De-naturalizing ecological disaster: colonialism,racism and the global Dust Bowl of the 1930s

This paper reinterprets the Dust Bowl on the US Southern Plains as one dramatic regional manifestation of a global socio-ecological crisis generated by the realities of settler colonialism and imperialism. In so doing, it seeks to deepen historical-theoretical understandings of the racialized division of nature and humanity making possible the global problem of soil erosion by the 1930s and forming the heart of the ecological rift of capitalism. The framework developed here challenges prevalent conceptions of the Dust Bowl, in which colonial and racial-domination aspects of the crisis are invisible, and affirms the necessity of deeper conceptions of environmental (in)justice.     

The production of a woman in Andrei Tarkovsky's the sacrifice

In this essay, I explore the semiotics of the terno, the Philippine national dress, creatively interpreted by diasporic artists as a dense metaphor for the proper and improper Filipina. These artistic deployments of the terno lay bare unquestioned notions of Filipina femininity and nationalism to be fabrications of colonialism, militarization and globalization. The reconfigurations of the infamous “butterfly dress” by multimedia artist groups Barrionics and Mail Order Brides (M.O.B.) take center stage in my discussion. The genealogy of the terno I focus on in this article emphasizes alteration and transformation, to resist facile binaries of the nation as traditional and the diaspora as the site of modern and innovative modifications. My historicization of the terno underscores it as an emergent form in which to situate the uses of the terno in Filipino American performance projects within the history of the terno itself. Specifically, the essay focuses on the defamiliarization of feminine constructs that operate both in the nation and the diaspora, as well as to foreground the imbrications of colonial histories and our neocolonial present in the current global circulation of Filipina bodies. I highlight how these artists in the Filipino diaspora spectacularize the inchoateness of categories of gender, race and sexuality. Their performance works delink the dressee from the dress, the terno from the Filipina, the dress from the girl and the boy, the dress from the straight and from the queer, the dress from the diasporic and from the national. Within such figurations, the terno emerges as an overprivileged icon – of ideal womanhood and of the mother nation – whose iconicity is re-routed through bodies that do not belong.     

Theorizing Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean

A central thesis of this paper is that the philosophical contradictions of liberal ideologies predispose states to institute unjust gender systems. I argue that postcolonial Caribbean states have inherited a complexity of social relations and structures from the Enlightenment discourses of Liberalism, yet they seem unaware that the discourses which created colonialism and Western expansion were themselves part of the Enlightenment project of modernity. In this paper I apply this theoretical framework to a historical analysis of gender systems in the twentieth-century Caribbean. The paper examines three distinct periods: 1900–37, 1937–50s and 1950s–90s, the transition from colonial to postcolonial modernizing societies, and attempts to generate a gendered analytical model which can be widely applied both within and outside of the region.     

Fieldwork experience: Relived and reconsidered. The Agrarian society of Uttar Pradesh∗

Fieldwork is currently regarded as basic to the anthropologist's method of studying rural communities. Though I studied social anthropology as a student, my interest in fieldwork in U.P. villages in the early 1950s came from different sources ‐from the tradition of fieldwork‐based rural studies initiated by R.K. Mukerjee in my university and from my contact with the writings of Mao Tse‐Tung in the course of my brief involvement in revolutionary politics. What gave special significance to my fieldwork was my theoretical interest in exploring the relevance of the concept of class as a tool for understanding the dynamics of predominantly agrarian, ex‐colonial countries. Fieldwork helped me to gain an insight into the peculiarities of the agrarian structure in an ex‐colonial country which showed rural‐urban antagonism more sharply than internal class polarisation. It is through fieldwork that I became aware of the role played by ecological and geographical factors in determining the peculiarities of the agrarian structure in each region. Field experience also made me aware of the conflicting pulls of class conflict and community solidarity operating simultaneously in Indian villages. The inadequacy of fieldwork as a method was also revealed to me sharply inthe course of fieldwork itself. When I tried to explore how the evolution of the agrarian structure in a region was shaped not merely by the natural factors specific to a region but the political‐economic forces operating from outside the region, I found I had reached the limits of field work. In the absence of a broader perspective of a macro theory of social change, fieldwork yielded only a bewildering mass of facts and information but no meaningful insights.     

Intersectionality,the Production of Difference and Norwegian Transnational Adoptees' Identity Work

Does intersectionality contribute to the production of knowledge, and if so, how? Does it provide us with new possibilities, or does it obscure rather than reveal anything new? In this article, I intend to further discussions about intersectionality by relating this concept to my own study of transnational adoptees' identity work. I focus on how intersectionality as an analytical tool can be operationalized in a concrete empirical study. I also bring the empirical data into dialogue with the concept of intersectionality in order to discuss how intersectionality can be developed further by interrogating the ways in which categories intersect.     

As unconscious and gay as a trout in a stream?: turning the trope of the Australian Girl

The instability of colonial representational economies, identities and tropes is the subject of analysis in this paper. I take as my starting point the anxieties that were generated during the late 19th century in relation to what I nominate the fictitiousness of settler subjects in colonial Australia. In order to examine these historical concerns and their explicitly gendered representations, I consider in detail one text, Rosa Campbell Praed's Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush (1902). This text was published in 1902 and was one of a number of romance novels this author produced for readerships in both colonial Australia and England. This adventure romance features the trope of the Australian Girl and also engages in varying degrees with discourses of colonial ethnography that, to my knowledge, have not been examined in relation to the ideological production and effects of this figure.     

Foreclosed Matter – On the Material Melancholy of Feminist New Materialism

In this article I investigate the need to provide feminism with a theory of matter. I argue that the attention to matter given by New Materialist Karen Barad is symptomatic of a refusal to accept the limits of matter and its constituting effects. I suggest that a critical definition of matter can be found in the works of Judith Butler and especially in her definition of melancholy in relation to performativity. I argue that melancholy is central for the understanding of not only gendered desire, but also matter. Matter is an intrinsic part of Butler’s theory on gender and desire which she presents in opposition to both social constructivism and biologism. I also read performativity as a concept introduced by Butler to point towards the foreclosure of matter as necessary for comprehensible bodies. I relate my reading of matter in Butler’s texts to Barad’s ‘matter as performative’. This ‘misconstruction’ I see as symptomatic of a ‘material melancholy’ in the works of Barad. My main intention is to show how we as feminist researchers need to see that matter can be defined and analysed in many different manners and that there is not one (old nor new) way to do this.     

Body/Mine: A Chaos Narrative of Cyborg Subjectivities and Liminal Experiences

This is a story about how I came to construct my postoperatively scarred body as a mine site, my liminal experiences of reconstructively normalizing its appearance as a cyborg, and what that means to me, conceptually and physically, as a feminist poststructuralist researcher interested in how the body of a theorist performs and is (re)presented within theoretical spaces. My story takes the form of a mitigated “chaos narrative” that questions linear modernist medical discourses of rehabilitation and restitution by discussing the chaotic dynamics of my cancer experiences, and relates concepts of cyborg subjectivities and other feminist poststructuralist work to my corporeal body and the body of my research in environmental education.     

Project 0395A.ĐC | Performing disorientation

The end of the Vietnam/American War lead to one of the largest exoduses of the latter part of the twentieth century: more than 3 million people escaped from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos over the course of two decades starting in 1975, many by boat and an estimated 1 million died at sea. How do you witness and retell stories of violence in the aftermath of war and dispossession at sea in the context of U.S. empire and Vietnamese socialist revolution? Project 0395A.?C, a multi-media installation by Vietnamese artist, Ly Hoang Ly, intentionally structures and choreographs disorientation to grapple with the condition of being dispossessed at sea, as the Vietnamese refugee is suspended at sea and entangled in histories of French colonialism and caught at the crux of U.S. imperial war and Vietnamese socialist revolution. I argue that disorientation is a performative experience and method that performs an act of refusal to break voyeuristic modes of consuming histories of violence and reorients the body to another theory of Vietnamese refugee subjectivity. I analyze how Ly creates a performative installation and performs with water as the core aesthetic material used to frame, dialogue, and re-narrate a story of Vietnamese refugee subjectivity.     

‘Writing from the Fringe of Empire’: understanding the gaps,silences and underlying whiteness in Jane Sarah Doudy’s literary works

Jane Sarah Doudy was a writer who often wrote to project an image of an ideal colonial community. Embedded within this literary construction were very clear ideas about cultural norms, colonial patriotism and racial hierarchies. Her literary works, however, have been shelved and forgotten for the better part of seventy‐five years. They have been revisited here to provide a fresh new site for acknowledging the political, cultural and historical significance of white settler women’s narratives and for understanding how one woman’s ‘dialogue of domination’ reveals much about the complex interracial boundaries and relationships that often occurred on the fringes of empire.     

Gender,Nationalism and Colonial Policy: prostitution in the Jewish settlement of Mandate Palestine, 1918–1948

The aim of this article is to discuss the way prostitution was perceived during the British rule in Palestine (1918–48), analyzing the differing perspectives of the British colonial authorities and the Jewish national community. The major concerns of the civil and military colonial authorities were focused on issues of ‘social hygiene’ and the trafficking in women and children. This often involved the transfer of both legislation and discourse from the metropolis. The Jewish community, on the other hand, was concerned mainly with the evolving national project. Prostitution was seen as a ‘mixing ground’ of Jewish women and British and Arab men, thus threatening the boundaries of the national collective. Whilst the article is attentive to the importance of studying prostitution in its historical specificity, it also considers the many ways in which this case study illuminates the complex series of relationships between both colonialism and prostitution, and gender and nationalism. Women were important to the imagining of the nation not only for their symbolic power—as ‘mothers of the nation’, for example; the construction of nationalist discourses also involved focusing on ‘negative’ gendered phenomena, such as prostitution. In these ways, the article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the multiple significance of gendered categories in the process of nation-building.     

Centering labor in the land grab debate

Placing labor at the center of the global ‘land-grab’ debate helps sharpen critical insights at two scales. At the scale of agricultural enterprises, a labor perspective highlights the jobs generated, and the rewards received, by people who work in and around large farms. This approach guides my critical reading of the report prepared by a World Bank team that argues for large-scale land acquisition as a way to reduce poverty. Using data from within the report itself, I show why poverty reduction is a very unlikely result. I develop the argument further by drawing on research in colonial and contemporary Indonesia, where large-scale plantations and associated smallholder contract schemes have a long history. A labor perspective is also relevant at the national and transnational scale, where it highlights the predicament of people whose labor is not needed by the global capitalist system. In much of the global South, the anticipated transition from the farm to factory has not taken place and education offers no solution, as vast numbers of educated people are unemployed. Unless vast numbers of jobs are created, or a global basic income grant is devised to redistribute the wealth generated in highly productive but labor-displacing ventures, any program that robs rural people of their foothold on the land must be firmly rejected.     

history as narration: resistance and subaltern subjectivity in Micaela Bastidas’ ‘confession’

This paper focusses on the negotiations in which many subaltern peoples engage within contexts of unequal power relations in colonial settings like eighteenth-century Peru. The trial and ‘confession’ of Micaela Bastidas, an indigenous mestiza and wife of the Inca rebel Túpac Amaru II, allows for an analysis of the complexity of her subjectivity and agency, both as products of colonial impositions and Andean notions of gender complementarity and power. As a woman, wife of a noble curaca and member of a conquered indigenous population, she defied rigidly bipolar colonial ethnic and gender norms. Skilfully engaging in ‘rituals of subordination’ through the manipulation of discriminatory colonial expectations, Micaela refused to share what was expected of her, subverting colonial gender and power hierarchies, albeit momentarily.     

‘I Want to Wear It’: Fashioning Black Feminism in Mahogany (1975)

ABSTRACT

In this article I focus on the portrayal of fashionable clothing in the 1975 film Mahogany and connect it to the history of African American women engaging with sartorial self-representation as a means to assert their visibility in American culture. My aim is to analyse Mahogany’s emphasis on brightly-coloured highly-ornamented clothing, which has a long history of signifying bad taste and became part of accusations of racial and sexual inferiority. I want to show how Mahogany’s representation of fashion undermines the historically entrenched bias against colourful, highly adorned clothing while also revealing how this bias has played a subtle but significant role in the racism and sexism black women have encountered, further (but not finally) impeding them from the forms of recognition the category of femininity offers. Mahogany represents those impediments and repeats the sexual and racial commodification underlying them, but also resists them (albeit quite subtly) through the film’s loving display of fashion and its attention to the work of designing and making clothes. Mahogany tells a story of bright sartorial resistance that can be understood as an articulation of black feminist desires for women of colour to be able to compose the images through which their bodies are perceived.     

Survival and song: Women poets of the Harlem Renaissance

This paper concerns Black women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Considered by modern critics to have adopted anachronistic subject matter and to be out of step with the militant race‐consciousness of the period, these poets have been largely neglected in discussions of the 1920's, despite the fact that this was the most significant flowering of Black women's writing until the 1960's. I provide an interpretive model that reveals the rebellious messages in this verse, one that helps explain the poets’ imaginative choices by placing them in their historical context and linking them to a female poetic tradition. This approach makes clear the affirming nature of Renaissance poetry by women and makes it accessible to us today, anticipating as it does contemporary issues and forging a modern sensibility.     

activist-mothers maybe,sisters surely? Black British feminism,absence and transformation

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women’s theorising as a crucial component of the methodological métissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence.     

Life (Hi)story writing: The relationship between talk and text

This paper is based on my experience of life (hi)story work with Aboriginal women. It will focus mainly on the development of a collaborative methodology between Patsy Cohen and myself and the process of creating the text Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs ¹.

Life (hi)story writing lies uneasily on the boundary between biography and autobiography and as such challenges many of our assumptions about telling and writing a life. It has traditionally been regarded as ‘an extensive record of a life told to and recorded by another who then edits and writes the life as though it were autobiography‘². More recently feminist researchers have redefined this process to emphasise its collaborative nature ‘in life history, two stories together produce one. A speaker and a listener ask, respond, present and edit a life‘³. Such a definition focuses our attention on the relationship, the inevitable power relations involved in the processes of the production of knowledge, the interface between talk and text and the need for alternative models to conventional biography and autobiography. Both the process and the text produced by this method are potentially deconstructive of conventional autobiography and biography. They are not simply deconstructive, however, as new narratives and new forms can be created out of this process which enable us to re‐evaluate the telling of all our lives.     

Jesusa Rodriguez: An inconvenient woman

For the symposium “Where Is Ana Mendieta,” I discussed and projected PowerPoint images, starting with my 1963 Eye Body – 36 Transformative Actions as a precedent for the explicit, artist body as both image and image-maker. This work, as well as Body Collage, Water Light/Water Needle and Meat Joy, provided a practice for Ana's intensive submersion with her body as subject. Images of our parallel affinities within natural forms and materials were shown, establishing our urgent permissions to regard the sensory, psychic realms in which our bodies manifested energy against cultural constrictions and prohibitions. Also shown was my homage Hand/Heart for Ana Mendieta inspired by a dream instruction sent by Ana shortly after her death.