot speak, at least
not unless Spivak is there to interpret for her.

As one would expect, the imperialists not only never tried to abolish suttee,
but were quite comfortable coexisting with it and strongly resisted efforts to
deal with it. It took a crusade by Rammohun Roy, against the opposition both of
the British and of the conservative native elites, to finally get the law
passed, and even then the British didn't go out of their way to enforce it. 

Spivak is a perfect example of the abysmal scholarship being fostered by trendy
interdisciplinary postmodernism, where, no matter what you write about, you
spend 80% of your time on incomprehensible exegesis of not even marginally
relevant writings by someone else, and then slap on a few superficial facts or
"facts" about the ostensible subject of your study. In this case, she seems to
be unfamiliar with a fact that every Bengali growing up in an even marginally
educated household (and certainly Spivak was one) knows.

Yes, the interplay of these matters is complex, but I would submit to you that,
in the vast majority of such cases, what really happened is that the
imperialist rhetoric and the enlightened values of the West managed to infect
some native reformers, who then fought for such changes, often becoming very
surprised at how little the imperialists believed their rhetoric in practice.

Rahul 

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