Postcolonial Feminism: Women, Nationalism, and Cultural Identity

Influential historiographics of anti-colonial nationalism suggest that women's cultural identities-laid out in codes by which they belong to their kin group and share in its collective future-are determined by the male elite's contentious relationship with imperialist modernity. The implication of such studies is that the new women's investment in her people's goals of gaining freedom from racial-masculinist domination and building independent nations inhibits her ability to self-actualize and intervene in patriarchal national history. Many feminist post-colonial scholars explore ways to theorize women's agency in nationalist contexts. They also avoid Western postmodernists liberalist faith in individual agency, and the allied binary model in which feminist subjectivity is synthesized from fusions of outsider identities" positioned on the utopian margins of masculinist-racist regimes. Instead, post-colonial feminists explore how knowledge/power work pervasively and invisibly in capitalist modernities, constituting and "enabling" every subject position-dominant, subordinate oppositional."