At Home in the World?

The Gendered Cartographies of Globality Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality by Deepika Bahri; Mary Vasudeva; Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory, and Postcolonial Histories by Mary John; Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Feminist National Practices by Inderpal Grewal; Caren Kaplan; Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age by Ella Shohat; At Home in the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-V ... Review by: Parama Roy Feminist Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 709-731 Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178815 . Accessed: 10/04/2012 04:06
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AT HOME IN THE WORLD? THE GENDEREDCARTOGRAPHIES OF GLOBALITY

PARAMAROY In the last dozen years, scholars of global cultures, institutions, and polities have devoted themselves to two cognate areas/objects of analysis: nations and nationalism, and transnationality, diaspora, and globalization.' Benedict Anderson's now classic on Communities: work, Imagined Reflections theOriginandSpread of historicaldetail the Nationalism examines in extraordinary (1983), processesthat createdthe distinctivelymodem communityof the nation-stateand the sentimentalchargeof nationalbelonging:the rise of print capitalism;the deployment of vernacularsfor functions of state;the decline of dynasties and of the global ecumenes of world religions;and new conceptions of time, sequence, and What is distinctiveabout this textbookon historicalimagination.2 nationalismis Anderson'sdemonstration the ways in which naof tionness is and was indissolublywedded to the categoriesof the transnationaland the colonial. It was not so much an isolated Continentalphenomenon as it was a product of colonial expansion itself (indeed, Anderson argues that it was conceived in the colonies of the New Worldbefore wending its way to Europe), producinga modem sense of nationalaffiliationin metropoleand colony as part of the same operation.More recently,scholars of transnationalityhave argued that nations and nationalisms are often-paradoxicallyand counterintuitively-the productof migration and exile, with their associationsof loss and nostalgia.3 Nations are made not only against the horizon of the global but also from the outside in, because often being "somewhereelse" can sharpenor createa sense of a particular identity that one had not hithertoexperiencedor claimedas uniquelyone'sown. The worldwide flows of people, commodities, and ideas
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through war, trade, sexual traffic(including marriage),colonialism, exploration,and pilgrimage,and often throughenforcedservitude like slavery and indentured labor have, as we know, occurredfor many millennia,predatingthe rise and the dissemination of the modem, post-Enlightenment institutionof the nationstate. JanetAbu-Lughod'swork on the oceanic articulationsof a globe thatpredatedthe emergenceof Europeanpreeminence,and Amitav Ghosh'son the trafficbetween Egypt, the MalabarCoast, and Aden in the twelfth century,provide ample evidence, were and transcontinenany required,of the antiquityof transregional tal modalities of identification,travel, and commerce.4 However, BOOKS DISCUSSED THIS IN ARTICLE
the Editedby DeepiBetween Lines: SouthAsiansandPostcoloniality. ka Bahri and Mary Vasudeva. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,1996. and Dislocations: Histories. Feminism, Theory, Postcolonial Discrepant Press,1996. Universityof California By MaryJohn.Berkeley: and Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity FeministNationalPractices. Edited by InderpalGrewal and Caren Kaplan.Minneapolis:University of MinnesotaPress,1994. in Visions: Multicultural Feminism a Transnational Edited Talking Age. Ella Shohat. New York:Museum of ContemporaryArt; Camby bridge:MITPress,1998. in At Homein the Empire: Indiansand the ColonialEncounter LateVictorian Britain. AntoinetteBurton.Berkeley: Universityof CalBy iforniaPress,1998.

the scale and natureof these movements changed with modernity's twin projects of colonialism and nationalism, which havethrough their technologies of production and disseminationtransformedprevious notions of community, mobility, and beour longing. These have in turn transformed older understanding and experienceof local, regional,and global processesand affiliawhich has tions. As KhachigTololyanpoints out, the nation-state, a certain global ubiquity as the most legitimate and achieved emotionallychargedform of politicalcommunityand politicalrationality,representingOne people and One law, claims, from the

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nineteenthcenturyon, a new relationshipto communitiesof (normatively male) indigenes,citizens,and diasporicsubjects.5 The issue of the national and now, more recently,the issue of the transnational, singularlypowerful resonancesfor scholars has of gender and sexuality.But although a good deal of the extant work on nationalismis conspicuousfor its engagementwith feminist questions and methods, there is as yet some criticalinattentiveness to the gendered coordinates of diaspora and its cognates.6In the last decade, we have seen a proliferationof singleauthor texts and edited volumes on discourses and histories of globality. The topic of intellectual production in particularhas been a chargedone, yoking togetherdiscussionsof the operations of a late-twentieth-century global capitalism with data on the emergence of migrant intellectuals in the Anglo-U.S. academy and producinga significantvolume of scholarlymaterialon questions of interest,affiliation,and responsibility. there is a relaYet small body of work, especiallymonograph-length work, on tively the profoundly gendered characterof these phenomena.7 This is not to say that there is not some criticalconsensus, although it is often parenthetically (and acknowledged,about the differential ocunpredictable)insertion of various gendered subjects casionally and constituenciesinto the relays of globality,diaspora,and national citizenship.In his prefatoryremarksto a well-known essay on contemporarydeploymentsof diasporicdiscourse,JamesClifford notes, in a confessionalmoment that is-as these moments inescapably are-at once abjectand self-exculpating,"Ihave begun to account for gender bias and class diversity in my topic. More needs to be done here, as well as in other domains of diasporic complexity where currently I lack competence or sensitivity."8 This stutterin the face of the irreduciblygenderedcharacter the of discoursesof diasporais the more markedfor diaspora'sanalytic proximitywith the question of nationalism;indeed, an entiresection of Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan's1994 volume, Scat(which seeks to reverse the myopia I have just described),is devoted to the question of the gendering of nations and of nationalisms. What is true for diasporastudies in generalis no less true for scholarsof particulardiasporas.Scholarswho work on South Asian materials(with which this essay will concernitself for the
most part) have devoted no inconsiderable attention to such tered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Feminist National Practices

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questions as the diasporicproductionof postcolonialintellectuals and postcolonial studies; the (re)production South Asian culof tures in North Americaand Britainamong the childrenof immilaw, and racialtaxonoimmigration, grantsfromthe subcontinent; and the politicaleconomy of the Indianstate in the aftermath my; that of economic"liberalization," is, the globalizationof the Indian in the early 1990s.9Severalhistorianshave, in addition, economy provided carefullydetailed accountsof the immigrationhistories of the several South Asian diasporas to North America (in the early part of this century and in the post-1965 period), Britain (fromthe eighteenthcenturyon), Fiji,EastAfrica,SouthernAfrica, and the Caribbean."o there is a comparativedearth of work Yet that deploys a specificallyfeministlens upon the issues. Thereare to date few handbooksto supplementScattered which Hegemonies, continues to function as one of the principaltexts for scholarsof or feminismand transnationality, to take up the editors'challenge the to "rework terms of theory and practiceof gender acrossculVisions: tural divides" (p. 28). Ella Shohat's Talking Multicultural in Feminism a Transnational is one of the very few to take on Age the criticalconcernsof thatearliervolume. In this article I examine these two significant general statements on gender, nationalism,and diaspora, along with several texts that substantiate their generalizations with a focus on a more specificdiaspora:the South Asian one. These texts combine an interest in detailing the specifically gendered character of women's experiencesof globalitywith a considerationof the ethical implicationsof various modes of transnational practice.Their and accountengagementwith questions of power, constituency, are simultaneouslyand irreduciblya ruminationon what ability might constitutea globally discerning(ratherthan a simply wellintentioned)feministethics. the SouthAsians It might be useful to begin with Between Lines: and Postcoloniality, volume that combines a general exegesis of a the crisisof the migrantpostcolonialintellectualwith a consideration of a particularhistory of migration.Part of the value of Betweenthe Lines,edited by Deepika Bahriand Mary Vasudeva,is the way in which it permits an interrogationof the profoundly
vexed relation between the institutions of postcolonial studies and feminist studies and the fact of middle-class South Asian mi-

gration to the First World.In fact, it showcases interviews with

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three South Asian feminist intellectuals teaching in New YorkMeena Alexander,Gauri Viswanathan,and GayatriChakravorty Spivak-on these questions; these interviews, along with a long essay by DeepikaBahri,constituteone of the fullest extantdiscussions of migrant/diasporicproductionand postcolonialstudies." of Whatit underlinesis that it is preciselythe conjuncture this imwith the "rise" what is today designated, however of migration waveringly,as postcolonialstudies thathas been the sourceof significantunease. It has led in recentyears to the growing consensus thatthe institutionalemergenceand consolidationof postcolonial studies (in terms of its visibility in scholarlyproduction,curricular development, and academic hiring) is something of a shamefulif not sinisterfact, to be noted and censuredwith a certain fervor.While the well-known critiquesof the postcolonialby Ella Shohatand Anne McClintock not necessarilyimpugn the do field in termsof the geographicprovenanceof (some of) its practitioners-their quarrel, rather,is with the adequacy of the term to "postcolonial" denominatea globe not fully decolonized-howmost of the field'smost visible criticshave damned it for its ever, co-implication(by virtue of its location in the Anglo-U.S.academy) with the workings of global capitalism.'2 Aijaz Ahmad's In Literatures the most elaborateof such criis Classes, Nations, Theory: tiques, and it is notablefor its damnatorycoupling of postcolonial studies not just with the fact of middle-classSouth Asian immigrationto the United Statesbut also with the ascendancyof antihumanistapproachesto Continental philosophyand to the project of the Enlightenment."3 Even a scholarlike Spivak,who has long been committedto the critiqueof humanismthat Ahmad finds so distasteful,proffersa critiqueof middle-classmigrancyto the First World in terms that are at times remarkably close (although markedlymore attentiveto questionsof gender)to Ahmad'sown. Such debates form a significanthorizon for the essays in Between the Lines,although the volume also particularizes and extends them in ways that areworthy of note. Between Lines(especiallythe three interviews and the essay the mentioned above) advances in often admirableways our current understandingof the field and its locations.For instance,Bahri's insistence that postcolonial studies scholars learn to give to the precolonialpast the same careful scrutiny that they bring to the analysis of colonialismis a much-neededword of admonitionto

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In the field."4 keeping with currenttrendsin postcolonialtheorizwith the term itself ing, the volume rehearsessome dissatisfaction as unduly celebratory(the "post" understoodhere throughthe is and relativelystraightforward temporallogic of "progress") as into the heterogeneitiesof the postcolonialcondition.This adequate is largely the provenance of the editors' introduction;a reading such as this not only omits-as StuartHall has noted-a consideration of the ironicand shifty logic of the prefixbut also makes little attempt to illustrate how such a charge can be substantiated through a considerationof the scholarshipin the field.'5But the greater dissatisfactionis produced by a variant of the diasporic scenariodetailed above. The field is deemed to have become altogethertoo popularto lay claim to any radicalcharge,and the language of a capitalistmarketplaceis pressed into admonitoryserthe vice to describeits "rise": "[I]ncreasingly, business of postcolonial discourseis business-the booming Othernessindustrythreatening to dissolve any radicalchargein the field"(p. 12). Here, as in so many other texts of and on postcoloniality, term "postthe functionas a disparagingepithet ratherthan colonial"appearsto as a descriptor;it is not overstatingthe case to assert that such texts constitute an increasinglylarge proportion of what comes out under the banner of postcolonialstudies. How might we unof derstand such a characterization the field, which is as deeply as it is disdainful?These anxietiesabout institutionallugubrious ization are familiar,in some respects, from the similar agonistic struggles in the Anglo-U.S. academy of feminist studies in the 1980s and queer studies in the 1990s;I will ask readers to keep these analogies firmly in mind as we examine the crisis (of conscience) of postcolonial studies. Among the discontents of migrancy that the interviews and essays rehearseis the sense of a certaintension between academicwork and what, for want of a better term, we can denominate as representativenessor as activism;this too is familiarto us from the history of feminist studThe concerns of the critics of postcolonial ies in the academy.'6 studies are not to be trivialized; I will consider them at some length in my examinationof the interviews.But they underscore what might seem to be a paradoxical fact,given theirprofoundinterest in questions of power and privilege: they have no robust conceptionof power, especiallyinstitutionalpower, and how this might be appropriatelydeployed (ratherthan simply rejected)

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either in local or in transnationalcontexts. Having conceived of themselves as perpetual academic guerrillas, they have no thoughtful, serviceable,and unsentimentalresponse to what is, ironically,the dismaying fact of an ostensiblesuccess and institutionalization.It is not too acerbic,I hope, to read in this melancholia a desire for a perpetualavant-gardism that repudiatesits locutions and formulations when they come to have a certain purchase in the academy.A perplexedreadermight even be tempted to see the self-romanticization and self-marginalization that underwritesthese indictmentsas no less pharisaicalor self-aggrandizing than the reproachesabout the privileged diasporicgenesis of the field.17(Thisis not to indict self-aggrandizement such; I as take it to be inescapable,and this review is not exempt from it. But one must be exceedingly carefulabout deploying it as a term of opprobrium.)If a narrativeof the questionable "progress" of the field (a "progress" can be mapped in terms other than the that of trajectories individual scholarsor individual feminists)is to be persuasive,it has to account at least for some of the institutional and/or disciplinarychanges that the field has either disabled or made possible. It also must ask itself what the objectivesand limits of the field/discipline are.What,postcolonialand feministcritics might profitablyask themselves, constitutesa peripheryor a margin, and how might it be distinct from what Spivak has named as a self-consolidating Other? Can such distinctions indeed be made in advance or can they be read off througha rather circumscribed "politics of location"?In the name of whom or what is intellectualand institutionalpower wielded? How are the forms of academic power articulatedwith and yet distinct from otherforms of social power?Unless we are wedded to an entirely utopian conception of the objectivesof the field, we might also wish to scrutinizesomewhat more carefullyjust what might constitute the ethical forms of arrivalor success, and what might be at stake in the desire to uncouple institutionalauthorizationfrom postcolonialstudies. Tobe politicallyand analyticallymeaningful this relation between power and traditionally disenfranchised constituenciesand areas of study must be thought by scholarsof globality beyond pious gestures and confessions of class privilege. In this regard the field has many lessons to learn from feminist scholarship's staging of its own crisis of legitimation in the U.S. academy.'8

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It might be useful here to turn to Spivak, whose work has always been mindful of the difficultquestions of feministprivilege in transnationality. her credit,she has always had a stake in reTo and defamiliarizingsome of the gendered contours of situating She migrancy and transnationality. concerns herself in this volume and elsewhere not just with the figure(s) of the expatriate, the immigrant,and the diasporic-she has always been emphatic in her insistencethat the figureof the immigrantfeministcriticin the metropolis not be construed as the paradigmatic figure of postcolonialityl9-but also with those who "subsistin transnationSpivak's objective is to ality without escaping into diaspora."20 wrench the focus in studies of transnationalityaway from the analysis of popular public culture,militaryintervention,and the neocolonialpracticesof multinationalsto "capital export and capital maximization," which can flourish independently of the miof labor exemplified in the immigrant.Characteristically, grancy her focus is on those female subjects(neithermigrant acrossnational boundariesnorinserted into citizenshipat the point of nationalorigin)who arepressed into the serviceof a globalitythat is not necessarilyvisible as such. Spivak'swork functionsas a bracof ing caution against the casual transposability terms like "diasand "globalization." pora," "immigration," "transnationality, (Always attentiveto the paleonymy of termsin currentusage, she as repudiates the term "diaspora" a historicallyaccuratecharacterization of post-1965 middle-class South Asian immigrants in the United States.)It is invaluable,moreover,in drawing our attention to the profoundlydispersed-ratherthan the easily identifiable-characterof some of these phenomena. And her work is useful for underliningthe ways in which the transnational operations of global capitalcan transformthe traditionalfunctionof the decolonizing democraticstate from that of an apparatusof redistributionand remedy to that of an entity that enables the maximization of profit.21But this insight could well be supplemented with a less inexorablesense of the inevitablemalignancyof such I transnationality. see no reason why her acute diagnosis of the violations"of colonialismshould not be at least partial"enabling such an analytic ly serviceablein the analysisof transnationality;2 lens might also make us more justifiablyskepticalabout the decolonizing state's exclusive potential-and its record-as an instrument of redistributive social justice for women.

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been unassimilable Spivakremindsus of what has traditionally into investigations of diaspora, migration, transnationality, and "woman'srelationshipto each of these phenomena globalization; is oblique, ex-orbitantto the general story," says.2 The work she of some feminist scholars on South Asian immigrationinto the United States responds in some ways to Spivak'sanalysis of the ex-orbitationof woman in migration.Annanya Bhattacharjee in of particularfocuses on the genderedcharacter the immigrantexperience. Punning upon the characterof the "twice-born" highcaste Hindu male, Bhattacharjee describes the bourgeois Indian immigrant community as a "twice-imaginednation," one that subscribesto the patriarchal imaginaryof the Indiannation-state as part of the process of functioningas a "modelminority"in an avowedly multiculturalplace of arrival.The figure of the bourconsoligeois woman is a foundationalelement of this imaginary, the her purity and traditionalism phallicself-suffidating through (Thisresonatesto a certain ciency of the diasporicIndian male.24 extent with Arjun Appadurai'scontention that the pressures of deterritorialization often serve to exacerbategender trouble, can as "thehonor of women becomes increasinglya surrogatefor the identity of embattledcommunitiesof males.")25 But perhaps the most visible site of feminism's engagement with the discourses of globalityhas been the interrogation the of colonial provenanceof some (metropolitan) feminist theory and policy, especially when it trains its lenses upon Third World women. If one could locate an originarymoment for such a critique, it would have to be the publication (in 1981) of Spivak's "French Feminismin an International an Frame," essay that caredelimits the blind spots of a well-intendedContinentalfemifully nism that seeks to deploy the non-Western woman as a trope of difference. But the more influential essay has been Chandra Talpade Mohanty's "UnderWesternEyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,"an excoriationof a strain of (Western and westernized)feministwork that reproduces,however unwitIn tingly,the Olympianbenevolence of the missionaryposition.26 it Mohanty draws attention to the ways in which the category can "woman" be deployed in the service of an unthinkingethnocentricuniversalismthat is heedless to historicaland local particularities.It is an indispensableessay, and certainof its claims and strategieshave constitutedsomething of a model for many post-

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colonial feminists. But an unreflective reproduction of its own carefullyconsideredemphasis on the local sometimes has the effect of frustratingratherthan enabling an interrogation unexof amined privilege. Mary John'sDiscrepant Dislocations: Feminism, and Histories owes a considerabledebt not only Theory, Postcolonial to Mohanty'swork but also to thatbody of feministwork that has followed in its wake. She interrogates spatiotemporal the particulars of a Westernfeministtheoryas a preludeto the establishment of an international feminism that is not predicatedupon unexamined universalisms. In taking on this project she also rehearses some of the strengthsand weaknesses of such endeavors. Highlighting the global circulationof feminist theory and the vexed question of "location" feminist endeavors,John'swork for seeks to addressthe complex and often uneasy trafficbetween the national ecumene and the transnational one. In the traditionof a reflexivefeministethnography, speaks of the project's she embeddedness in conditions of postcoloniality, and transnamigration, tionality;it arises from, and provides a theoreticalstaging of, her situationas a feminist anthropologist raised in postcolonialIndia and engaged in graduate study in anthropology in the United States.The empiricalfact of migrantvoyaging serves as a kind of a trope for uneasy feminist encounter,although John is meticulous about noting the characterof the "West" a transnational as of extending beyond geographicaldeterminacategory,"capable tions and creating new and specific loci of power/knowledge (pp. throughthe manifoldprocesses of Westernization" 8-9). This tropecomes finallyto assume a disciplinaryform:Johnwrites the encounter of a (highly disseminated) West and the postcolonial terms.Anthropologyyields threeposfeministin anthropological sible subject positions or, more properly,three scenarios which the postcolonialfeministmight inhabitin relationto the West:imand migrant,anthropologist-in-reverse, native informant.The deof the frameworkof anthropologyin such a contextis a ployment provocativemove, not least because it anchorsthe discussion to forms and because it trouspecificallyinstitutionaland structural bles the conventional bearings and logic of the anthropological encounter. John'sfirst scenario for the encounterof postcolonial feminist and the West is denominated as "immigrant." discourse of The
academic migrancy is, in the aftermath of colonialism, almost in-

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the variably Eurocentric; immigrantis understood in terms of a politics of arrivalin which the subject'sentry into westernization is associated with "modernization, progress, and secularism" (p. 10). This immigrationinvolves the putting on of certainkinds of knowledge (typicallythe universal,and universalizing,language of "theory") the deliberateor unwitting cultivationof certain and kinds of ignorance.John is careful to emphasize that she is not ones-"setknowledges as against "universal" privileging "local" ting up a theory as either relativeto its context or universalin its applicabilityis wrongheaded from the start,"she insists (p. 37)but she does suggest that the contexts of the emergenceand apbe plicability of theoretical universals (their "data-ladenness") in mind at all times, so we see them as being at all times borne "situated" and "partial" borrow the terms favored by Donna (to of Haraway and James Cliffordin his ThePredicament Culture).27 Theirclaims to universalityare best tested in a mise-en-scene that is distinct from the contexts that produced them. All this is more or less unimpeachable,although it necessarilybegs the question of what would constitutea carefuland responsiblemode of universalization or generalization, because generalization as such cannotbe forsworn.Intellectual work cannotproceed only or prithe proliferationof particulars.Nor are the "conmarily through texts"of what is called Westerntheoryalways self-evident;the insistence upon "asense of historicity" 72) must be set to work (p. on both sides of the imperial/postcolonialdivide. John'sexcavation of the travels of theory throughclose readingsof two essays by Spivak and two texts by Freud speaks to some of the difficulties of the demand for specificity. John's reading of Spivak's "Deconstructing Historiography:SubalternStudies"(one of the to "Canthe SubalternSpeak?"), which she charges many preludes with marshalinga subcontinentalsubalternityas merely a particular instance of a more general deconstructivehermeneutics of is undecidability, one instanceof this, because it is not clear why such a strategyshould be self-evidentlydamning.It is with some pleasure, therefore,that one turns to her sympatheticand subtle and to Jokes TheirRelation reading of TheInterpretation Dreams, of the Unconscious, Mosesand Monotheism. she would perand But haps have been even better served had she elaboratedjust how Freud (or the genderedinstitutionof psychoanalysis)might function in the colony or postcolony.

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The scenarioof "anthropology-in-reverse" permitsJohnto provide a briefand necessarilylimited overview of the contestedand internally variegated terrain of U.S. feminism. She is incisive aboutthe ways in which issues of raceand class have all too often been designated as the special preserve of "womenof color,"although she is occasionallyunnecessarilyreproving(and occasionally mistaken) in her readings of the work of prominent white feminists such as JudithButlerand Diana Fuss. Fred Pfeil'sscruof Hegemonies, the pulous and venturesomecritique,in Scattered fetishization of U.S. feminists of color by white U.S. feminists of (and the correspondingdisparagement the work of white femicomes to mind here as a much-neededcorrectiveto such an nists) accountof feminism'sterrain. As "nativeinformant," John produces a chapterthat serves as an apt supplement to the precedingone. Returningto India, her place of departure,she traces the histories of the feminist movement (not just feminist academicwork) in post-independenceIndia. John's capacity to trace the broad contours of immensely complicated developments is very much on display here, although oddly, there is little of the critiqueof largeranalyticcategories that had markedher earlierchapters.One wishes, too, that she had been more explicit about the modes in which a postcolonial Indian feminism could be set to work in other contexts such as the U.S. one. Her contentionthat the categoryof the nation remains profoundlyundertheorizedin (white)U.S. feminismmight offer one model of reversingwhat she describesas the one-way trafficof feministtheory;but this remainsno more than an incipient possibilityin the text. The work of Grewaland Kaplanis also genealogicallybound to the conventionsof the Mohantyessay,althoughthey are far more successfulthan is Johnabouteschewing a nostalgiafor the "local." In their introduction,they map the contours of feminisms practiced acrossnational,regional,and culturaldivides; and they ask how these might be practiceddifferently. They examine the genand cultures of diaspora,migrancy, dered identities, economies, transnationality,and modernity in a world that is irreducibly They are especially clear global but by no means "postnational." in their demand that feminists resist well-meaning articulations of "globalfeminism" attendingto rigorouscomparativework, by without however fetishizing the local, which is, as they astutely

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assert, extremely difficult to disentangle from the global. In so doing they exhibit a tough-minded (and rare) skepticism about nostalgiclocalismsandabout the utopianpossibilitiesof the transnationalor the postnational. The introductionestablishesits projectwithin currentdebates about postmodernism.Arguingthat the termin the Westis situated in the registerof aestheticproductionand is relativelyoblivious to the global contextswithin which postmodernismemerges and is manifest,the editors, in Scattered seek to supHegemonies, this focus with an attentionto the distinctionsbetween plement "theaestheticeffects of postmodernismin contemporaryculture and the historicalsituationof postmodernity" 4). Underlining (p. the inescapablecomplexitiesand historicalparticularities postof in differentglobal locations,they seek to link the dismodernity courses of gender and/or feminist theory to global macroeconomies of productionand distribution, nationalismsand patriarchal other forms of localized domination, and local claims to "tradition"and "authenticity." Theirquestionsare thus articulated along two axes:"What kinds of feministpracticesengendertheoriesthat resistor questionmodernity?... How do we understandthe production and receptionof diverse feminisms within a framework of transnational social/cultural/economic movements?" (pp. 2-3). In distinction to many postcolonial and U.S. minority feminist scholars,they refuse to dismiss the possibilitiesof postmodernity (which functions here as a kind of shorthandfor the critique of humanism), discoveringwithin it a crucialcritiqueof modernity that is indispensablefor postcolonialfeministwork. Thatthe challengesposed by the introductionare taken up unevenly by the essays that constitutethe volume speaks to the difficultiesof an analysisthat is centeredon subjectsand intersubjective relationsworked upon simultaneouslyby local,national,and transnationalvectors. Two essays stand out, however, as noteworthy instancesof what feministscholarshipon nationalismand the transnational might be. In a superbhistoricalessay that is unusually attentiveto the nuances of textual detail, TaniBarlow,in "Theorizing Woman: Funii, Guojia, Jiating (Chinese Women, Chinese Family),"traces the emergence of the category Funti (Woman)in modern China,noting in this emergencethe contours of a contest among the patriarchalkinship group, the modern state, and an internationalcommunity of social reformersfor ex-

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clusive claims upon women. KamalaVisweswaran'sessay, "Betrayal:An Analysis of ThreeActs,"on the other hand, provides a reflexivestaging of the complexitiesof a transnational ethnography. Her reading of the ironizationof feminist solidaritiesin the ethnographicencounterprovides a more successfulinstancethan John'sof what a reflexiveenactmentof the genderedprotocolsof a disciplinemight entail. EllaShohat'sTalking Visions revisitssome of the concernsof the and Kaplan volume but with greater emphasis on the Grewal U.S. contextsof the transnational; indeed, the adjectivaluse of the multiculturalin the title makes that fairlyexplicit.Shohat'sobjective, however, is to wrench the commonsensicaland liberal deployment of multiculturalismaway from its implicitly U.S. nationalisthorizon, noting cogently that "[a]submerged American nationalismoften undergirdssuch practices and epistemologies nationalismwith a [of multiculturalism], giving us a star-striped tan, a nationalismin drag, and rainbownationalism" 39). She (p. points out the converse as well-that U.S. postcolonialstudies has failed to interrogate its relation to U.S. ethnic studies and has often had a tense relationshipwith the work of U.S. feminists of color. Such tension is often named as a quarrel over "theory." in "Theory" this instanceis, I would argue,itself vectoredthrough the of nationalidentity and immigration; postcolonialcrittropes is ic, often foreign-born, censuredas the "modelminority" immiwho has assimilatedpoststructuralist as a contheory grantfigure dition of acceptanceinto a racist academic mainstream.Indeed, what is salutary about Shohat's introduction is that-despite a sometimes coarse criticismof the work of white feminists-it is in generalscrupulousaboutpointing out some of these considerable difficultiesin the path of a sororalpolitics for multiculturalfeminists. Noting the often conflictual mutual relations of minority communities,she clarifiesthe difficultiesof "seiz[ing]on the possible mutual identifications among minoritized communities while also acknowledgingthat those on the marginshave sometimes had to survive at each others'expense"(pp. 34-35). Visions deliver on Shohat'spromise Not all the essays in Talking to trouble the distinctions of the local and the global. Some of
them (such as Coco Fusco's "WeWear the Mask") seem relatively anecdotal and slight. But at their best they demonstrate with counterintuitive panache the unexpected entanglements of the

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local and global trafficin commodities,practices,and bodies. Lisa on Jones,for instance,has a delightfulessay,"TheHair Trade," the internationalharvesting,processing,and sale of hair to a female African American clientele for braiding and weaving. The complex racialallegory of a hair trade spread across Asia and North America is-as in Kobena Mercer's"BlackHair/Style Politics"never entirelyreducibleto the categoriesof purity or naturalness as opposed to the synthetic.28 Otheressays in the collectiondemonand stratehow self-contradictory troublesomeit is to maintainthe receivedpieties about the comparativeculpabilityor innocenceof about the our ethnicallyand nationallymarkedselves. In "Talking State and ImaginingAlliances," WahneemaLubianodescribesin brilliantdetail her encountersas a public intellectualwith working-classAfricanAmericanwomen; these encountersdemonstrate that subjectswho experienceracism,sexism, or relativepoverty in the U.S. context need not necessarily oppose U.S. state power around the globe and might, in fact,even supportit quite wholeheartedlyand benefitfrom it. She underlinesfor us the disconcertalliances'... requiresthat ing lesson of this encounter: "'Imagining we look carefullyat the difficulties,at the obstacles to alliances; of otherwise,the powerful attractiveness alliancepossibilitieswill hide the very pitfalls that frequentlydisrupt those alliancepossibilities"(p. 442). Similarly,Caren Kaplan demonstrates (in "'BeU.S. the yond the Pale':Rearticulating JewishWhiteness") limits of Michael Lerner's claims in the article entitled "JewsAre Not While she is resolutelyattentiveto the prevalenceof antiWhite." Semitism in the United States she also seeks to trace a North American history of the assimilation into whiteness of Jews of Ashkenazioriginfollowing the SecondWorldWar.She recognizes the ways in which this Ashkenaziwhiteness,however contingent, has been purchasedthroughthe excisionof Sephardic culturalhistories and throughthe supportof a Zionismthat ensurescontinuconflict.Throughoutshe is profoundlymindful of ing Arab-Israeli the variegatedcontexts-historical, regional,national,and globalthattraversethis extraordinarily vexed identity. Kaplan'shistoricallyinformed work is, like that of almost all the scholars discussed here, primarily focused on the post-1945
and late-capitalist identities that have resulted from various forms of global traffic. Antoinette Burton's At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the ColonialEncounterin Late-Victorian Britainbalances

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this focus on the contemporaneous returningus to a different by temporalityof migrancyand feminist self-fashioning.She examof ines the trajectories three Indian sojoumers-PanditaRamabai, and Britain the late ninein ComeliaSorabji, Behramji Malabari-in teenth and early twentiethcenturies.A scrutinyof Burton'swork to can serve as a useful corrective the historicalmyopia of much of talk"(to borrow Spivak's term),29 which often today's "globality the late twentieth century (especiallythe post-cold war fetishizes period)as uniquelymarkedby the processesof diasporaand globalization.Even so subtle a readerof contemporary configurations of globalityas ArjunAppaduraitends occasionallyto exoticizethe late-twentieth-century presentas a uniquelycosmopolitanand, inmoment (even as he adds, a trifleweakly,that deed, "postnational" such a diagnosis is not necessarilymeant to be laudatory):"Until recently, whatever the force of social change, a case could be made that social life was largely inertial,that traditionsprovided a relativelyfinite set of possible lives, and that fantasyand imagination were residualpractices,confined to special persons or doA mains, restrictedto special moments or places."30 more than casual interrogationof the history of even the last century underlines, on the contrary,the nebulousness of the definitions of the the and that "local," "national," the "global" fuel Appadurai's argument in the passage above. Attentive to the fissiparouscharacter of the phenomenawhose boundednessAppaduraitakes as given, Burtonunderlinesthe double purpose of providinga contextually nuanced and substantially gendered account of diasporic sojourning in the colonial period. In its excavation of three "temBritporarily diasporicvoices" (p. 13) in late-nineteenth-century ain, such an account contributesto the genealogy of a subcontinental diaspora "whose contemporary manifestations have received some attentionbut whose historieshave yet to be written" (p. 73). It also functions as a provocationto insular historiansof nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryBritainwho, ironically,share with putatively radicalscholarsof the South Asian diaspora/migration the imagined geography of the "IslandStory"(p. 9), believing that the South Asian (and Black) presence in Britain (whetherin the shape of demographicsor in less individualized
and more disseminative forms) dates only from the post-World War II period.

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Curiously enough for a projectwith such commendableambinever clarifiesthe semantic,legal, tions, At theHeartof theEmpire and affective charge of a term like "diaspora" its relation to and associated but not identical terms such as expatriate, resident alien, traveler,refugee, or exile. Given that all three figures were long-termresidents of the subcontinent,and that at least two of them-Ramabaiand Sorabji-alsosojournedfor extended periods in other parts of the globe (to say nothing of their peregrinations within India),what might the analyticeffectivitybe of examining their Britishresidence through the lens of diaspora?What is the exemplarity,moreover, of these three figures from the Bombay presidency of the 1880s and 1890s,given that there was a significant constituencyof "Indians at abroad" this time, including M.K. DadabhaiNaoroji,KadambiniGanguly,SarojiniChattoGandhi, padhyaya (laterNaidu), the Begums of Oudh, and the Maharani Sunity Devi of Cooch Behar?Burtonprovides,in chapter1, a fairly thoroughcatalog of this community,althoughwithout enunciating the principlesthat groundedher choice of Ramabai,Sorabji, and Malabari.It could perhapsbe argued that these threefigures catalyze in particularlyproductive and diverse ways the desires and the limits of late-Victorian philanthropicbenevolence, espewith respectto that particularly favoredfocus of such attencially tion, the Indianwoman. Ramabaiwas prominentin the projectto uplift Hindu women, and she received funding and patronage from women's groups in the United Statesand from Anglican institutionsin Britain; while emphaticallynot a self-identiSorabji, fied feminist, was the sometimes reluctantbeneficiaryof philanthropic and missionary interest in Indian women; and Malabari was the avowed male championof Hindu childbrides and visited Londonin the hope of garneringsupportfor the passage in India of the Age of Consent Act that would have raised the minimum age of maritalconsummationfrom ten to twelve years for child brides. Burton does not yoke together forcefully or consistently enough this questionof gendereddiaspora/travelwith thatof the Indian female objectof gendered imperial altruism;occasionally, as in the instance of the chapter on Malabari,she seems to lose sight almostentirelyof this braidedclusterof concerns. This having been said, Burtonmust be commendedfor her exegesis of the conundrums and complexities of residence in lateVictorianEnglandfor two purposefuland strong-mindedwomen

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fromthe colonies who were often dependenton the financialsupport and goodwill of Britishreformersand philanthropistswith notably Orientalistnotions of the proper duties and capacitiesof Indian women. In a carefulanalysis that resonatesquite powerfully with the work of Spivak,John,Grewaland Kaplan,Shohat, and other scholars of global feminism in the twentieth century, Burtonnotes that the relationshipbetween Ramabaiand her female mentorsin Englandwas "lessa questionof sisterhoodthan a over which version of female restrugglefor authority-authority form would prevail in India"(p. 103). She details the ways in as which Ramabai, a rarehigh-casteHindu convertto Christianity and a considerableSanskritscholar,was considereda prize by the ChristianMissionarySocietyof the AnglicanChurchbut was also carefully disciplined and controlled by the church hierarchy. Sorabji,who was more financially constrained by her various benefactors,was also subjectedto multiple and changing claims upon her person,her education,and her plans for the future. Burtonmust be applauded for her insistencethat the three figures who constitute the objects of her analysis were not simply is "Indians abroad." Indeed,the chapteron Sorabji admirablysubtle aboutthe immenselycomplicatedrelationshipof her Parsiethone nic identity and her Protestant to her putativeIndiannessand to the Englishnesswith which she strongly identified. Burtonis also perceptive about the failures of ethnic-feminist solidarity for among Indianwomen sojournersin Britain.Sorabji, instance, was notable for her competitivehostility to other Indian women she in Britain; was inordinatelyanxiousto conserveher statusas a pioneer or even as a unique figure in the history of Indianwomen's educationabroad.Thisanxious desirewas perhapsonly comRamabaiand pounded by the greaterfame of her contemporaries Rukhmabai(the latterhad come into the public eye throughher legal challenge,as a child bride, to her husband'sconjugalrights). Despite the opportunitiesshe had for friendshipwith Rukhmabai, who was studying medicine in London-a plan that Sorabji had envisaged for herselfbut had to abandonon the advice of her Englishbenefactors-shewas contemptuous,sometimes exaggeratedly so, of her. Burtonastutely sees the metropolitanspace of Britain as the theater for competitive jockeying among Indian women; in such a scenario the other woman from the Bombay shadpresidency functions as an intimate enemy, as "Sorabji's ow-one might even say her double"(p. 127).

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Burton'sexcavation of the late-Victorian histories of gendered SouthAsian migrancydemonstratessome of the colonialtrajectories of globality and serves to emphasize its distinctions (and its likenessesin termsof gender and class privilege)from its contemporary manifestations.It also reminds us to be wary of our easy convictionthat we inhabita capitalisttemporalityunmatchedfor its rapid globalizationand its dissolution of nationalboundaries; leftist and neoclassicaleconomichistorianshave pointed out that beforethe FirstWorldWar capitalismwas at least as transnational as it is in the present conjuncture.31 Finally,it insists to us that all manifestations of globality are not necessarily self-evident but must be scrupulouslyand often counterintuitively learned.An attentiveness to these issues might serve to make our melancholic readingsof gendered migrancymore historicallyresponsibleand analyticallyuseful. NOTES
1. I am not unaware of the quite distinct charges of terms like "globalization," "diaspora," "immigration," and "transnationality." In the interests of economy, I have used "globality" in the title as a portmanteau term for all these locutions of locality and situation; but I have striven for a more precise usage through the body of the essay.

Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 3. Peter van der Veer, ed., introduction to Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Arjun Appadurai, "Difference and Disjuncture in the Global Cultural Economy," Public Culture 2 (spring 1990): 1-23; and Homi Bhabha, "DissemiNation," in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990).

2. Benedict Anderson, ImaginedCommunities: on Reflections the Origin and Spreadof

4. Janet Abu-Lughod, BeforeEuropean The WorldSystem,A.D. 1250-1350 Hegemony:

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). Also see Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levan-tine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); K.N. Chaudhuri, 1750 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See also Fernand Braudel,

Asia before and Europe: Economy Civilisation the IndianOcean of from the Rise of Islamto

University of California Press, 1981), The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Sian Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), and The Perspective of the World, trans. Sian Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Also Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World (London: Variorum, 1996); Subrahmanyam, The Careerand Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1998). 5. Khachig Tololyan, "The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface," Diaspora 1 (spring 1991): 3-7. 6. A full bibliography of this scholarship is impossible to provide here; the following

TheStructure Everyday trans. Sian Reynolds (Berkeley: Life:TheLimitsof the Possible, of

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are some of the importantstatementson this topic:Andrew Parkeret al., eds. Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York:Routledge, 1992);Anne McClintock,"No Longer in a and Leather: Context Future Heaven,"in Imperial Race,Gender, Sexualityin the Colonial and in (New York:Routledge, 1996);KumariJayawardena,Feminism Nationalism the ThirdWorld(London: Zed Press, 1986); Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Women: History(New Brunswick,N.J.:RutgersUniEssaysin IndianColonial Recasting and Colonial Postversity Press, 1990);ParthaChatterjee,TheNationand Its Fragments: colonialHistories(Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1995);Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., and Islam, theState(Philadelphia: Women, TempleUniversityPress, 1991);Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis,Woman-Nation-State (London:Macmillan,1989);Susan Jeffords, HardBodies: Masculinityin the ReaganEra (New Brunswick, N.J.:Rutgers Hollywood Goesto Washington City University Press, 1994);LaurenBerlant,TheQueenof America Duke UniversityPress,1997). (Durham: 7. The following is a partiallist of the recentwork on this clusterof issues: Paul Gilroy, and HarvardUniversity Atlantic: TheBlack Modernity DoubleConsciousness (Cambridge: at Dimensions Globalization Cultural Press, 1993);Arjun Appadurai,Modernity Large: of and Travel (Minneapolis:University of MinnesotaPress, 1996);JamesClifford,Routes: HarvardUniversity Press, 1997); in Translation the LateTwentieth Century(Cambridge: Now Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge:Harvard Timothy Brennan,At Homein the World: Culture, (London:Routledge, Identity UniversityPress, 1997);Iain Chambers, Migrancy, and 1994);Pheng Cheah and BruceRobbins,eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking Feelingbeyond the Nation (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1998);Bruce Robbins,Feeling in Internationalism Distress(New York:New York University Press, 1999);Rey Global: Cultural Studies Chow, Writing Diaspora:Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Acts (Durham: (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1993);Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Transnationals theThird and World: The Duke UniversityPress, 1996);ArmandMattelart, Jamesonand (SouthHadley,Mass.:Bergin& Garvey,1983);Frederic for Struggle Culture Masao Miyoshi, eds., TheCulturesof Globalization (Durham:Duke University Press, 1998); van der Veer; Aihwa Ong, FlexibleCitizenship:The CulturalLogicsof Transand (Durham:Duke University Press, 1999);Saskia Sassen, Globalization Its nationality and on Discontents: of Essays theNewMobility People Money(New York:New Press,1998). in 245. 8. JamesClifford,"Diasporas," Routes, 9. SuchetaMazumdar,"Racist Responsesto Racism:The AryanMyth and South Asians Crisis: SouthAsia Bulletin no. 1 (1989);Susan Koshy, "Category in the United States," 9, South Asian Americansand Questions of Race and Ethnicity," Diaspora (forthcoming); TejaswiniGanti on bhangrain New York;GurinderChadha,dir., I'm British,But ... (NAATA, 1990);Chadha, dir., Bhajion the Beach(First Look Pictures, 1993);Srinivas dir.,Masala Krishna, (DivaniFilms,Inc.,1992). 10. Karen Leonard, TheSouthAsian Americans (New York:Greenwood Press, 1998); in The Roger Ballard,ed., DeshPardesh: SouthAsianPresence Britain(London:C. Hurst, SouthAsians and RajiniSrikanth, eds., A Part,YetApart: 1994);LaviniaDhingraShankar in AsianAmerica Temple University Press, 1998);Avtar Brah,Cartogra(Philadelphia: and (London:Routledge,1996);RozinaVisram,Ayahs,Lascars, Princes: phiesof Diaspora in 1700-1947 TheHistory Indians Britain, Pluto, 1986);MichaelH. Fischer,ed., (London: of India(Berkeley: UniAn TheTravels DeasMahomet: Eighteenth-Century Journey through of Hinduism, Sexuality, versity of CaliforniaPress, 1997);JohnD. Kelly,A Politicsof Virtue: in Discourse Fiji(Chicago: andCountercolonial Universityof ChicagoPress,1991). 11. The investigationof such a nexus is not, of course,entirelynovel. The two phenomwith substantialcorrectness,to changes in U.S. ena are linked by many commentators, and especially to the 1965 amendment to the Immigration and immigration policy, NationalityAct which removed race, religion, and nationalityas criteriafor eligibility for immigration.This permitteda new wave of (postcolonial)South Asian immigration (and, indeed, immigration from other parts of Asia including China and the Philip-

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to pines). This wave consisted-in contradistinction the first (colonial)wave of immigration by a farming and laboring underclassin the early part of the century-largelyof urban, English-speaking,middle-class, and professionally trained men (and their female relatives)from the subcontinent.In the last two decades, commensurably professionalized women have constitutedpart of this immigrantpopulation.This is the pool from which many postcolonialcriticsin the FirstWorldare drawn.Yet the class composition of SouthAsian immigrantsis not uniform;this is attestedto in partby the numerous nonbourgeoisoccupationsin which they play a prominentpart. They function as taxi drivers, restaurantworkers,newspaper vendors, nurses' aides, and gas station attendants. Besides, immigration to the United States sometimes results in downward mobility in class terms;it is not entirelyanomalousto encounterimmigrantswith professional credentialsfrom the countryof origin laboringin nonprofessionaloccupations in the United States. 12. Ella Shohat, "Notes on the 'Post-Colonial,"' SocialText 31/32 (1992):99-113, and Anne McClintock, "TheAngel of Progress:Pitfallsof the TermPost-Colonialism," Social Text31/32 (1992):84-98.In her introductionto Talking Shohathas supplementVisions, ed the critiqueof postcolonialstudies profferedin "Noteson the 'Post-Colonial."' Arif Dirlik has remarkedthat "thepopularity that the term postcolonialityhas achieved in the last few years has less to do with its rigorousnessas a conceptor with the new vistas it has opened up for criticalinquirythan it does with the increasedvisibility of academic intellectuals of Third World origin as pacesetters in cultural criticism"("ThePostcolonialAura:ThirdWorldCriticismin an Age of GlobalCapitalism," Critical 20 Inquiry the [winter1994]:339).Also see KwameAnthony Appiah, "Isthe 'Post'in 'Postcolonial' Same as the 'Post'in 'Postmodern'?" In My Father's in House: Africain the Philosophy of Culture(New York:OxfordUniversity Press, 1992);and LataMani and Ruth FrankenCrosstalk:Race, 'Postcoloniality,'and the Politics of Location," berg, "Crosscurrents, CulturalStudies7 (May, 1993):292-310.For an acute response to Shohat, McClintock, and Dirlik, see StuartHall's "WhenWas the 'Post-Colonial'? in Thinkingat the Limit," ThePost-Colonial Common ed. Skies,Divided Horizons, Iain Chambersand Lidia Question: Curti(London:Routledge,1996),242-60. 13. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations,Literatures (London:Verso, 1992).The fact that his work has been so widely disseminated,reviewed, and made the occasion for have heated, even hysterical,criticalexchangeunderlines-evenwhere his interlocutors and disagreed with him-that his ad hominem adfeminam critiqueshave struckhome for Need ("The many a postcolonialcritic.See, for instance,the essays by ParthaChatterjee to Dissemble," Levinson("Newsfrom Nowhere:The Discontentsof 55-64)and Marjorie devoted to a discussionof In AijazAhmad,"97-131)in the special issue of PublicCulture (vol. 6, fall 1993). Theory 14. Spivak'sturn to the Hindu dharmashastras "Canthe SubalternSpeak?"-amove in that distinguishesher analysisof sati fromLataMani's-speaksto the profoundnecessity of understandingthe historicaland conceptuallimits of "the[colonial]invention of tradition."See GayatriChakravorty in and Spivak,"Canthe Subaltern Speak?" Marxism the ed. Interpretation Culture, Cary Nelson and LawrenceGrossberg(Urbana: of University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313;and Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: Debateon The in India(Berkeley: "Sati" Colonial Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1998).For a critiqueof Mani's methods as historian, see Sumit Sarkar,WritingSocialHistory (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Sheldon Pollock, "Deep Orientalism?Notes on Sanskrit and Power beyond the Raj,"in Orientalism the Postcolonial and Predicament: on and Perspectives SouthAsia,ed. CarolBreckenridge Petervan der Veer (Philadelphia: of Universityof PennsylvaniaPress, 1993).The term "invention tradition" popularwas ized by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge,U.K.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992). For a notable new reading of "Canthe SubalternSpeak?" Sandhya Shetty and ElizabethJane Bellamy, "Archive see

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diacritics Fever," 2001). (forthcoming, 15. Hall. 16. On this issue, also see HortenseSpillers'scritiqueof the guilt of Blackintellectuals A 2 in "The Crisisof the Negro Intellectual: Post-Date," boundary 21 (fall 1994),65-116. 17. I have profitedfrom a readingof BruceRobbins's analysis of the institutionalization of intellectual work; see his SecularVocations: Culture Intellectuals,Professionalism, remains, to date, the last (London:Verso, 1993). Spivak's"Canthe SubalternSpeak?" word on the topic. 18. It might be no bad thing eitherto be remindedof the often heterogeneousgloballocations of the postcolonialcritic;after all, the denunciationof the metropolitan scholar also ensures the fetishizationof this immigrantfigure.No matterwhat its point of geoin graphicalorigin (the publicationof Edward Said's Orientalism the United States in 1978is commonlyacknowledgedas an inauguralmoment),postcolonialstudies is now locatedin severalvenues, not just in the United Statesor the Britishacademy;Indiais in fact a significantproducerof postcolonialscholarship,as is the Caribbean (even though some scholarsin those locationsmight disavow the termitself). 19. See GayatriChakravortySpivak, "Poststructuralism, Marginality,Postcoloniality, and Value,"in Literary Today,ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan(Ithaca, Theory N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). This argument is repeated in A Critiqueof HarvardUniversityPress,1999),356-421. Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Old 20. GayatriChakravorty Spivak,"Diasporas and New: Womenin the Transnational Practice no. 2 (1996): Textual 245-69. 10, World," BruceRobbinsnotes that "nationalism 21. In his spirited advocacyof internationalism, is often couched as a defense of the welfare state, which is seen as a prime victim of the forces of capitalist globalization that internationalism is taken to reflect and abet" Global, 6). (Feeling in 22. GayatriChakravortySpivak, "Bondingin Difference," An OtherTongue: Nation in ed. Duke University andEthnicity theLinguistic Borderlands, Alfred Arteaga(Durham: Press,1994),273-85. Old 23. Spivak,"Diasporas and New,"246. "TheHabit of Ex-Nomination: 24. AnannyaBhattacharjee, Nation, Woman,and the InPublicCulture (fall 1992):19-44.Also see Keya Ganguly, 5 dian ImmigrantBourgeoisie," Statesof Exception: Life Identity(Minneapolis:University of Everyday and Postcolonial MinnesotaPress,2001). in and 19. 25. Appadurai,"Difference Disjuncture the GlobalCulturalEconomy," Feminism in an InternationalFrame," In in 26. GayatriChakravortySpivak, "French Politics(New York:Routledge,1988).ChandraTalpade OtherWorlds: Essaysin Cultural Mohanty, "UnderWestern Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,"in and ed. ThirdWorldWomen the Politicsof Feminism, ChandraTalpade Mohanty, Ann IndianaUniversityPress,1991),51-80. Russo,and LourdesTorres(Bloomington: 27. Donna Haraway,"Situated Knowledges:The ScienceQuestionin Feminismand the Feminist Studies14 (fall 1988):575-99.JamesClifford, Principleof PartialPerspective," and ThePredicament Culture:Twentieth-Century Literature, Art (CamEthnography, of bridge:HarvardUniversityPress,1988). to 28. Kobena Mercer, "BlackHair/Style Politics," in her Welcome the Jungle:New in Studies Positions Black Cultural (New York:Routledge,1994). Talksin the Hot Peace:Revisitingthe 'Global 29. GayatriChakravorty Spivak,"Cultural and the Thinking Feelingbeyond Nation,ed. Pheng Cheah and Village,' in Cosmopolitics: " BruceRobbins(Minneapolis: Universityof MinnesotaPress,1998). at 53-54. 30. Appadurai,Modernity Large, 31. See, in addition to the work of JanetAbu-Lughodand K.N. Chaudhuri,the followTradein WorldHistory(Cambridge,U.K.:Cambridge ing: P.D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural I: University Press, 1984);Immanuel Wallerstein,TheModernWorld-System Capitalist

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in and (New Agriculture the Originsof the European World-Economy the Sixteenth Century York: Academic Press, 1974), The Modern World-SystemII: Mercantilism and the 1600-1750(New York:Academic Press, Consolidation the European of World-Economy, Era III: 1980),and TheModern World-System TheSecond of Great Expansion theCapitalist of 1730-1840s (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989); and Andre Gunder World-Economy, in GlobalEconomy the Asian Age (Berkeley:University of California Frank,Re-Oreint: Press, 1998).For neoclassicalaccountsof pre-1914trafficin commoditiesand labor,see in the following: Alan M. Taylor and JeffreyG. Williamson,"Convergence the Age of Reviewof Economic Mass Migration," History1 (April, 1997):27-63;JeffreyG. European LaborMarkets,and Policy Backlashin the Past,"Journal Williamson,"Globalization, of EconomicPerspectives12 (fall 1998): 51-72; and Kevin H. O'Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, "WhenDid GlobalizationBegin?"NBERWorking PaperNo. 7632 (March 2000),1-54.