The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

nation state," national and post-colonial
studies must necessarily be informed by
feminisms.
All of the articles in this varied collection
are useful and significant in some way, but
several are particularly noteworthy. Four of
the essays give an idea of the range of topics
and approaches. Julianne Burton's entertaining
piece on the making of the quite
bizarre 1945 Disney cartoon movie, The
Three Caballeros, shows how Hollywood's
attempt to construct its "Other(s)" in Latin
America proves the rule of "cross-cultural
borrowing as self aggrandising appropriation."
She also demonstrates that when cultural
expression itself becomes feminized,
socio-cultural exchange with an imperial
power takes the form of male heterosexual
conquest. Lee Edelman uses mediareportage
of the Jenkins affair (a public
washroom scandal concerning LBJ's chief
of staff) to examine the interpénétration of
American nationalism and homosexuality.
Cindy Patton details the attempt of Western
medicine, represented by AIDS-control
workers, to maintain a distinction between
an "African heterosexual AIDS" and a
"Western homosexual AIDS" by inventing
and promoting the "African monogamous
bourgeois family" (which disempowers
both women and the community) as
Africa's only solution to the catastrophe of
African AIDS. Rhonda Cobham argues that
the transformation of the anti-imperialist
struggle in Africa into a nationalist movement
heightened a crisis of individual and
collective identity that is elaborated in
recent African novels. In addition to articulating
this crisis, Nuruddin Farah's Maps
calls into question some of the most cherished
myths of modern Africa, "from the
"natural' moral superiority of oral pretechnological
cultures over literate cultures .. .
to the inevitability of certain gender and
ethnic categories."
Several contributors are particularly
effective at punctuating the complex relationship
between women and nation. Their
approaches contain a blend of the theoretical
and the pragmatic modes of feminist
criticism(s); they are perhaps more thoroughgoing
than most of the other contributors
to the volume at questioning the ways
gender has been constructed in different
cultural (con)texts. R. Radhakrishnan,
dealing with post-colonial India, underlines
the need to resist the nationalist
rhetoric which makes "woman" the "pure
and ahistorical signifier of inferiority." He
argues that feminist historiography, along
with other discourses, must secede from
the structure of nationalist totality, not to
set itself up as a different and oppositional
form of totality, but in order to "establish a
different relationship to totality," since no
one discourse should have the "ethicopolitical"
legitimacy to represent the total field
of contestations and relational dialogues. In
a similar but less intricate argument
Géraldine Heng and Janadas Devan, assessing
Singapore's "Great Marriage Debate"
which was prompted by the state's governing
(Mandarin) Chinese elite, conclude
that women "and all signs of the feminine,
are by definition always and already antinational."
In her difficult essay on a story
by Mahasweta Devi about a female tribal
bonded-labor prostitute in India, Gayatri
Spivak focuses on the space that exists prior
to the movement from old colony to new
nation. The political goals of the new
nation are determined by a "regulative
logic" derived from the old colony but
"with its interest reversed: secularism,
democracy, socialism, national identity,
capitalist development." For Spivak and
Devi there is always a space, which does not
share in the "energy of this reversal," that is
simultaneously the habitat of the subproletariat
or subaltern and the female body:
this shows us that it is possible to "consider
socio-sexual (in)difference philosophically
prior to the reversal of the establishment
codes" and hence the Aufhebung of colony