Sara Suleri
"Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and
the Postcolonial Condition." Critical
Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 756-769.
Third World Woman
"There are no women in the third world." -1. In law, women can not
bear testimony.
"Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition."
Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 756-769.
I. There is a trend of "anti-intellectualism" in the debate of
multiculturalism in the U.S. academia
II. the article's focus: feminism and postcolonialism, or "postcolonial
woman"
p. 758-59 "The coupling of postcolonial with woman...almost
inevitably leads to the simplicities that underlie unthinking celebration
of oppression, elevating the racially female voice into a metaphor for
"the good." Metaphoricity; the status of the other
III. feminism's lived experience--realism made objective truth
on theoretic level--too limited and subjective:
p. 762 To privilege the racial body in the absence of
historical context is indeed to generate an idiom that tends to waver with
impressionistic haste between abstractions of postcoloniality and the anecdotal
literalism. ... Realism...is too dangerous a term for an idiom that seeks
to raise identity to the power of theory."
Spivak "if one looks at the history of post-Enlightenment
theory, the major problem has been the problem of autobiography:
how subjective structure can, in fact, give objective truth." -the
person who knows
e. g. Trinh Min-ha (p. 761 "Grandma's story") and bell
hooks (p. 764; 765 opposes Third-World Women to Black women)
IV. "realism" in postcolonial condition--e.g. The Hudood Ordinances
in Pakistan (pp. 766- )
Hadd (limit) and Tazir (punish)
Zina (adultery) rape defined as "one where a man or a woman have
illicit sex knowing that they are not validly married to each other."pp.
767-68
p. 768 "I cite these alternative realisms and constructions of identity
in order to reiterate the problem endemic to postcolonial feminist criticism.
It is not the terrors of Islam that have unleashed the Hudood Ordinances
on Pakistan, but more probably the U.S. government's economic and ideological
support of a military regime during that bloody but eminently forgotten
decade marked by the "liberation" of Afghanistan.
Conclusion: Hadd'the limit'is precisely the realism against
which our lived experience can serve as a metaphor, and against which we
must continue to write.
The Rhetoric of India Chicago:
U. of Chicago P, 1992.
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The Rhetoric of English India
Sara Suleri's The Rhetoric of English India is a powerful challenge
to the obsession with otherness that marks the current study of colonial
discourse. Where other scholars tend to observe a strict separation between
works by Western and non-Western writers, and between ruling and
subject races,
Suleri reconstructs a diverse Anglo-India narrative in which English
and Indian idioms inevitably collude. The author focuses on the paradigmatic
moments in the multiple stories generated by British colonization of the
Indian subcontinent. By studying a wide range of materials,
from the writings of Burke to the travel logs of nineteenth-century women
such as Fanny Parks and Harriet Tytler to the fiction of Kipling,
Forster, Naipaul, and Rushdie, Suleri deftly reveals the complicity that
always operates in these stories. Her study succeeds not only in challenging
the standard chronology of imperial history; it fundamentally recasts
contemporary discourse on the theories of cultural empowerment. The
University of Chicago Press
from Sara
Suleri Goodyear Homepage |
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The rhetoric of otherness (strict binarism)
Main argument: Current study of colonialism, and even post-colonial
literature, are marked by an obsession with otherness.
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p. 1 "Even as the other is privileged in all its pluralities,
in all its alternative histories, its concept-function remain too embedded
in a theoretical duality of margin to center ultimately to allow
the cultural decentering that such critical attention surely desires.
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p. 4 break down the binarism -"To study the rhetoric
of the British Raj in both its colonial and postcolonial manifestations
is therefore to attempt to break down the incipient schizophrenia of a
critical discourse that seeks to represent domination and subordination
as though the two were mutually exclusive terms.
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example of otherness: India read as "intransigent,"
or India as unreadable., to protect the myth of colonial authority. P.
7
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Criticism of S. Rushdie's Shame
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174 "Since the book attempt to house idioms of the political
and the news-worthy, and finally can only draw attention to its own language
in a gesture of defeated surrogacy, Shame's narrative peculiarities
become paradigmatic of the casualties frequently accrued by contemporary
postcolonial writing.
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the novel's two narrative modes: 1. documentary fragments,
2. Allegorized, third-person tale
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The aura of shamefulness, self-censorship
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the novel's unhappy relation to the molecular profusion of
fact that constitutes political discourse, is Shame's undoing.'resort
to allegory or fairy-tale (the story of Omar Khayyaam, born out of a trinity
of mothers, being dismembered by Shame. )
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Its binarism'the urge to Westernization, a will to fundamentalism
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the connection between idioms of exile and adolescence--[His]
nostalgic evocations of exile recast the postcolonial writer as Peter Pan,
who, after he has learned to fly, returns home to find that his parents
have put bars on his bedroom window and a new baby in his bed. …}After
self-exile, the writer must come to terms with the literalizing
urge to return, simply in order to examine a prior history as a prison
house, …}--being a voyeur, not taking any responsibility.
p. 4 In colonial encounter, a disembodied nation of cultural
exchange merges "love" with "fear and loathing," thus creating a historical
context where nationalism is synonymous with terror.
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183 As Stanley Wolpert's biography demonstrates, the sheer
unlikeliness of Jinnah's rise to power in the Muslim League such an overdetermined
relation between national movements and religion …}In the context of political
mythmaking in Pakistan, Bhutto's need to serve as a truant to that country's
originary myth…}is a compelling narrative that no novel about the latter
ruler can afford to ignore.
184 After twelve years of military rule, Pakistan was hungry for a flamboyant,
civil ruler; Bhutto was both fetish and scapegoat for this desire.
Questions for Meatless Days
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What kind of national history is presented?
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Does it avoid "realism" on the one hand and easy allegorization on the
other?
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How are women related to nation?
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Why are there no women in the third world?
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Meatless Days
1. "There are no women in the third world."
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Only the burned and the silent stay in the country
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narrative method'associational e,g,
4. the relations between the public (nation) and the private (women)?
1. "There are no women in the third world." -1. In law, women can not
bear testimony.
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Only the burned and the silent stay in the country
The genealogy of this family:
Dadi--p. 3 religious
the goal p. 5
a recognizable loneliness 6
more good in women 7
smelling death 8 |
father--a rebellious son 7; later devout
Muslim
Welsh mother--killed |
Sara
Ifat -run away to get married , killed in a car accident
Tillat
Irfan'born in England, serious, refuses food
Shahid |
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narrative method--associational
4. the relations between the public (nation) and the private (women)?
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causal, b. parallel, c. allegorical, d. alternative'national history
marked by cooks, marked by personal changes, esp. Dadi's
the middle years--Dadi's loneliness
Bhutto's regime--trying times: Dadi' complaint about being lifted
by Shahib (1971)'Dadi's conflagration
Zia's regime -Dadi forgets to pray
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knowing, p. 10 or indifferent p. 2 Dadi