1. Foucault, "The Political Function of Intellectuals," trans. Colin Gordon, Radical Philosophy 17 (1977): 12.

2. Foucault, "Politics and Ethics: An Interview," trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader , ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 374, emphasis added.

3. Lâm, "Feeling Foreign in Feminism," Signs 19, 4 (1994): 890-891.

4. For other discussions about the position, location, and history of feminist scholars of third-world origin in the first world, see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience," Copyright 1 (Fall 1987): 33-44; Lata Mani, "Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception," Inscriptions, Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists 5 (1989): 1-23; Ruth Behar, "The Biography in the Shadow," Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), pp. 320-342; Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

5. B. B. Misra, The Indian Middle Classes: Their Growth in Modern Times (London, New York, Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 10-11.

6. "Discussing Modernity, 'Third World,' and The Man Who Envied Women ," with Laleen Jayamanne, Geeta Kapur, and Yvonne Rainer, Art and Text 23/24 (1987): 44.

7. Macaulay, "Indian Education" (Minute of the 2nd of February 1935), in Prose and Poetry , ed. G. M. Young, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1967), pp. 719-730. In Macaulay's formulation, this class was defined by its differential status: "a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in morals and in intellect" (p. 729, emphasis added). It would be worth investigating how this differential identity has changed.

8. See Gauri Viswanathan's study, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 3: "The history of education in British India shows that certain humanistic functions traditionally associated with literature—for example, the shaping of character or the development of the aesthetic sense or the disciplines of ethical thinking—were considered essential to the processes of sociopolitical control by the guardians of the same tradition."

9. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. xii.

10. For some varying assessments of this process based on different historical periods and levels of analysis see Lata Mani, "The Construction of Women as Tradition in Nineteenth Century Bengal," in Cultural Critique 2, 7 (Special Issue: "The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse") (Fall 1987): 119-156; Veena Mazumdar "The Social Reform Movement in India from Ranade to Nehru," in Indian Women from Purdah to Modernity , ed. B. R. Nanda (New Delhi: Radiant Publishers, 1976); Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 1849-1905 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984); Partha Chatterjee, "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question," in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History , eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1989), pp. 231-253; and Radha Kumar, A History of Doing: An Illustrative Account of Movements for Women's Rights and Feminism in India, 1800-1990 (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1993).

11. Chatterjee, "Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonised Women—the Contest in India," mimeo, p. 16. For a slightly altered version, see Chatterjee, "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question," p. 246.

12. Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books; and New Delhi: Kali Press for Women, 1986), pp. 107- 108.

Susie Tharu has this to say about prominent women during the nationalist struggle:

Individual women, especially those who came from families that had risen economically and socially during the colonial regime, were able to develop, move close to and sometimes even achieve leadership and power (often held tenaciously), for a very old and deeply rooted ideological sanction had been obtained for the growth. However, the women who emerged from this phase, often were . . . vociferous about the traditional role of women. . . . These women rarely admit the real

oppression of women in our society, for they believe the way out of it is open to any who has the strength and talent to try, and of course the virtue to succeed.

13. See Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, Daughters of Independence: Gender, Caste and Class in India (London and New Delhi: Zed Press, 1986), especially chapter 17, "Education: The Path to Emancipation?" for first person accounts by Indian women with professional occupations.

14. An excellent example of such a view of an Indian woman's subjectivity is Rama Mehta's The Western Educated Hindu Woman (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1970).

15. The term "sanctioned ignorance" comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's powerful critique of Michel Foucault's position as a self-contained Western intellectual. She focuses on his "blind spot" concerning the techniques for the appropriation of space that ravaged the colonies during precisely the same historical period that held his attention, but for other matters. His excavations remained with the new inventions of power-in-spacing in the European theater alone—in prisons, asylums, and hospitals—through Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. See her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture , eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271-313. Her point is well taken. A major purpose of this study, however, is not to stop with the production of sanctioned ignorances amongst Western intellectuals but to examine our own as well.

16. Rich, "Notes toward a Politics of Location," in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1986), p. 211.

17. Maxine Schwartz Seller, ed., Immigrant Women (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), p. 5.

18. Ibid.

17. Maxine Schwartz Seller, ed., Immigrant Women (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), p. 5.

18. Ibid.

19. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983).

20. "It can be difficult to be generous to earlier selves, and keeping faith with the continuity of our journeys is especially hard in the United States, where identities and loyalties have been shed and replaced without a tremor, all in the name of becoming American"—Rich, "Notes toward a Politics of Location," p. 223.

21. Quintanales, "I Paid Very Hard for My Immigrant Ignorance," in This Bridge Called My Back , p. 151; emphasis added.

22. This phrase is the title of Moraga's foreword to the second edition of This Bridge Called My Back.

23. The relatively insignificant numbers of these immigrants, overwhelmingly Sikh (but called "Hindus" or "ragheads") was due to systematic racial discrimination by the U.S. government and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). This was backed by a strong, predominantly working class movement for "Asiatic exclusion" that was securely in place by the time of their arrival on the Canadian and U.S. West Coast. The first immigrants were men, with women only joining in considerable numbers after 1946. There is now a growing body of literature on their history in this country—see for example Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988); South Asians in North America: An Annotated and Selected Bibliography , ed. Jane Singh, Occasional Paper No. 14, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Sucheta Mazumdar, ''Punjabi Agricultural Workers in California, 1905-1945," in Labor Immigration under Capitalism , eds. Edna Bonacich and Lucie Cheng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 549-578. At a total of around 1,500 prior to World War II, the Indian-American community has shot up from 10,000 in 1965 to close to a million in the intervening years.

24. According to newspaper reports at the time, a group calling itself the "dot-busters" (the "dot" referring to the practice among Indian women to wear a red spot, or bindi , on their foreheads) claimed responsibility for a series of assaults on businesses and individuals from the Indian community in Jersey City beginning in October 1987. In some reports, the assailants were identified as belonging to Jersey City's other minority communities. Their demand was that "Indians get out of town."

25. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989), p. 476. For an excellent study of the place of Asian-Americans in contemporary U.S. education, see Dana Y. Takagi, The Retreat from Race: Asian-American Admissions and Racial Politics (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

26. I borrow this phrase from Teresa de Lauretis's book Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987).

27. Rich, "Disloyal to Civilisation: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia," in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966—1978 (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1979), P. 290.

28. Here is an interesting aside concerning the differential working out of the power webs between the sciences and technology, on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities, on the other, in terms of the relative proportions of Indian women students in these disciplines: while the number of such women in India (as in the United States) decreases sharply from the humanities to the "hard" sciences, the select group making its way to the United States is stratified in the opposite direction—most of my female peers graduate with degrees in engineering, medicine, the sciences, and economics.

29. Foucault, "Intellectuals and Power," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews , ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 205-217.

30. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" p. 273.

31. Scott, "Locating the Anthropological Subject: Postcolonial Anthropologists in Other Places," in Inscriptions, Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists 5 (1989): 75-85.

32. Michele le Deuff, "Women and Philosophy," in Radical Philosophy 17 (1977), cited in Meaghan Morris, "A-mazing Grace: Notes on Mary Daly's Poetics," in The Pirate's Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Post-modernism (London and New York: Verso, 1988), p. 43.

33. Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies , 14, 3 (1988): 584.

34. Ibid., p. 583.

33. Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies , 14, 3 (1988): 584.

34. Ibid., p. 583.

35. Stephen Heath, "Male Feminism," in Dalhousie Review 64, 2 (1986): 270. A little further on he briefly engages with the possibility that men take up their very masculinity in response to feminism's challenge ("Pornography is the theory and rape the practice"). But he subsequently shies away, and the essay becomes increasingly noisy. It is as though the shift from "universal" to "masculine,'' though easy to name, is still being resisted.

36. For a range of early examples that are framed precisely by the relations between and conceptions of different groups of women within the United States, see Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology , The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978); B. Ruby Rich, "Feminism and Sexuality in the 1980s," Review Essay, Feminist Studies , 12, 3 (Fall 1986): 525-561; This Bridge Called My Back ; Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith eds., Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (New York: Long Haul Press, 1984). This kind of

cross-questioning has been taking place elsewhere as well: the Nigerian critic Chikwenye Okonjo Ogumyemi addresses in turn Buchi Emecheta in London, white feminists, and, more interestingly, Alice Walker in her essay "Womanism: The dynamics of the contemporary Black female novel in English," Signs 11 (Autumn 1985): 63-80. Gayatri Spivak, the diasporic woman abroad, is questioned by university women in India in an interview that was reprinted as "The Postcolonial Critic" in Sarah Harasym, ed., The Postcolonial Critic , pp. 67-74. In the 1990s, the modes of address and forms of interrogation between feminists have become even more complex. To take but two examples, see Jane Roland Martin, "Methodological Essentialism, False Differences and Other Dangerous Traps," Signs 19, 3 (Spring 1994): 630-657, and Margaret Homans, "Women of Color" and "Feminist Theory,'' New Literary History 25 , 1 (Winter 1994): 73-94. These essays are significant because of their three -dimensional structure, which goes beyond the more common dialogic model: in each case the author questions specific feminists about their use or appropriation of other feminists' work.

37. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17, 2 (Summer 1987): 65.

38. Ibid., p. 67.

39. Ibid., p. 80.

37. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17, 2 (Summer 1987): 65.

38. Ibid., p. 67.

39. Ibid., p. 80.

37. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17, 2 (Summer 1987): 65.

38. Ibid., p. 67.

39. Ibid., p. 80.

40. Martin and Mohanty, "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do with It?" in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies , ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 193; emphasis original. As I point out in chapter three, too few white feminists have explored the question of racism as it structures their lives. Some examples would be Marilyn Frye, "On Being White: Thinking toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy," in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (New York: The Crossing Press, 1983), pp. 110-127; Adrienne Rich, "Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia," in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-78 (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company), pp. 275-310; and Ruth Frankenberg White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). For a critical response to Rich, see doris davenport, "The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Wimmin," in This Bridge Called My Back , pp. 85-90.

41. Pratt, "Identity: Skin Blood Heart," in Yours in Struggle, Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism , eds. Bulkin, Pratt, and Smith, p. 39.

42. Martin and Mohanty, "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do with It?" p. 202.

43. Pratt, "Identity: Skin Blood Heart," p. 19.

44. This phrase comes from the title of Richard Rodriguez's book Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, An Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1983).

45. Trinh, "Difference: 'A Special Third World Women Issue,'" in Feminist Review 25 (March 1987): 14; emphasis original.

46. For a recent account of its history see Henrietta Moore, Feminism and Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

47. Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," Boundary 2 (Spring/Fall 1984): 337.

48. See her fine essay, "Who Claims Alterity?" in Remaking History , eds. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, Discussions in Contemporary Culture 4, Dia Art Foundation (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), pp. 269-292, and "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

49. There are many instances where Spivak, for example, has done more than any other theorist to hold on to necessary distinctions between "the investigator" and "the woman at the other end." Her contrast between the paradigmatic colonial and neocolonial subject, however, has also effected the kind of elision and transparency I am concerned with. In "the Political Economy of Women as Seen by a Literary Critic," she demarcates "the old colonial subject" under territorial imperialism in terms of his (and occasionally her) violent production through the imposition of ''a new code of law, a new system of education, and a new perception of needs" (in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics , ed. Elizabeth Weed [New York: Routledge, 1989], p. 224). Today, instead, there are "hordes of women [in Asia's export-processing zones] who, because of the patriarchal structures of parental and conjugal power are the new army of 'permanently casual' labor working below the minimum wage—these women represent the international neo-colonial subject paradigmatically" (Ibid., p. 223). It is not clear to me why these two subjects should so singularly and exclusively stand in for the colonial and postcolonial periods, respectively. Although territorial imperialism did see the emergence of a new middle class transformed by the epistemic violence of law, education, and desire, the establishment of empire depended much more, if anything, on the production and exploitation of working classes and subalterns located otherwise in the colonial formation. Again, the elaborate "ideological" constitution of subjects continues to be invented and reproduced internationally and across various classes today. I am trying to suggest that postcolonial feminists like ourselves are not an insignificant strand in the webs of international neocolonialism and should not, therefore, be rendered invisible between such depictions of "the investigator," the "old" and the "new" colonial subjects.

48. See her fine essay, "Who Claims Alterity?" in Remaking History , eds. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, Discussions in Contemporary Culture 4, Dia Art Foundation (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), pp. 269-292, and "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

49. There are many instances where Spivak, for example, has done more than any other theorist to hold on to necessary distinctions between "the investigator" and "the woman at the other end." Her contrast between the paradigmatic colonial and neocolonial subject, however, has also effected the kind of elision and transparency I am concerned with. In "the Political Economy of Women as Seen by a Literary Critic," she demarcates "the old colonial subject" under territorial imperialism in terms of his (and occasionally her) violent production through the imposition of ''a new code of law, a new system of education, and a new perception of needs" (in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics , ed. Elizabeth Weed [New York: Routledge, 1989], p. 224). Today, instead, there are "hordes of women [in Asia's export-processing zones] who, because of the patriarchal structures of parental and conjugal power are the new army of 'permanently casual' labor working below the minimum wage—these women represent the international neo-colonial subject paradigmatically" (Ibid., p. 223). It is not clear to me why these two subjects should so singularly and exclusively stand in for the colonial and postcolonial periods, respectively. Although territorial imperialism did see the emergence of a new middle class transformed by the epistemic violence of law, education, and desire, the establishment of empire depended much more, if anything, on the production and exploitation of working classes and subalterns located otherwise in the colonial formation. Again, the elaborate "ideological" constitution of subjects continues to be invented and reproduced internationally and across various classes today. I am trying to suggest that postcolonial feminists like ourselves are not an insignificant strand in the webs of international neocolonialism and should not, therefore, be rendered invisible between such depictions of "the investigator," the "old" and the "new" colonial subjects.

50. Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes," p. 336; emphasis added.

51. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), pp. 323-324.

52. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World—A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Press, 1986), p. 17.

53. Ibid., p. 17.

52. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World—A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Press, 1986), p. 17.

53. Ibid., p. 17.

54. Johnson, "Introduction" to A World Of Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 4.

55. Omvedt, We Will Smash this Prison: Indian Women in Struggle (London: Zed Press, 1980), p. 18.

56. Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity: Reading Between East and West , (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. xi.

1. Wherever it has seemed necessary to distinguish this contemporary body of "theory" from modes of theorizing in general, I have placed it in quotes.

2. Bhabha, "The Commitment to Theory," New Formations 5 (Summer 1988): 6-7.

3. Ibid., p. 16.

2. Bhabha, "The Commitment to Theory," New Formations 5 (Summer 1988): 6-7.

3. Ibid., p. 16.

4. Dhareshwar, "The Predicament of Theory," in Martin Kreiswirth and Mark A. Cheetham, eds., Theory Between the Disciplines: Authority, Vision, Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), p. 235.

5. Bhabha, "The Commitment to Theory," p. 16.

6. Dhareshwar, "The Predicament of Theory," p. 242.

7. Harari, "Nostalgia and Critical Theory," in Thomas M. Kavenagh ed., The Limits of Theory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 169.

8. Skinner, introduction to The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (London: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 12.

9. Only Lévi-Strauss and the Annales historians have obvious affiliations outside philosophy. But their inclusion remains just as obvious, given the centrality of structuralism in their work, a "grand theory" of philosophical proportions in its cross-cultural and historical reach. Indeed, as Judith Butler has incisively pointed out in Lévi-Strauss's case, "[a]lthough Lévi-Strauss reports in Tristes Tropiques that he left philosophy because anthropology provided a more concrete texture to the analysis of human life, he nevertheless assimilates that cultural texture to a totalizing logical structure that effectively returns his analyses to the decontextualized philosophical structures he purported to leave." See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 39.

10. Johnson, "Introduction," A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 2. Cited hereafter as WD. See also The Critical Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 1980.

11. One reason the practice of deconstruction in particular has been able to resist its partial and composite structure has something to do with Derrida's professional affiliations, his predilection for those texts that constitute the canon of Western metaphysics. Even with a different subject, such as "woman" or "Geschlecht," the authors chosen for scrutiny are Heidegger and Nietzsche. How do matters stand, then, in an essay such as "The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, In Admiration"? (reproduced in Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili eds., For Nelson Mandela , [New York: Seaver Books, 1987], pp. 11-42). Derrida analyzes one of Mandela's early speeches from 1962, "Black Man in a White Court: First Court Statement," to show us the reasons behind our admiration for this figure, still in prison at the time of his writing. It is Mandela's ''force of reflection," he says, the reflectiveness with which he admires the spirit of the Enlightenment and its proclamation of respect for a universal Law, that we in turn admire so intensely. With someone as reflective as Mandela, and in the face of the monstrosity of South Africa's state racism, this respect gains a phenomenality perhaps for the first time. On the one hand, Derrida is very aware that it is questionable to depict "the struggle against apartheid, wherever it takes place and such as Mandela carries it on and reflects it, . . . [as] a sort of specular opposition, a domestic war that the West carried on with itself . . . [a]n internal contradiction which would not put up with either a radical otherness or a true dissymmetry" (Ibid., p. 16). He also does not forget that Mandela's admiration stems as much from a collective memory of the democratic structure of early African societies as from the existence of the Magna Carta or the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man. On the other hand, however, Derrida seems content to place Mandela's respect for a Law he himself has never seen enacted in a quasi-Kantian conscience—namely, that groundless place without ontological basis—because such a conscience can provide no reasons for its existence. Why does Derrida foreclose on Mandela's own response to a similar question in court, a response that took the form of an account of his own life (Ibid., pp. 33-34)?

For a related and extremely provocative analysis, counterposing the aporetic claims of the Enlightenment with the paradoxes of a postcolonial identity politics, see Simon During, "Waiting for the Post: Some relations between modernity, colonization and writing," in Ariel 20, 4 (October 1989): 31-61.)

10. Johnson, "Introduction," A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 2. Cited hereafter as WD. See also The Critical Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 1980.

11. One reason the practice of deconstruction in particular has been able to resist its partial and composite structure has something to do with Derrida's professional affiliations, his predilection for those texts that constitute the canon of Western metaphysics. Even with a different subject, such as "woman" or "Geschlecht," the authors chosen for scrutiny are Heidegger and Nietzsche. How do matters stand, then, in an essay such as "The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, In Admiration"? (reproduced in Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili eds., For Nelson Mandela , [New York: Seaver Books, 1987], pp. 11-42). Derrida analyzes one of Mandela's early speeches from 1962, "Black Man in a White Court: First Court Statement," to show us the reasons behind our admiration for this figure, still in prison at the time of his writing. It is Mandela's ''force of reflection," he says, the reflectiveness with which he admires the spirit of the Enlightenment and its proclamation of respect for a universal Law, that we in turn admire so intensely. With someone as reflective as Mandela, and in the face of the monstrosity of South Africa's state racism, this respect gains a phenomenality perhaps for the first time. On the one hand, Derrida is very aware that it is questionable to depict "the struggle against apartheid, wherever it takes place and such as Mandela carries it on and reflects it, . . . [as] a sort of specular opposition, a domestic war that the West carried on with itself . . . [a]n internal contradiction which would not put up with either a radical otherness or a true dissymmetry" (Ibid., p. 16). He also does not forget that Mandela's admiration stems as much from a collective memory of the democratic structure of early African societies as from the existence of the Magna Carta or the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man. On the other hand, however, Derrida seems content to place Mandela's respect for a Law he himself has never seen enacted in a quasi-Kantian conscience—namely, that groundless place without ontological basis—because such a conscience can provide no reasons for its existence. Why does Derrida foreclose on Mandela's own response to a similar question in court, a response that took the form of an account of his own life (Ibid., pp. 33-34)?

For a related and extremely provocative analysis, counterposing the aporetic claims of the Enlightenment with the paradoxes of a postcolonial identity politics, see Simon During, "Waiting for the Post: Some relations between modernity, colonization and writing," in Ariel 20, 4 (October 1989): 31-61.)

12. Mies, "Towards a Methodology for Feminist Research," in Gloria

Bowles and Renate Duelli Klein, Theories of Women's Studies (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 125.

13. Clifford, "Introduction," Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography , eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 123.

14. Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14, 3 (Fall 1988): 582-583.

15. Haraway borrows this phrase from Nancy Hartsock.

16. I borrow this term from Katie King. See especially her essay "Audre Lorde's Lacquered Layerings: The Lesbian Bar as a Site of Literary Production," in Cultural Studies 2 (1988): 321-342.

17. Said, "Traveling Theory," The World, the Text and the Critic , (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 226-247.

18. Bhabha, "The Commitment to Theory," p. 8.

19. Said, "Traveling Theory," p. 226.

20. Both these essays have been reprinted in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), which is where they are most likely to be read by Western audiences. Cited hereafter as OW.

21. The Subaltern Studies series, brought out by Oxford University Press in Delhi, initially edited by Ranajit Guha and subsequently by different members of the Subaltern Studies collective, now runs into eight volumes. Other texts of interest would be Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton and Co., 1963); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), among others.

22. Given the general context of this discussion, it should not be forgotten that among all the theories one might consider, Marxism has undeniably traveled the most. (That Said's own examples of "traveling theory" came from within Marxist literary criticism is surely no accident.) Indeed, one could go on to speculate whether at this historical juncture, Marxism hasn't evolved into a third-world theory more than a first-world one.

23. Guha, "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India," in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society , ed. Ranajit Guha (Dehli: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 4; emphasis original.

24. Some examples are "Subaltern Studies II: A Review Article," Social Scientist 12, 10 (1984): 3-41; Ranajit Das Gupta, "Significance of Subaltern Mediation," and B. B. Chaudhuri, "Subaltern Autonomy and the Nationalist Movement,'' both in The Indian Historical Review 12, 1-2 (July 1985-January 1986); and Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies 22, 1 (1988): 189-224.

25. Derrida, "Positions," interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta, in Positions , trans. and ann. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 41-43; emphases original.

26. As Spivak points out in the foreword to her recent collection of essays, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), the notion of a "strategic use of essentialism" was first explicitly named as such in an interview with Elizabeth Grosz (Spivak, "Criticism, Feminism and the Institution," Thesis Eleven 10/11 (November/March 1984-1985): 175-187). She now sees a shift in her work from such a position to "considerations of institutional agency" ( Outside in the Teaching Machine , p. ix) My own attempt to broaden the scope of the notion of strategy by prying it loose from the issue of essentialism is perhaps another way of taking up questions of agency. (The importance of essentialism and anti-essentialism is addressed more fully in chapter three.)

27. Spivak, "In a Word," interview with Ellen Rooney, in differences 1, 2 (1989): 127.

28. The essays I am drawing from here are "Double Displacement and the Discourse of Woman," in Displacement: Derrida and After , ed. Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 169-195; and "Feminism and Deconstruction, Again: Negotiating with Unacknowledged Masculinism," in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis , ed. Teresa Brennan (London and New York: Routledge, 1989, pp. 206-223).

29. Spivak, "Feminism and Deconstruction, Again," p. 215.

30. Here I depart from Spivak's invitation to treat philosophy as "our" "other," as though we were bound in a symmetrical relation. "We" are rather our own "others"—and in the most complex and uneven ways, as subsequent chapters will continue to attest. She subsequently concludes this essay by invoking a very different figure for her discussion of "catachresis"—the "disenfranchised" woman in third-world nations like India whom she feels her Western feminist audience cannot imagine and who is persistently erased within the world of feminist theory. Just how central such women have been within the emergence of Indian feminist theory is discussed in chapter four.

31. Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," in Subaltern Studies II, 1983, p. 1-42.

32. Ibid., p. 39.

33. Ibid., p. 33.

31. Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," in Subaltern Studies II, 1983, p. 1-42.

32. Ibid., p. 39.

33. Ibid., p. 33.

31. Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," in Subaltern Studies II, 1983, p. 1-42.

32. Ibid., p. 39.

33. Ibid., p. 33.

34. In the collection In Other Worlds , the contrapuntal potential of both essays is emphasized through their location under the section "Entering the Third World," separated by her translation of "Breast-Giver." The initial essay in this section, Mahasweta Devi's "Draupadi," was translated and introduced in 1981 and possibly represents Spivak's first attempt to have the third and first worlds question each other through a negotiation between theory and fiction.

35. What changes are inaugurated when the text being analyzed belongs to the field of literature and not the historical archive? In her introductory remarks, Spivak highlights the degree to which differences (such as the contrasting effects of the "imagined" versus the "real") are not easily come by: the historian must imaginatively subscribe to processes of narrativization not provided by her material, whereas Mahasweta Devi, for one, is engaged in writing historical fiction, creating plausible characters backed up by extensive research. Spivak insists that literature and history do not therefore become identical; she also refuses to privilege any one. Tucked away in the footnote of another article, however, she has this to say: "[T]he figure of the gendered subaltern . . . stands unnoticed and implicit in the cracks of much carefully written documentation in the social sciences. . . . Fiction can make her visible." See "Who Claims Alterity?" in Remaking History , eds. Kruger and Mariani, p. 273 and 290, footnote 10.

36. It is important to notice which feminist theories Spivak valorizes here, how they are named, and which ones are excluded. All the theories are white, for one thing, even as white remains an unmarked category throughout the essay. No "radical" feminisms are considered. I will examine the unevenness among different strands of U. S. feminisms, and discuss how this gets highlighted in their unequal travel, in chapter three.

37. Cited in In Other Worlds , pp. 258-259. The quotations come from two translated essays of Lacan, "A Love Letter," and "God and the Jouissance of The Woman," reproduced in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne , eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1985), pp. 137-161.

38. Although such composite theory is clearly what is needed, the obstacles are many. One set of difficulties cluster around methods for recovering "Hindu" epistemologies that do not get caught in Orientalist or nativist binds. Also, there are clearly problems in referring to a given concept or worldview as "Hindu" without further qualification—whose Hinduism is being referred to, and which castes are being assumed within its fold?

39. Elizabeth Abel, "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Ques-

tions," in Conflicts in Feminism , eds. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox-Keller (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 184.

40. Ibid., p. 185.

39. Elizabeth Abel, "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Ques-

tions," in Conflicts in Feminism , eds. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox-Keller (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 184.

40. Ibid., p. 185.

41. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious , ed. and trans. James Strachey, The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 6 (London: Pelican Books, 1976 [1904]); Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams , ed. and trans. James Strachey, The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 4 (London: Pelican Books, 1976 [1900]).

42. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious , p. 236. Cited hereafter as J.

43. Freud is in some danger of collapsing the social/psychic distinction here; it sounds as if repression could be directly measured from the strength of cultural taboos, with the less educated therefore possessing a less developed unconscious rather than a different one. Furthermore, are the so-called lower classes so simply inured from the cultural influences of the dominant middle classes in sexual as much as in other matters?

44. The fact that Freud took his "ethnic" examples from among Jewish jokes is no reason to confine ourselves here. Indeed, this would be an explicit place where the relevance of psychoanalytic methods for questions of race and ethnicity could be productively explored. It has been said once too often by psychoanalytically inclined white theorists that they cannot deal with questions of race because the Freudian corpus is so exclusively structured around sexuality. Not only are there many well-known figures both from the past and present, such as Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha, who have creatively psychoanalyzed race relations, but Freud's texts themselves were not as race-blind as one might be led to believe. The problem does not, therefore, appear to lie with psychoanalysis.

45. Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), especially chapters 2 and 3.

46. Freud, Moses and Monotheism , trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), P. 14; emphasis added. Cited hereafter as MM.

47. Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984 [1939]).

48. This is why I cannot quite assent to aspects of Michel de Certeau's reformulations of Freud's project, when he glosses it as follows: [T]hrough metaphor, a rhetorical means, and through ambivalence, a theoretical instrument, many things are at play in the same spot. . . . Past and present are moving within the same polyvalent plane. And none of the "levels" of the text is the referent for the others. (de Certeau, The Writing of History , trans. Tom Conley, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) p.312-313). Once again, I am less opposed to de Certeau's extremely masculine, if not misogynous, reading in itself: "The law of the father" must replace all

"territorial identities"—"the matriarchy of the mother tongue (German), the mother country (Israel), or the nurturing tradition (the Mosaic Scriptures)" (ibid., p.317). My disagreement stems rather from his complete acceptance of Freud's analogy as a sufficient structuring device for an understanding of collective memory, and Judaic nationalism.

49. Coward, Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations (London: Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 253.

50. The anthropological literature here is quite vast and well documented, so I will only mention one of its strands. The debate between Branislaw Malinowski and Ernest Jones on Trobriand society, beginning in the 1920s and resulting in Malinowskfs Sex and Repression in Savage Society (New York: Meridian Books, 1927), has recently been revived: Melford E. Spiro's defense of a psychoanalytical reading, Oedipus in the Trobriands (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), was rebuffed by Annette B. Weiner's "Oedipus and Ancestors" ( American Ethnologist 12, 4 [1985]: 758-762). For a recent detailed use of psychoanalysis within the field of anthropology, see Gananath Obeyesekere, The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformations in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

51. Rose, "Femininity and its Discontents," in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso Press, 1986); and Wilson, "Psychoanalysis: Psychic Law and Order?" in Hidden Agendas (London: Tavistock Publications, 1986).

52. Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision , p. 6.

53. Wilson, "Psychoanalysis: Psychic Law and Order?" p. 166.

54. Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision , p. 91.

55. Teresa Brennan, "Introduction," Between Psychoanalysis and Feminism , ed. Teresa Brennan (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 1. Brennan continues by identifying four such issues—the status of the Lacanian symbolic, sexual difference and knowledge, essentialism and feminist politics, and the relation of psychical reality to the social. The Rose-Wilson debate probably hinges most closely on the last issue. Another collection of essays is Feminism and Psychoanalysis , eds. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989).

56. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 364-370.

57. Ibid., p. 367.

58. Ibid., p. 378.

56. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 364-370.

57. Ibid., p. 367.

58. Ibid., p. 378.

56. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 364-370.

57. Ibid., p. 367.

58. Ibid., p. 378.

59. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman , trans. Gillian C. Gill, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

60. See Jonathan Katz, "The Invention of Heterosexuality," in Socialist

Review 20, 1 (January-March 1990). As he puts it, "not ancient at all, the idea of heterosexuality is a modern invention, dating to the late nineteenth century. . . . The formulation of the heterosexual idea did not create a heterosexual experience or order; to suggest otherwise would be to ascribe determining power to labels and concepts. But before the wide use of the word heterosexual, I suggest, women and men did not mutually lust with the same profound sense of normalcy that followed the distribution of the 'heterosexual' as universal sanctifier" (Ibid., pp. 7, 28).

61. Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988).

62. It is also instructive to see how much the attitudes of some feminist theorists can shift over time. In an unpublished essay circulated in 1988 ("Gender differences: Feminist Theory and Psychoanalytical Narratives," mimeo, pp. 1-29), Judith Butler more or less dismissed psychoanalysis because she took it to be so irretrievably implicated in the legitimation of an interior heterosexist core to gender identity as to preclude an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject. By contrast, far from being discounted in her new book, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), psychoanalysis has evolved into a privileged discourse for an elaboration of lesbian sexuality.

63. Bhabha, "The Commitment to Theory," p. 8.

64. "An Interview with Juliet Mitchell," by Angela McRobbie, New Left Review 170 (July/August 1988).

65. Toril Moi, "Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Politics: A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell," South Atlantic Quarterly 93, 4 (Fall 1994): 925-949.

66. Hall, "The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture , eds. Carl Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 50.

1. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, "Introduction," Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present , Volume I: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century, eds. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (New York: The Feminist Press, 1991), p. 13 footnote 23.

2. Alarcón, "The Theoretical Subjects of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism," in Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color , ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1990), p. 365. Chela Sandoval has called U.S. third-world feminism an "enigma" because it "represent[s]

a form of historical consciousness whose very structure lies outside the conditions of possibility which regulate the oppositional expressions of dominant feminism" (Sandoval, "U. S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World," Genders 10 [Spring 1991]: 1).

3. Haraway, "Gender for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: Feminism and the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 130.

4. Ibid., p. 130.

3. Haraway, "Gender for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: Feminism and the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 130.

4. Ibid., p. 130.

5. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Elaine Showalter, "The Rise of Gender," introduction to Speaking of Gender , ed. Elaine Showalter (Routledge: New York and London, 1989), pp. 1-13; Teresa de Lauretis, "Technologies of Gender," in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction , (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 1-31.

6. Derrida, "Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference," in Research in Phenomenology 13 (1989): 65. See also Derrida, "Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand," in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida , ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987), pp. 161-196.

7. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 17. Cited hereafter as SF.

8. Haraway, "Gender for a Marxist Dictionary," p. 136.

9. Women, Culture and Society , eds. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), and Toward an Anthropology of Women , ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).

10. Moore, Feminism and Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 6. Michelle Rozaldo, one of the editors of the volume Women, Culture and Society , appears to occupy an interesting intermediate position within Moore's account of the different phases of feminist anthropology in an essay she wrote in 1980, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections in Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding" ( Signs 5, 3 [1980]: 389-417). She, too, warns against wrong versions of the difficulty: "Contrary to those anthropologists who have suggested that our problems lie in incomplete reports or, even worse, in inarticulate and 'silent' female voices, I would suggest that we hear women speak in almost all anthropological descriptions" (Ibid., p. 390) Instead, "what is needed . . . is not so much data as questions. . . . [W]e are challenged to find new ways of linking the particularities of women's lives, activities, and goals to inequalities wherever they exist" (Ibid., p. 390, 417). Looking critically at her own earlier research, Rosaldo frames her

doubts in terms of the need for new conceptual frameworks but without explicitly articulating a theory of gender.

9. Women, Culture and Society , eds. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), and Toward an Anthropology of Women , ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).

10. Moore, Feminism and Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 6. Michelle Rozaldo, one of the editors of the volume Women, Culture and Society , appears to occupy an interesting intermediate position within Moore's account of the different phases of feminist anthropology in an essay she wrote in 1980, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections in Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding" ( Signs 5, 3 [1980]: 389-417). She, too, warns against wrong versions of the difficulty: "Contrary to those anthropologists who have suggested that our problems lie in incomplete reports or, even worse, in inarticulate and 'silent' female voices, I would suggest that we hear women speak in almost all anthropological descriptions" (Ibid., p. 390) Instead, "what is needed . . . is not so much data as questions. . . . [W]e are challenged to find new ways of linking the particularities of women's lives, activities, and goals to inequalities wherever they exist" (Ibid., p. 390, 417). Looking critically at her own earlier research, Rosaldo frames her

doubts in terms of the need for new conceptual frameworks but without explicitly articulating a theory of gender.

11. Moore, however, also points out that if culture has been a major way feminist anthropologists have dealt with questions of difference, this emphasis has been at the expense of others—questions of race, for one, remain largely unexplored.

12. de Lauretis, "Technologies of Gender," p. 2; emphasis original.

13. Ibid., p. 3.

12. de Lauretis, "Technologies of Gender," p. 2; emphasis original.

13. Ibid., p. 3.

14. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge: New York and London, 1990), p. 148.

15. Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women , ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157-210.

16. MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory," in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology , eds. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michele Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 1-30.

17. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 7.

18. Joan Scott is not alone in wanting everyone to be quite aware of the dangerous ease with which gender is entering general academic parlance: "'Gender' seems to fit within the scientific terminology of social science and thus dissociates itself from the (supposedly strident) politics of feminism. In this usage, 'gender' does not carry with it a necessary statement about inequality or power nor does it name the aggrieved (and hitherto invisible) party" ( Gender and the Politics of History , p. 31).

19. Showalter, Speaking of Gender, p. 2-3.

20. See chapter 4, "Women and The Making of the English Working Class," in Gender and the Politics of History.

21. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex: The Manifesto of the Liberated Woman (New York: Vintage, 1974 [1954]).

22. Berger, "Categories and Contexts: Reflections on the Politics of Identity in South Africa," Feminist Studies 18, 2 (Summer 1992): 284.

23. Sargant, Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981). An equally well-known anthology was Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism , ed. Zillah R. Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).

24. See Zillah R. Eisenstein's essay "Specifying U.S. Feminism in the 1990s: The Problem of Naming" in Socialist Review 20, 2 (April-June 1990: 45-56), where she moves rather uncertainly from a desire to "incorporat[e] many of the earlier concerns of socialist feminism while moving through and beyond them" (ibid., p. 49) to the opinion that socialism is

"stale" (ibid., p. 51). Older political orientations such as "radical," "liberal," and "socialist" have basically become passé in her view and should be replaced by a radically revised ''egalitarianism between our differences and our sameness" (ibid., p. 55).

23. Sargant, Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981). An equally well-known anthology was Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism , ed. Zillah R. Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).

24. See Zillah R. Eisenstein's essay "Specifying U.S. Feminism in the 1990s: The Problem of Naming" in Socialist Review 20, 2 (April-June 1990: 45-56), where she moves rather uncertainly from a desire to "incorporat[e] many of the earlier concerns of socialist feminism while moving through and beyond them" (ibid., p. 49) to the opinion that socialism is

"stale" (ibid., p. 51). Older political orientations such as "radical," "liberal," and "socialist" have basically become passé in her view and should be replaced by a radically revised ''egalitarianism between our differences and our sameness" (ibid., p. 55).

25. Going through the entire collection, particularly for the overall effect this has on the reader, is well worth the effort. The text itself is structured around Heidi Hartmann's lead essay, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union," to which subsequent contributors responded by way of disagreement, qualification, or further extension of her arguments.

26. de Lauretis, "Upping the Anti [ sic ] in Feminist Theory," in Conflicts in Feminism , eds. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 255-270.

27. Butler, Gender Trouble , p. 143.

28. Apart from Dixon, Harding cites the work of Joseph Needham and Russell Means on third-world peoples, as well as the discussions of Placide Tempels, Abiola Irele, Lancinay Keita, and J. E. Wiredu on African philosophy to show how representative such a worldview is.

29. Hartsock, "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism," in Discovering Reality , eds. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Dordrecht Reidel Co., 1983), pp. 283, 300; emphasis original. Probably the most influential text for Hartsock's study is Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), a book that has undoubtedly played a significant role in the intellectual history of U. S. feminism. But, as Hartsock points out, a number of other feminists—Dorothy Dinnerstein, Jane Flax, Hilary Rose, Sara Ruddick, and Carol Gilligan, to name a few—have also come up with similarly structured conceptions of gendered ontologies, epistemologies, and worldviews.

30. Stepan, "Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science," in Anatomy of Racism , ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 40.

31. An example we have already come across would be Gayatri Spivak's more literal reading of Mahasweta Devi's "The Breast-Giver" in chapter 2.

32. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987 (1978)), pp. 1-2; emphases original.

33. Ibid., p. 3; emphasis original.

32. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987 (1978)), pp. 1-2; emphases original.

33. Ibid., p. 3; emphasis original.

34. Hurtado, "Relating to Privilege: Seduction and Rejection in the Subordination of White Women and Women of Color," in Signs 14, 4 (1989): 840. She cites Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who in her speech before

the New York State Legislature in 1860 said: "The prejudice against Color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The Negro's skin and the woman's sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man. The few social privileges which the man gives the woman, he makes up to the (free) Negro in civil rights" (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Cage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage , 2nd ed. [Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1889], cited in Hurtado, p. 840).

35. Howard Winant, "Postmodern Racial Politics in the United States: Difference and Inequality," in Socialist Review 20, 1 (January-March 1990): 121.

36. Gloria Yamato, "Something About the Subject Makes it Hard to Name," in Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras , ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1990), pp. 20-24.

37. "The image of race as a phantom word came to me after I moved into my late godmother's home. . . . The power of that room, I have thought since, is very like the power of racism as status quo: it is deep, angry, eradicated from view, but strong enough to make everyone who enters the room walk around the bed that isn't there, avoiding the phantom as they did the substance for fear of bodily harm. They do not even know what they are avoiding." Patricia Williams, "And We Are Not Married: A Journal of Musings Upon Legal Language and the Ideology of Style," in Consequences of Theory , eds. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 185-186.

38. The notion of articulation comes from Stuart Hall's excellent essay "Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and Post-structuralist Debates," in Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2, 2 (1985): 112, n. 2: "By the term, 'articulation,' I mean a connection or link which is not necessarily given in all cases, as a law or a fact of life, but which requires particular conditions of existence to appear at all, which has to be positively sustained by specific processes, which can under some circumstances disappear or be overthrown, leading to old linkages being dissolved and new connections—re-articulations—being forged. It is also important that an articulation between different practices does not mean that they become identical or that the one is dissolved into the other." ''Articulation" has also been brought into greater currency by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso Press, 1985).

39. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1991), p. 215.

40. Ibid., p. 214.

39. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1991), p. 215.

40. Ibid., p. 214.

41. Far more problematic are cases where analogies are effectively at work but never acknowledged. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita have shown how Elaine Showalter's well-known categorization of British women writers in A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) into three phases—the feminine (a phase of imitation), the feminist (a phase of protest), and the female (a phase of self-discovery)—has been borrowed from Frantz Fanon. "What is also obscured," they continue, "is her transformation of Fanon's theory, domesticating an idea of revolutionary action to a liberal-conservative one of self-discovery and individual fulfillment as the goal of literary endeavor." Tharu and Lalita, Women Writing in India , p. 18.

42. Irigaray, "Women's Exile," Ideology and Consciousness 1 (1977), p. 76.

43. Marcus, "Alibis and Legends, The Ethics of Elsewhereness, Gender and Estrangement," in Women's Writing in Exile , eds. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 273.

44. Ibid., p. 273.

43. Marcus, "Alibis and Legends, The Ethics of Elsewhereness, Gender and Estrangement," in Women's Writing in Exile , eds. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 273.

44. Ibid., p. 273.

45. Irigaray, The Speculum of the Other Woman , trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), especially p. 71.

46. Since I am expressly considering U.S. feminist theory here, discussing a French feminist calls for some explanation. Luce Irigaray is possibly foremost among non-Americans in terms of her significance in travel into, and effect on, the field of U.S. feminism. The reasons for this, within the overall privileging of "French Theory," and the considerable body of translators who make work such as hers so readily available to American readers, is not something I can go into here. Even before going into the question of the travel of feminist work from other nations, it is worth noting the inequality between the reception of feminists living and writing in France, on the one hand, and who effectively gets to count as a French feminist in the United States, on the other. Going back to the anthology New French Feminisms , eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), a figure like Christine Delphy (C. D.), to take but one example, is barely included. (A collection of her essays Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression , has been translated and edited in Britain by Diana Leonard [London: Hutchinson, 1984].)

47. I take this phrase from Hayden White's descriptions of the working of metaphors in his essay "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact," reproduced in Tropics of Discourse , especially p. 91.

48. Gordon, review of Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History , in Signs 15, 4 (Summer 1990): 855. Scott, in turn, reviewed

Gordon's Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Viking, 1988) in the same issue. Each scholar also responded briefly to the other's review.

49. Gordon, "What's New in Women's History," in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies , ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 20-31.

50. In the introductory essay to Gender and the Politics of History , namely "Women's History," which does take up questions of history, Scott is more concerned with pointing out the shortcomings in existing historical approaches than with putting forward a conception of history of her own. Thus, she finds feminist versions of "herstory" to have been ''uniquely about women" and therefore "too separatist," whereas the approach of social history tends toward integrating gender at the level of socioeconomic relations (p. 22).

51. Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 3.

52. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism , pp. 11—12.

53. Johnson, "Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God ," in A World of Difference , pp. 155-171, especially pp. 167 and 169.

54. Marxism's influence has extended well beyond its paradigmatic status for socialist and Marxist feminists to its availability as a resource for radical feminists, ranging from Shulamith Firestone ( The Dialectic of Sex , 1970) to Catherine MacKinnon. "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one's own, yet most taken away. . . . Feminism stands in relation to marxism as marxism does to classical political economy: its final conclusion and ultimate critique" (MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory," in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology , eds. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982], pp. 1, 30).

55. Haraway, "Gender for a Marxist Dictionary," p. 134.

56. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Search for a Method (New York: Vintage, 1968 [1963]), p. xxxiv.

57. Some examples would be Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-50 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Lourdes Benería and Martha Roldán, The Crossroads of Class and Gender: Industrial Housework, Subcontracting, and Household Dynamics in Mexico City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Aihwa Ong,

Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).

58. "Introduction," Conflicts in Feminism , Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox-Keller, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 1.

59. "A Conversation about Race and Class" by Mary Childers and bell hooks, and "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Questions" by Elizabeth Abel, both in Hirsch and Fox-Keller eds., Conflicts in Feminism , pp. 60-81 and pp. 184-204.

60. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Harper Collins, 1989), p. 5.

61. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 3.

62. Gates, Jr., "Editor's Introduction: Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes," "Race," Writing, and Difference, Critical Inquiry 12, 1 (1985): 5. More recent examples that suspend race within quotes are The ''Racial" Economy of Science: Towards a Democratic Future , ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), and Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period , eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Barker (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

63. Appiah, "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race," in "Race," Writing and Difference , pp. 21-37.

64. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham provides an indispensable corrective to positions such as Gates's or Appiah's: "As a fluid set of overlapping discourses, race is perceived as arbitrary and illusionary, on the one hand, while natural and fixed on the other. To argue that race is myth and that it is an ideological rather than a biological fact does not deny that ideology has real effects on people's lives" (Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs 17, 2 [1992]: 255).

65. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 256-257.

66. Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe, An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17, 2 (Summer 1987): 79.

67. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights , p. 163. bell hooks insists that "race and sex have always been overlapping discourses in the United States" where black/white relations are concerned. However, "there is no psychosexual history of slavery that explores the meaning of white male exploitation of black women or the politics of sexuality, no work that lays out all the available information." Instead, such narratives have been effectively displaced by the kind of attention the dynamics between black men and white women have historicaly been accorded, ansd espe-

cially with "images of black men as rapists, as dangerous menaces to society" (bell hooks, "Reflections on Race and Sex," in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 57, 61). Nothing could have brought home the divergent trajectories of race and gender, nor their impossible intersections, more directly than the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings that stunned so many and could only be painfully traced afterwards. (See for example, the collection of essays edited by Toni Morrison, Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992); L. A. Grindstaff, "Double Exposure, Double Erasure: On the Frontline with Anita Hill," Cultural Critique 27 (Spring 1994): 29-60; and numerous articles in The Black Scholar. )

68. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," p. 80.

69. bell hooks, Ain't I A Woman? (Boston: South End Press, 1986), and Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985).

70. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 18, emphasis added.

71. Hurtado, "Relating to Privilege," p. 844. Questions of history become even more pressing in contemporary efforts to work through the naming of U.S. women of color as a single entity. What are the different historicities among Native Americans, blacks, Chicanas, and Asian Americans, including their varying presence and valorization in U.S. academia, that are sometimes obliterated in over-easy references to such a collectivity? For a study of some of the specific moments in the Hispanic racial formation, see Amy Kaminsky, "Gender, Race, Raza," Feminist Studies 20, 1 (Spring 1994): 7-31.

72. Hurtado, "Relating to Privilege," p. 847.

73. Kelly, "The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications in Women's History," in Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 1.

74. Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. xiii. Cited hereafter as ES.

75. Brittan and Maynard, Racism, Sexism and Oppression (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 193.

76. An excellent example would be Stuart Hall's call for "the end of the essential black subject" in favor of "the recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities, which compose the identity 'black'; that is, the recognition that 'black' is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial catego-

ries and which therefore has no guarantees in Nature" (Stuart Hall, "New Ethnicities," ICA Documents , 7 [1988]: 28). One could read this passage not only as displacing questions of essence from "Nature" to the work of cultural and political experience but also as multiplying one ostensible essence into many.

77. It is worth counterposing Marx's method in the Grundrisse to what has come to count today as sophisticated theory: "The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is a point of departure in reality and hence also for observation and conception. . . . The method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is the only way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind" (Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations for a Critique of Political Economy , translated with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus [London: Penguin Books, 1973], p. 101). Nowadays, the move from the concrete to the abstract is taken to be the mark of one's theoretical accomplishments, rather than as a provisional stage along the way.

78. Dipesh Chakrabarty appears to have opted for just such a conceptualization where postcolonials are concerned: There is only one History—that of Europe—of which we can only ever be inadequate variations (Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?" Representations 37 [Winter 1992]: 1-26). For a very different discussion of history see Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). It should be obvious that the notion of historicity I am arguing for—dealing with what is possible and necessary in the present—has little in common with the kind of "compulsory historicism" (emanating from a specialised discipline) Jane Roland Martin believes is being unfairly thrust upon all feminists at this time (Martin, "Methodological Essentialism, False Differences and Other Dangerous Traps," Signs 19, 3 [Spring 1994]: 641-643).

79. Degler, "What the Women's Movement Has Done to American History," in A Feminist Perspective in the Academy: The Difference it Makes , eds. Elizabeth Langland and Walter Gove (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 67.

80. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault , ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 162.

81. Ibid., pp. 162, 163.

80. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault , ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 162.

81. Ibid., pp. 162, 163.

82. West, "The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual," in Cultural Critique 1, 1 (1981): 109-124. For a significantly different approach to the

question of the relation of black intellectuals to their community, see Hortense Spillers, "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date," Boundary 2 21, 3 (Fall 1994): 65-116. She describes the cost, as she perceives it, of not having taken one's identity and location as a black scholar seriously enough, which demands rethinking the boundaries of community itself.

83. Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Cambridge: Unwin Hyman, 1990), pp. 21-22.

1. Dreyfus, "Holism and Hermeneutics," in Review of Metaphysics 34 (September 1980): 3-23. Background practices have less to do with beliefs than with "habits and customs, embodied in the sort of subtle skills which we exhibit in our everyday interactions with things and people" (p. 8).

2. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), especially pp. 3-43.

3. Ibid., p. 32.

2. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), especially pp. 3-43.

3. Ibid., p. 32.

4. By some peculiar coincidence, two essays with this title came out around the same time: Judith Stacey's "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" appeared in Women's Studies International Forum 11, 1: 21-27 in 1988, and Lila Abu-Lughod delivered a lecture, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" in the same year. Abu-Lughod's lecture was subsequently published in Women and Performance 5, 1 (1990): 7-27. The title to this section is an obvious modification of theirs.

5. Abu-Lughod, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" p. 7.

6. Asad, "Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter," in The Politics of Anthropology: From Colonialism and Sexism Toward a View from Below , eds. Gerrit Huizer and Bruce Mannheim (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1979), p. 91.

7. Caulfield, "Culture and Imperialism: Proposing a New Dialectic," in Reinventing Anthropology , ed. Dell Hymes (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 182.

8. According to Partha Chatterjee, the nation is "the one most un-theorized concept of the modern world" (Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993], p. xi).

9. Strathern, "An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology," in Signs 12, 2 (1987): 284; emphasis original.

10. Ibid., p. 290.

9. Strathern, "An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology," in Signs 12, 2 (1987): 284; emphasis original.

10. Ibid., p. 290.

11. Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen, "The Postmodernist Turn in

Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective," in Signs 15, 1 (1989): 20 ff.

12. Strathern, "Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology," Current Anthropology 28, 3 (1987): 269.

13. Mascia-Lees et al., "The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology," p. 9.

14. Ibid., p. 21.

13. Mascia-Lees et al., "The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology," p. 9.

14. Ibid., p. 21.

15. Abu-Lughod, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" p. 24.

16. Ibid., p. 27.

15. Abu-Lughod, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" p. 24.

16. Ibid., p. 27.

17. For a fuller discussion of this notion see James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Authority," in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 21-54).

18. Ginsburg and Tsing, eds., Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), pp. 1-2.

19. I take this very well-known phrase from the title of Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso and New Left Books, 1983).

20. Stacey, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" p. 22.

21. Ibid.

20. Stacey, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" p. 22.

21. Ibid.

22. Chabram, "Chicano Studies as Oppositional Ethnography," Special Issue: Chicana/o Cultural Representations: Reframing Alternative Critical Discourses, Cultural Studies 4, 3 (1990): 237-238; emphasis original.

23. Ibid., p. 234.

22. Chabram, "Chicano Studies as Oppositional Ethnography," Special Issue: Chicana/o Cultural Representations: Reframing Alternative Critical Discourses, Cultural Studies 4, 3 (1990): 237-238; emphasis original.

23. Ibid., p. 234.

24. Another example that disrupts and reconstitutes innovative ethnography is Kamala Visweswaran's important essay "Defining Feminist Ethnography" (in Inscriptions, Feminism and the Critique of Colonial Discourse 3/4 (1988): 27-44). Here, too, the field contracts around U.S. subjects—Zora Neale Hurston and Cherríe Moraga.

25. Feminists have on occasion gone quite far in demanding greater accountability and a politics of location from the "new" ethnographers. In the course of a crucial essay that provides an incisive and nuanced feminist critique of the poststructuralist turn in ethnography, Deborah Gordon questions Paul Rabinow's claim to "critical cosmopolitanism" (in his essay "Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-modernity in Anthropology," Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography , eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986], pp. 234-261). But if there is a problem with Rabinow's aspiration to be a citizen of the world, transcending national affiliation, her essay does not take this up. It is the problematic place of feminism in Writing Culture that takes precedence. James Clifford's introduction to the book is the other essay Gordon analyzes for its conflictive treatment

of feminism. This is how he brings up the issue: "The book gives relatively little attention to new ethnographic possibilities emerging from non-Western experience and from feminist theory and politics. Let me dwell on this last exclusion, for it concerns an especially strong intellectual and moral influence in the university milieux from which these essays have sprung. Thus this absence cries out for comment " ("Introduction: Partial Truths," Writing Culture , p. 19; emphasis added). Clifford feels an accountability toward feminists from his own milieu, his own nation; the exclusion of non-Western experiences, by contrast, goes without further comment and is not a problem. Critics like Gordon display a desire to include third-world women and third-world feminists: "Studies of Third World women by Third World women suggest rich possibilities for linking Western and Third World feminist writers who are embedded in and wish to speak to diverse audiences" (Deborah Gordon, "Writing Culture, Writing Feminism: The Poetics and Politics of Experimental Ethnography," Inscriptions, Feminism and the Critique of Colonial Discourse 3/4 (1988): 21). But what are these rich possibilities?

26. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminism: Race, Gender and Empire-Building (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 8- 11.

27. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Summer, and Patricia Yaeger, "Introduction," Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1-18, especially p. 7.

28. Let me confine myself to a few examples in southern India of what can only be described as an exorbitant and obsessive literature: Rene Dubois' Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies was compiled at the end of the eighteenth century (trans. Henry K. Beauchamp, third edition 1906, reprinted Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981); Edgar Thurston's Castes and Tribes of Southern India runs into seven volumes (Madras: Madras Government Press, 1906); and early-twentieth-century native anthropologists produced almost indistinguishable works, such as A. Krishna Iyer's Lectures on Ethnography (Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1925) or his The Cochin Tribes and Castes (New York; Higginbotham, 1969).

29. This, according to Louis Dumont, is how Indians should conceive of themselves, in contrast to the Western antithesis, homo equalis ( Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 (1966)]). Arjun Appadurai has called caste one of the privileged "gatekeeping concepts" in anthropological theory, a metonym for Indian society as a whole. (See Appadurai, "Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery," in Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 [1986]: 356-361; and Appadurai, "Putting Hierarchy in Its Place," in Cultural Anthropology 3 [February 1988]: 36-49).

30. In a rare discussion on the place of subjectivity in fieldwork, Indian researchers came up against built-in methodological models that inculcate the treatment of one's subjects not just as others but as distant others, even when they were studying their own society. See V. K. Jairath and Meenakshi Thapan, "Nature and Significance of Subjectivity in Fieldwork," in Economic and Political Weekly 23, 9 (February 27 1988): 408-409.

31. Satish Deshpande, "Imagined Economies: Styles of Nation-Building in Twentieth Century India," Journal of Arts and Ideas , Special Issue on Careers of Modernity, 25-26 (1993): 5-35.

32. Dube, "Introduction," to Visibility and Power: Essays on Women in Society and Development , eds. Leela Dube, Eleanor Leacock, Shirley Ardener (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. xi ff.

33. Das, "Indian Women: Work, Power, Status," in Indian Women from Purdah to Modernity , ed. B. R. Nanda (New Delhi: Radiant Publishers, 1976).

34. The literature here is quite vast and diffuse, beginning with the plan documents themselves. A crucial institution that helped carve out the oppositional discourses of the Indian "imagined economy" is the Economic and Political Weekly , initially simply called the Economic Weekly. Published from Bombay, this journal has been coming out on a weekly basis since 1965.

35. Desai, "From Articulation to Accommodation: Women's Movement in India," in Visibility and Power: Essays on Women in Society and Development , eds. Leela Dube et al. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 287-299.

36. Neera Desai and Maithreyi Krishnaraj, "Introduction," Women and Society in India (Bombay: Ajanta Publications, 1987), p. 7.

37. Ibid., p. 5.

36. Neera Desai and Maithreyi Krishnaraj, "Introduction," Women and Society in India (Bombay: Ajanta Publications, 1987), p. 7.

37. Ibid., p. 5.

38. Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (New Delhi: Department of Social Welfare, Government of India, 1974).

39. Desai and Krishnaraj, Women and Society in India , p. 5.

40. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).

41. For a similar juxtaposition of the Towards Equality Report and Friedan's The Feminine Mystique as "founding texts" in the Indian and U.S. contexts, see Susie Tharu and K. Lalita "The Twentieth Century: Women Writing the Nation," in Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present , Volume II: The 20th Century, eds. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (New York: The Feminist Press, 1993), P. 101.

42. Kishwar, "Introduction," In Search of Answers: Indian Women's Voices from Manushi , eds. Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita (London: Zed Books, 1984), p. 1.

43. Sen, "Introduction," A Space Within the Struggle: Women's Participation in People's Movements (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1990).

44. Ibid., p. 3.

43. Sen, "Introduction," A Space Within the Struggle: Women's Participation in People's Movements (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1990).

44. Ibid., p. 3.

45. Desai and Krishnaraj, Women and Society in India , pp. 50-148.

46. Here is a sample from the early phase of a now vast literature: Nirmala Banerjee, "Women Workers and Development," Social Scientist 6 (March 8, 1978): 3-15; Kamla Bhasin, "Participation of Women in Development," Consultation on Improving Nutrition of the Rural Poor in Asia and Far East, mimeo (Bangkok, 1977); Bina Agarwal, Agricultural Modernisation and Third World Women (Geneva: International Labour Organisation, 1981); Leela Gulati, "Female Work Participation—A Study of Inter-State Differences," Economic and Political Weekly 1, 1-2 (January 11, 1975): 35-42; Vina Mazumdar, Role of Rural Women in Development (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1978). For reviews of the literature, see Uma Kalpagam, "Gender in Economics: The Indian Experience," Economic and Political Weekly 21, 43 (October 1986): WS-49-66; and Nata Duvvury ''Women in Agriculture: A Review of the Indian Literature," Economic and Political Weekly 24, 43 (October 1989): WS-96-112.

47. Omvedt, We Will Smash This Prison: Indian Women in Struggle (London: Zed Press, 1980), p. 10.

48. Saradamoni, "Changing Land Relations and Women: A Case Study of Palghat District, Kerala," in Women and Rural Transformation , eds. R. Mehra and K. Saradamoni (New Delhi: Concept Publishing House, 1983); Stree Shakti Sanghatana, "We were making history . . . ": Life stories of women in the Telangana People's Struggle (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989).

49. Saradamoni, "Changing Land Relations and Women," p. 124.

50. Ibid., p. 245.

49. Saradamoni, "Changing Land Relations and Women," p. 124.

50. Ibid., p. 245.

51. Saradamoni, Changing Land Relations and Women, p. 73.

52. Ibid., p. 148.

51. Saradamoni, Changing Land Relations and Women, p. 73.

52. Ibid., p. 148.

53. Stree Shakti Sanghatana, We were making history . . . , pp. 280-281.

54. Ibid., p. 281.

55. Ibid., pp. 57, 74, 87, 73.

56. Ibid., p. 246.

53. Stree Shakti Sanghatana, We were making history . . . , pp. 280-281.

54. Ibid., p. 281.

55. Ibid., pp. 57, 74, 87, 73.

56. Ibid., p. 246.

53. Stree Shakti Sanghatana, We were making history . . . , pp. 280-281.

54. Ibid., p. 281.

55. Ibid., pp. 57, 74, 87, 73.

56. Ibid., p. 246.

53. Stree Shakti Sanghatana, We were making history . . . , pp. 280-281.

54. Ibid., p. 281.

55. Ibid., pp. 57, 74, 87, 73.

56. Ibid., p. 246.

57. See also Vasantha Kannabiran and K. Lalita, "That Magic Time: Women in the Telangana People's Struggle," in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History , eds. Kumkum Sanghari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), pp. 180-203.

58. Stree Shakti Sanghatana, "We were making history . . . ," p. 31.

59. Ibid., p.258.

58. Stree Shakti Sanghatana, "We were making history . . . ," p. 31.

59. Ibid., p.258.

60. Kumkum Sanghari and Sudesh Vaid, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History , p. 3.

61. Ibid., p. 2.

62. Ibid., p. 4.

60. Kumkum Sanghari and Sudesh Vaid, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History , p. 3.

61. Ibid., p. 2.

62. Ibid., p. 4.

60. Kumkum Sanghari and Sudesh Vaid, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History , p. 3.

61. Ibid., p. 2.

62. Ibid., p. 4.

63. Gandhi and Shah, The Issues at Stake: Theory and Practice in the Contemporary Women's Movement in India (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1992), p. 325.

64. Tharu and Niranjana, "Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender," Social Scientist 22, 3-4 (March-April 1994): 93-117.

65. Sarkar, "The Woman as Communal Subject: Rashtrasevika Samiti and Ram Janmabhoomi Movement," Economic and Political Weekly (August 31, 1991): 2057-2062, especially 2061.

66. Ibid., p. 2060.

67. Ibid., p. 2062.

65. Sarkar, "The Woman as Communal Subject: Rashtrasevika Samiti and Ram Janmabhoomi Movement," Economic and Political Weekly (August 31, 1991): 2057-2062, especially 2061.

66. Ibid., p. 2060.

67. Ibid., p. 2062.

65. Sarkar, "The Woman as Communal Subject: Rashtrasevika Samiti and Ram Janmabhoomi Movement," Economic and Political Weekly (August 31, 1991): 2057-2062, especially 2061.

66. Ibid., p. 2060.

67. Ibid., p. 2062.

68. Tharu and Niranjana, "Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender," p. 107.

69. Sarkar, "The Woman as Communal Subject," p. 2062.

70. Tharu and Niranjana, "Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender," p. 96.

71. Ibid., p. 108.

70. Tharu and Niranjana, "Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender," p. 96.

71. Ibid., p. 108.

72. Questions of sexuality are no longer confined to privacy or marginalized. At least since the last national conference of autonomous women's organizations in 1993, sexuality and lesbianism are now explicit, if largely unexplored, themes in the Indian women's movement.

73. For an extremely suggestive essay that employs Western feminist debates to pry open the suppressions of caste in the Indian postcolonial context, see Vivek Dhareshwar, "Caste and the Secular Self," Journal of Arts and Ideas , special issue on Careers of Modernity, 25-26 (December 1993): 115-126.

74. Trinh T. Minh-ha's discussion "Not you/Like you: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference," Inscriptions, Feminism and the Critique of Colonial Discourse 3/4 (1988): 71-77 reveals how white expectations get disrupted when a U.S. third-world member makes a film about other third-world peoples.

75. It was surprising and not a little disappointing to discover that Marilyn Strathern has effectively reduced the scope of "the awkward relationship" by treating it as a purely epistemological question, with no institutional or political effects. See her The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).