Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 09:28:35 -0500 (EST)
From: Lisa McNee <lm23-AT-qsilver.queensu.ca>
Subject: Re: Who is "us?" WAS: the enemy and they is us


I appreciate the comments that Keith Sprouse and Judith Tabron made
regarding the difficulties of sustaining binary oppositions between "us"
and "them." As Judith remarked, this is an extremely naive position. I
would like to add that taking this position would simply mean returning to
the discourses that I assume postcolonial theorists have attempted to
deconstruct--i.e. the colonial or imperialist attitude that we see writ
large in westerns, exoticizing fiction, etc. Moreover, shifting positions
and subjectivities make it impossible to inhabit one category or the other
in all cases. 

The example of gender makes this clear. Many women of color
were told to reject feminism in order to unite with black men and fight
racism. This meant accepting patriarchalism and male dominance. The case
of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is another example that highlights
these difficulties. We can't possibly pretend that repression and
colonization of Palestinians is acceptable while at the same time
supporting human rights; however, Israel most certainly needs to be
protected as the homeland of all Jewish people in the world, for they face
anti-Semitism. 

Who is the enemy? Who is "us" and who is "them" in this
case? It is my opinion that as long as we retain the categories of "the
enemy," we will never get beyond colonizing discourses.
Realistically, however, I believe that we can always fight for equality
and justice, but we will never actually arrive at some utopia that
embodies these qualities. This is as true of academic discourse as it is
of policy-making. Perhaps this is why Amilcar Cabral's motto, A lutta
continua! still holds such force? 

Lisa McNee
French Studies
Queen's University


On Thu, 2 Apr 1998, Keith Alan Sprouse wrote:

> that suffers from neo-colonialism. As far as your question about
> "postcolonial" itself being reducible to "oppressed", I think that position
> is just that: reductive. It's not a question of some clear moral superiority
> with one group (presumably anyone in the US, in this example) being the
> "oppressors" thus bad, and the other group being the "oppressed" thus good.
> To think so posits a much more monolithic view of the work than most of us
> can imagine. However, and this is the point that I was making, I do believe
> that the attempt to *erase* one's position in unequal power relations IS
> morally questionable. And the line of reasoning that lets pretty much
> everyone except the Europeans claim to be the "victims" of colonialism,
> without dealing with their implication in unequal power relations, certainly
> constitutes just such an attempt.
> 
> Keith:
> On might argue that, since the claims of feminist studies have to do with
> the fact that women exist in all cultures, then of course femist studies are
> relevant to all cultures. Since the category "woman" is fairly well
> delineated in this approach, we might continue, feminist studies manages to
> emerge as a coherent body of knowledge. But I think it's interesting to
> point out here that this has been problematized by many non-Western and/or
> women of color, as we all know, for precisely its failure to make itself
> adaptable to cultural difference, that is, for its claims to universalism
> (which is usually the critique made by postcolonial scholars against the
> colonizers, so we probably don't want to be guilty of that). Thus we need to
> be careful of our claims to universal applicability. 
> 



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