Ethnic and Racial Studies

ISSN: 0141-9870 (Print) 1466-4356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20

FEMINISM AND POSTCOLONIAL: KNOWLEDGE/

POLITICS

Suki Ali

To cite this article: Suki Ali (2007) FEMINISM AND POSTCOLONIAL: KNOWLEDGE/POLITICS,
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30:2, 191-212, DOI: 10.1080/01419870601143877

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870601143877

Published online: 02 Feb 2007.

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Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 30 No. 2 March 2007 pp. 191
212

Special Issue
FEMINISM AND
POSTCOLONIALISM:
KNOWLEDGE/POLITICS
Guest Editor: Suki Ali

Introduction: Feminist and

postcolonial: Challenging knowledge

Suki Ali

Abstract
This article charts a partial and situated engagement with some of the
debates about the development of feminist and postcolonial theory. It
looks at the importance of maintaining an engagement with both these
perspectives in contemporary struggles around knowledge/politics in the
(British) academy. In addition it discusses the ways in which the
conjunction of feminist with postcolonial provides impetus for new
methodological agendas in future research and practice.

Keywords: Feminist; postcolonial; knowledge/politics; anti-racism.

Introduction: Knowledge/Politics
What is at stake in invoking ‘feminist and postcolonial’
nouns,
adjectives, distinct yet conjoined? Why is it done so rarely or in mostly
limited fashion?1 Starting with these rhetorical questions is not simply
idle speculation, a concern with semantics which obscures ‘bigger
issues’. The semantics matter to the ongoing critical debates about the
meanings of the terms themselves and more importantly what they
mean within particular epistemic communities, institutional and

# 2007 Taylor & Francis

ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 online
DOI: 10.1080/01419870601143877
192 Suki Ali
disciplinary sites as well as more broadly in collective public arena.
Speaking of Foucault’s work on power/knowledge Gayatri Spivak
argues that

[T]he word ‘power’ points toward what we call the empirical in the
history of the language. Poststructuralist nominalism cannot afford
to ignore the empirical implications of a particular name, (Spivak
1996: 144).

Feminist theorists, teachers and activists have long been concerned

with the relationships between power and language as they shape and
condition women’s lives. Similarly, those interested in the contested
field of postcolonial studies have included language practices as one of
their key sites of intervention. The power to name, the problems of
translation and the role of language in the production of subjectivities
are all part of a broad interest in the discursive. In considering how to
engage this particular discussion, the decision to separate the terms
feminist and postcolonial becomes relevant. Indeed, it becomes clear
that using these terms at all raises important issues for and changes
our approaches to theory and practice.
In this instance I am particularly speaking of my own location in a
British institution, and as an observer of the ongoing changes in
British Higher Education. The changes in the UK have been
characterized as a move away from elite education systems to
‘widening participation’ and ‘education for all’. While one may
support such expansion it is also notable that higher numbers of
students studying at tertiary level is continuing, but resourcing (labour
hours, facilities etc.) often fails to keep pace with such increases.
Larger student numbers and falling resources have coincided with the
so-called ‘marketisation of higher education’. Together, these changes
have been described as a move from a ‘nationalised’ system to that of a
‘mixed economy’.2 Although pressures around research ‘productivity’
have always existed, the struggle for funding for research appears to be
intensifying. ‘Priority areas’ are increasingly decided by the centralized
funding bodies; the influence of publishers is such that they can name,
rename or decline to publish work which does not sound ‘sexy’ or
commercial enough; and branding and re-branding are considered to
be of serious concern to social science departments. In such a climate,
positioning oneself intellectually and how one positions one’s work
matters. It not only matters for the continuation of that work, the
recognition of such work, it also matters to the work itself. What
counts as important, what is marginalized, what is ‘new and exciting’,
what hopelessly dull and old hat, what will recruit, what will gain one
international recognition and what is hopelessly parochial? It is in this
context that the issue of naming one’s work as feminist comes to have
 Introduction: Challenging knowledge 193
some considerable implications. This position is one that has rather
different implications than simply suggesting one is using feminist
theory or methodology as if that somehow imbues the work with
enough feminist kudos to make it viable, but not so much that it
becomes problematic i.e. political. And it is also in this context that the
move to embrace ‘the postcolonial’ in mainstream studies of ‘race’ and
ethnicity has had some impact in the British context which I shall
discuss further below.3 These are the institutional knowledge politics
that shape and are challenged by our work as academics and as
activists and researchers, and help us to understand when, how and
why fields of study emerge and fade away. As such they represent a
concern with the ways in which the feminist postcolonial must engage
the shifting conditions of encounters of people, subjects, knowledge,
politics and their situatedness (Ahmed 1998, 2000).
The development of feminist theory in academia and discussions
about its positioning as a distinct field of study bears some striking
similarities to those that debate the development of postcolonial
theory. Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Fritz Ringer,
Kirsten Campbell suggests the term ‘theoretical field’ in order to think
about the relations between theoretical positions and ideas. A
‘theoretical field’ refers to ‘a diverse group of theorists and research
projects that coalesce around shared political and theoretical invest-
ments’ (Campbell 2004: 9
10). Both ‘feminist’ and ‘postcolonial’
invoke strong debates about who can and cannot count as properly
belonging under the headings and both have been subjected
to criticisms of either maintaining intellectual elitism or being un- or
anti-intellectual. Both have been either effectively mainstreamed
or else co-opted and assimilated into or by other specific disciplines
depending upon your political perspective.4 As such, thinking of them
as theoretical fields helps to see the connections within and across the
terms.
In order to explore these issues I shall focus upon two interlocking
areas which impact upon the current understandings of both feminist
and postcolonial studies, and propose a set of problematics with which
they both engage. Although separated here they are, of course,
intricately bound up in each other. The first consideration is the
emergence of a named field of study and a linked series of theoretical
debates that help construct and contest it. The second is the changing
object of study. In both these categories, subjects of knowledge are
crucial. Subjects reference not only the fields of enquiries themselves,
but the individuals and groups who are constituted by and resist such
knowledge practices. If we take subject contestation seriously, then we
can see that these subjects provide a useful lens to turn upon
knowledge politics. In addition, the categories above and the invoca-
tion of a subject are linked by what I am terming ‘methodological’
194 Suki Ali
considerations which concern the appropriate theories and methods
for understanding or representing the social world; and how we decide
upon these. This might more accurately be thought of as an
engagement with the politics of methodologies. Considering these
together reveals several points of congruence between feminist and
postcolonial knowledge/politics. But for all the similarities there are
also notable differences which will be explored below. I shall outline an
account of some features of the development of feminist postcolonial
theory from the fields of feminist and postcolonial studies which are
salient to the discussions of institutionalized knowledge politics. This
selective approach situates the discussion of the articles collected in
this Issue which all engage with these key problematics.

Disciplining feminism
It is not my purpose here to provide a definitive genealogy of feminist
theory, and anyhow such an attempt would be doomed to fail.
Nonetheless, the changing place of feminist theoretical engagements
within disciplinary boundaries is worth considering. The oft told story
of the development of (contemporary) ‘feminist theory’ is a story of
privileged women in Euro-American societies founding and maintain-
ing an interdisciplinary field of study that has its roots in political
activism and consciousness raising. It is from the social movements of
the 1960s, and a specific kind of gendered, localized activism,
‘consciousness raising’, that the key tenet of feminist activism
translated into feminist theory
‘the personal is political’. Women as
women challenged the androcentric foundations to much of what
constituted social theory, but were centrally concerned with tackling
women’s subordinate positions in societies. This is most often seen to
mark the emergence of ‘second wave feminism’ as both theory and
activism. Clearly the two are not unrelated yet an engagement with
theory is often seen as an evacuation of a commitment to political
activism, and a move to the safer realms of theoretical musing. It is
again notable that this is a story that needs locating.
In the US, the UK and Europe the emergence of the politics of
feminism within and outside of the academy took different forms.5 It is
commonplace to see the key theme of this particular historiography as
one of (homogenous) white, middle-class and Western women who are
out to define the world, women and gender oppression in their own
terms. In such a narrative, the writings of women of colour who may or
may not have been calling themselves feminist, but are part of
(gendered) emancipatory or liberatory strategies are erased entirely
or reduced to the role of critiquing the central emergent field. This is
not to argue that we need to rewrite these accounts and paint a
rainbow coalition of queers, blacks and other others as central to a
 Introduction: Challenging knowledge 195
developing field of feminist enquiry. That would be as problematic as
the former assessment, but it does seem that such a story negates the
huge struggles and highly contested nature of the field from its outset.
While there were undoubtedly power differences between women,
inequalities in access to knowledge and its dissemination, and uneven
access to other socio-economic and cultural resources for women
located within socially and geographically differentiated sites, these
issues were loudly and painfully debated. From such volatile begin-
nings, the issue of difference, despite a rhetorical shift to diversity,
remains imperative to feminist attempts to theorise the ways in which
gender organizes and is organized within and across societies
and
crucially is still relevant to academic practices.
Feminist theory, in its latter incarnation during the so-called second
wave, explored the ontological and epistemological category of
Woman as well as the lived experiences and social positions of women.
In this sense, the objects of study, Woman and women, are also
subjects. Two major issues have impacted upon this field in line with
the rest of the humanities and social sciences
the first is the influence
of ‘the postmodern’ on and in social theory, and the second is the
‘globalization’ of knowledge. The first has seen a significant set of
engagements with poststructuralist theory which has led to the
fragmentation of the category Woman. In the early stages of second
wave feminism, difference was often seen in terms of additive models

the curse of triple oppression, race, gender and class (sexuality was
often subsumed or erased here). The debates and disputes about
differences among feminists have always been characterized by critics
from without as a weakness
from those within, a painful and costly
strength. It led to writing that characterized itself as providing a
challenge to the masculinist subject of the European Enlightenment,
universalism and the omnipotence of the all-seeing-I, the view from
nowhere which claims to be the view from everywhere (Haraway 1991).
Key texts included the collections by women of colour in the US such
as This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and But Some of us are
Brave(1982); these have been profoundly influential in breaking down
the stereotyped assumptions about the whiteness and heterosexism of
feminists as well as challenging the heterosexism and masculinism of
much anti-racist work. In the UK collections such as those by Amos
et al (1984) and Bryan et al (1985) were highly influential, along with
careful and targeted criticisms of specific categories and practices such
as Carby’s insights into the failures of British feminism’s engagements
with anti-racism (1982) and Mohanty’s (1991 [1988]) deconstruction of
development literature.
The impetus behind the move to embrace poststructuralism was one
which in part arose from a simple recognition that these issues of
subject positions were far more complex than could be explained by
196 Suki Ali
the ‘grand narratives’ and universalist theories of modernity. It is clear
from the range of writings we might call ‘feminist’ that Woman as an
undifferentiated social category is untenable; women are a diverse
group occupying multiply held positions, identities are never ‘fixed and
complete’ (Hall 1996), and it is not possible to think of all women as
simply and only ‘oppressed by men’ through a monolithic system
named ‘patriarchy’. Likewise, despite the important political and
intellectual struggles around ‘race’ and representation and recognition,
a nationally held racialized category has its limitations and contains its
own multiplicities. For example the category ‘African American’
cannot explain the experiences and consequences of blackness across
the globe, and may occlude other kinds of inequalities operating
within its boundaries. Thus June Jordon, an African American
feminist, wrote about the term ‘oppression’ and how and why it
should be used to counter sexism, racism and homophobia but also
spoke out against, for example, the prejudice against bisexuals by some
lesbians and gay men, and of some black people against other
minority groups (e.g. Jordan 1983). To understand the ways in which
women continued to be disadvantaged in so many sites necessitated a
move to studying ‘gender’ as well as women, to consider not additive
models but intersecting and mutually constituted forms of oppression
which require located and situated understandings of terms such as
race, sexuality, ability and class. It also required an acknowledgement
of the relative privilege of some women. For many this has
strengthened the political interventions of feminism. Despite those
who might suggest that difference becomes an issue with the influence
of poststructuralism, as noted above, difference has always been at the
heart of feminist praxis, but which differences and the forms of
analysis or methodologies for exploring them have in some instances
changed. Feminist theories embrace the relational aspects of gender,
and the instability and contingency and mutual constitution of core
terms such as sex, gender and sexuality, and the ‘voices from the
margins’ of yesteryear are no longer peripheral to pedagogy. Some
argue that the move to deconstruct and the focus on discourse has led
to an overemphasis on analyses of individualised subjectivities (see
Moya 2002); and a disregard for structural and social inequalities
which must be recovered (see Alexander and Mohanty 1997). What is
evident is that the objects of study have shifted and the ‘subject of
feminism’ seems to be even harder to define.
As feminist interventions across the social sciences and humanities
have become more successful, the debates about mainstreaming or
marginality grow.6 In the British context it is evident that the word
‘feminist’ must be used with extreme caution, that students are openly
advised to avoid degrees that are solely entitled Gender or Women’s
Studies, and that despite some successes, the closure of Women’s
 Introduction: Challenging knowledge 197
Studies programmes continues apace.7 The earliest engagements with
difference seemed to be curiously nationally bound. ‘Race’, class and
sexuality were all analysed through their national context despite the
necessarily international links in the construction of such terminolo-
gies, as well as in the lived experience of those identifying with raced,
gendered positions. These kinds of issues were most evident in specific
(sub)fields of study within feminism. One such engagement was
centred around labour and migration, yet along with this overlap
with racial and ethnic studies, a form of ‘methodological nationialism’
(Beck 2006) still impacted upon the terms of debate. However,
throughout the last twenty years, the ‘globalization’ of knowledge
has steadily encroached upon the territories of knowing and there has
been a distinct shift from national spaces for theory to ‘feminism
without borders’ (Mohanty 2003, see also Grewal and Caplan 2003).
The subject of feminism may still be gender but the instability and
contingency of that term requires rethinking methodological politics.
It has been argued that the single biggest challenge for feminism in the
twenty-first century will be the negotiation of shared political and
intellectual projects within a global arena. This difficult task requires
us to engage the ‘perplexity’ in negotiating pleasure and danger, desire
and fear, hope and despair in concrete situations (see e.g. Ramamurthy
2003).The need to think through issues of ‘race’, ethnicity and class as
situated within globalized networks of economic, cultural and
technological expansion is central to feminist discussions of power
and resistance, as it is of course to feminist politics and practice.

Determining the postcolonial

Situating postcolonial studies is another tricky task, one which
undoubtedly lends itself to ongoing criticisms of inadequate definition,
false boundary marking and the (re)instigation of exclusionary
practices. In order to answer the ‘what’ of postcolonialism, the debates
tend to focus on the ‘when, what, where, which and whose of
postcoloniality’ (Venn 2006: 7).8 I shall here shift the emphasis from
these key features to add a consideration of how we engage these issues
and also why, and in feminist fashion, why now. Major concerns
around the dominance of the US and other Northern centres of
knowledge production mean that although many authors may have
started out in Southern locations the dominant voices tend to be
located in the North (see Dirlik 1997). In addition, given the
heterogeneity of European colonialism it is not surprising that the
debates about the usefulness of terms also engage with the dominance
of writing from the Indian sub-continent, Africa and the Caribbean
and which is for some simply not transferable to other postcolonial
contexts; much of Latin America for example (see Klor de Alva 1996,
198 Suki Ali
Mignolo 2000) or China and Chinese diasporas (e.g.Chow 1991,1993)
to indicate but two. Nor do they adequately engage the ongoing
colonization of indigenous peoples and their absence from these
debates (see e.g. Andrea Smith 2003 on the U.S., and in contrast Moss
(ed.) 2000 on ‘postcolonial’ Canada). Currently these kinds of
considerations make it all but compulsory to make a disclaimer about
how many others have already had these discussions and how
rehearsing the main strands of dissent of postcolonial studies is a
form of reflexivity which has outlived its usefulness (see Loomba et al.
2005). What is most important to note is that despite the necessarily
transnational and global reach of fields of study which have their
inception in the impact of colonial expansion and national struggle,
the metropolitan centres in which they develop come in for a great deal
of criticism in how they represent this as I shall briefly outline below.
In the UK, there is a particular connection to US based writing,
although the debates and terminologies used to discuss dominant
issues and the formation of what might be termed ‘national canons’
are different.9 In the case of this particular Special Issue the
complexity of locatedness was one of the interesting features of the
event and papers (see below) which belies a simple US/UK assessment,
but remains relevant to the issues under investigation. In the US it has
been claimed that the mainstreaming of postcolonial studies has
already taken place. Indeed, it is more common to be discussing what
to do now that the mainstreaming has dulled the edge of critical
enquiry that postcolonial studies offered (Seshadri-Crooks and Afzal
Khan 2000; Loomba et al 2005). In the US it has also been claimed
that ‘the melancholic state’ of postcolonial studies arises from this
‘new-found authority and incorporation into institutions of higher
learning’ (Seshadri-Crooks 2000: 3). Within British contexts the move
to embrace ‘the postcolonial’ across a range of disciplines has been
increasing during the last decade, but arguably lags behind that of the
US. Still the debates about the inception of the field of postcolonial
studies illuminate the discussions about what postcolonial theory is.
Studies of colonial histories have a long tradition. ‘The history of
scholarship on colonialism abounds with examples of the questioning
of the idea of History, the interrogation of the concepts of race and
tribe’ (Prakash 1996: 5). One of the major influences on the
developments in postcolonial theory has come from the emergence
of the Subaltern Studies group who challenged conventional historical
methods (see e.g. Guha 1982; Chakrobarty 2000). The collective term
‘postcolonial studies’10 as it is most often invoked has its basis in the
literary criticism that was founded in studies of colonial literatures
a
form of colonial discourse analysis. This work is best known in terms
of its engagement with the development of fiction which might be seen
as counter-colonial, as well as that of writers from colonial centres. As
 Introduction: Challenging knowledge 199
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o writes ‘Written literature and orature are the main
means by which a particular language transmits the images of the
world contained in the culture it carries. . . . Language is thus insepar-
able from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific
form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the
world.’ (Thiong’o 1986: 15
16). The importance of literatures from
Africa, the Caribbean and again, India are absolutely central and
foundational to the field as established in metropolitan, Anglo-
American centres.11 The issues of ‘race’ and ethnicity, cultural
and linguistic appropriation, and indigeneity and settler societies,
migration and stasis all coalesce with the impact of colonizing
capitalism. In addition to its place with literature, postcolonial studies
can be and has been embraced within the fields of history, of area
studies, and of social geography as well as anthropology and sociology.
What is common to these diffuse areas is that attaching ‘postcolonial’
to the form of analysis implies an approach that is critical to modernist
accounts of historical relations between colonizers and colonizers and
centralize a problematization of these issues. As such the subjects of
postcolonial studies are colonialization and resistance, and in line with
feminism a questioning of modern European subject formation via
nationhood.
There is in the UK, however, a body of work that comes under the
heading of postcolonial theory. This coincides with a US-recognized
collectivity who cite the work of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ as the
founding text, with the triumvirate completed with Homi Bhabha and
Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak (e.g. Ashcroft et al 1989; Chambers and
Curtis 1996; Childs and Williams 1997; Loomba 1998). A key
intervention by Said was to insist upon the mutually constitutive
nature of the categories such as Occident and Orient, colonized and
colonizer, and privileges the Occident. A central tenet of postcolonial
theory, like that of feminist theory, is to challenge Eurocentric notions
of modernity (Young 1995, 2001; Chakrobarty 2000) and nation
(Chaterjee 1993), the linear temporality that privileges the progress of
civilization over primitivism (Mclintock 1995) and a decentring of a
West and Rest binary (Hall 1992). Said’s earlier work is criticized for
holding too closely to modernist binaries such as Orient and Occident
and for focusing too heavily on the role of colonizers; others such
as Spivak (1993,1998) emphasise deconstruction and insist on com-
plexity, characterized by liminality and ambivalence (Bhabha 1994)
and an interest in the vernacular cultures of the everyday (Gilroy 1993,
2000, 2004).
A curious anomaly is the positioning of the work of Frantz Fanon
who seems to be to the postcolonial theory what Simone de Beauvoir
is to (Euro-American) feminist theory. Fanon is an author who
challenges disciplinary boundaries using an exhilarating mix of
200 Suki Ali
psychoanalysis, existentialist philosophy and Marxist critique in a
poetics of personal experience that vividly explores colonial psychol-
ogy, and whose uncompromising stand on violent struggle in liberation
movements continues to challenge. Just as de Beauvoir inevitably gets
positioned as a precursor to ‘second wave feminism’, someone whose
work has inspired a new generation of feminist poststructuralists who
claim her as a postmodern innovator, so too Fanon pre-empted the
current interest in understandings of racialized embodiment and
racialization and identity, in ways similar to those that de Beauvoir
used in relation to gender. Such a connection is not unsurprising given
that both authors were in Paris at the same time and shared not only
an intellectual interest in existentialism but also a commitment to
political activism; both were vociferous campaigners against France’s
colonial rule in Algeria. While de Beauvoir writes admiringly of
Fanon, he never mentions her or her work.12 His own gendered
position impacted upon his work hugely, while not being subject to the
same critique he affords gender in colonial relations.
Fanon’s work provides further important insights in the debates
about the politics of methodology I mention above. The major critical
dissent occurs between those who argue that a turn to ‘the
postmodern’ has all but erased the radical political potential of anti-
colonialist movements and writings and replaced it with the high
theory of the elites.13 For example, the groundbreaking work of
Fanon’s ‘Black Skins, White Masks’ gets privileged over the call to
resistance of his other two texts. Bart Moore-Gilbert argues that
people read Fanon ‘in reverse’, that his work changed with his
disillusionment with the institutionally truncated interventions of the
intellectual (Moore-Gilbert 1997).
With this critique in mind, Fanon again provides us with a way into
thinking about the problematic which engages the referent to which
the term postcolonial attaches. If the origins of postcolonial theory are
situated in a form of critical textual analysis then what is the object
that is most under scrutiny? Clearly the term itself indexes colonialism
in all its forms, and its comprador term ‘imperialism’. It would surely
engage with the issue of temporality, ‘the continuing present’ (Bhabha
and Comaroff 2000) or the ‘time-lag’ (Bhabha 1994). For some it is
‘the nation’ and identities that are of the most interest, and following
Fanon, the production of (post)colonial subjectivities. In recent times
another key area of concern takes the form of an interlocution of
terms like ‘globalization’, development, cosmopolitanism or multi-
culturalism. Given the historical and material conditions of the
production of these terms, and the subjects they stand for, it is surely
essential to also include considerations of ‘race’ and ethnicity (or caste
or tribe) and the role they play in ordering societies.
 Introduction: Challenging knowledge 201
Feminist postcolonial theory
The relocation of authors as founders and members of canons forms a
larger issue in relation to the knowledge/politics of academia. My own
introduction to Bhabha, Hall and Gilroy were not as postcolonial
theorists but as cultural theorists who raised a challenge to existing
sociological theories of race and ethnicity. Vron Ware and Cath Hall
both wrote about colonialism, imperialism and femininities and
inaugurated a new form of feminist whiteness studies (Hall 1992;
Ware 1992).14 They are clearly theorists who would come under the
heading postcolonial, yet again they were positioned as feminist
theorists of ‘race’ and ethnicity. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and You-me
Park make a much more explicit engagement with ‘postcolonialism’
and ‘feminism’ but locate their work in relation to US Third World
Feminism
a term that has never had the same resonance in the UK,
as the histories of (writing on) ‘race’ and location do not sit well with
this label. In the late 1980s into the1990s Audre Lorde and Adrienne
Rich were taught as respectively black lesbian, and white lesbian
feminists. Now both are in the edited collection ‘Feminist Postcolonial
Theory’ (Lewis and Mills 2003). I am not challenging this (re)location,
just noting it with interest. How do Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich
come to be ‘postcolonial feminists’? Does it make a difference to talk
about feminist postcolonial theorists, or feminists who draw upon
postcolonial theory? Why is the label postcolonial being attached to
people who might have been called theorists of ‘race’, ethnicity and
culture in the past (or as Rajan and Park (2000) might have it ‘Third
World’ or ‘transnational’)? It is possible to engage anti-colonial
discourse without necessarily invoking ‘race’ and ethnicity or gender;
to think postcolonial theory and not be concerned about anti-racism
or anti-sexism. One cannot, nor would one want to, reposition Edward
Said as a ‘(pro) feminist’ yet to hear Said detail his life as a migrant,
exile, a man without a homeland is to hear echoes of Virginia Woolf’s
comments on her condition as a woman requiring her to be without a
country, yet at the same time noting that this is a strength for her and
all women
‘As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country
is the world’.15 Said is clearly not a feminist as for him gender is a
secondary feature of his analysis and when it does appear is at its best
extremely limited in scope and impact. Similarly we could hardly re-
position Woolf as a postcolonialist, even as we might undertake a
contrapuntal reading of her work and acknowledge its utility in
furthering understanding of colonialism and imperialism. It is
common now for people to acknowledge the interventions made by
feminists into postcolonial theory. At the same time it is possible to
make the claim that gender matters to the theory, but to not actually
take that further in one’s work, still yet to unpack the heteronormative
202 Suki Ali
aspects of gender in the work one does. The labelling is in this instance
less important than the political and intellectual commitment to
taking gender seriously. But we might raise concerns about this kind of
elision and think of its impact upon policy and practice in institutional
settings, particularly educational settings.
Gail Lewis (2000) has shown in relation to British social policy the
difficulties of making visible forms of gendered, racialized policy and
practice, and we need to be constantly aware of how these issues are
manifest in theory and practice in relation to policy and curriculum.

In a context where issues of ‘race’ and racism are cast as

epiphenomenal, or at most the property of a few ‘bad apples’ and
not endemic in British society, recourse to class or spatial structure
is a means of avoiding the embeddedness of ‘race’ and racism in the
British social formation. (Lewis 2000: 55
56)

It is now hard to identify a form of racial and ethnic studies in the

UK that does not owe something to what were called cultural analyses
by male academics, and the so-called transnational and third world
feminists of the US. Still on the periphery are the writers, both feminist
and non- who centralize the term postcolonial in their work, or those
who work from outside of the US/UK dyad. Where the term
‘postcolonial’ does appear it sometimes seems to imply a study of
race and ethnicity, however this is less than explicit and by no means
certain. In this sense it can be seen as a form of erasure of the ongoing
salience of a form of white racism that dominates the academy and a
move away from a committed politics of anti-racism which challenges
this. Structural inequalities merge with subject popularity shifts and
the proliferation of sub-disciplinary specialization to provide very
specific national contexts in which to discuss transnational epistemol-
ogy and political allegiance. It is crucial that we continue to challenge
the silences on issues of inequality in relation to gender and sexuality
and ‘race’ and ethnicity in institutional settings, as well as increasing
our interest in issues such as disability.
In the UK there has been a consistent move to ‘mainstream’ work
on ethnicity and ‘race’; and it is clear that increasing numbers of white
academics are doing the work that was the province of Black and
Minority Ethnic [BME]16 scholars, i.e. work on ‘race’, ethnicity and
culture which is about non-white ‘others’. At the same the time, with
the rise of critical whiteness studies, we see the co-option of the
research, theory and labour of BME academics which is used by white
scholars as counterpoints to their own central theses in ways that often
leave their own positions untouched; all the while noting this is a big
problem of the field. I raise this not as an expression of faith in or a
call to return to ‘authenticity’ or identity politics within research. This
 Introduction: Challenging knowledge 203
is an insistence that we remind ourselves of the importance of thinking
through the (institutional) politics of representation in relation to these
issues. While scholars of colour are underrepresented, underpaid and
under-promoted in the academy, white academics continue to aver
their commitments to anti-racism while paying little attention to the
impact these shifting fields have upon minority ethnic colleagues. In
these examples it seems that there is something about the ‘weight of
whiteness’ (Back 2004) which is very similar to the ‘weight
of masculinities’. Just as Back describes such manoeuvrings as a way
of being an ‘Alright White’(ibid.), so too we might see a passing nod to
feminists and/or gender in theory and non-sexist practice as akin to
being an ‘Alright Man’. These matters coalesce when trying to think
through a postcoloniality which is centrally concerned with situated
‘race’, gender, sexuality, class and ability. For example, at a recent
conference based in the UK on the future of racism there were no
female speakers at all. One paper used the overworked and vilified
iconic figure of the (young) Muslim woman and ‘the French headscarf
affair’ to tell the audience about the limits of multiculturalism-but
failed to engage any of the feminist debates from Islamic, Muslim and/
or secular feminists. When asked about the role of gender in their work
all but one of the senior male academics giving talks claimed that they
took gender very seriously, and named either a feminist (female?)
writer who had influenced them or where they had inserted gender
into the talk. With this one exception who seriously engaged the
question, none of them acknowledged that their presentations would
have been different if they had taken a critical approach to gender
hegemonies seriously, and fully acknowledged the content of the
feminist interventions throughout the work. While not suggesting that
they should all ‘become feminists’ it nonetheless appears that there is
still some way to go to enjoin ‘race’, ethnicity and gender issues in the
mainstream of ‘race’ work in academia, and despite a willingness to
engage postcolonial theory, feminist theory (and gender) are still
peripheral to many discussions.

Challenging knowledge
The articles in this Special Issue arise from a workshop held at the LSE
in 2004. The remit of the workshop was to facilitate transnational
debate about some of the issues raised above, but to move out from the
contextualised epistemological and institutional debates to look at
how work that comes under the generic rubric of ‘feminist post-
colonial’ is transcending disciplinary and methodological bound-
aries.17 It was both a strength and complexity of the event that
those who attended did not necessarily name themselves as either
feminist, postcolonial or both, but they acknowledged these fields of
204 Suki Ali
enquiry, or theoretical or political allegiances, to be central to their
work. As part of the suggested discussions contributors and partici-
pants were invited to acknowledge both identification and dis-
identification with terms and fields.
The appeal to radical interventions in the academic setting is of
course an old one. For example, in discussion Homi Bhabha and John
Comaroff ponder the notion of the continuous present and the
temporal aspects of defining postcolonialism (Goldberg and Quayson
2002). They reminisce about the post 1968 era in the academy and
discuss the possibilities and limits of the LSE as a space of radical
intellectual politics.
Comaroff remarks that

Nobody anticipated the purge of the centres of radicalism, the LSE,

where we were students, notably among them. But that quiet purge
in the early seventies came to symbolize a sense of the evacuation of
politics, of the neutralization of the academy. . . . (Bhabha and
Comaroff 2002: 18)

This shift coupled with the rise of posts
Marxism and modernism

developed hand in hand with Cultural Studies and an ‘ever more
articulate feminism’ (ibid: 19). Comaroff goes on to comment that
LSE produced ‘for sure a very docile student body and a very docile
faculty. For those of us who had come from the colonies and for whom
revolutionary struggles were very much an object of concern, the
whole thing quickly looks like a fantastic carnival of liberal desire’
(ibid.). Universities here seem to be doing the work of repression that
governments could not do. Given the international nature of the LSE
they present a hugely pessimistic picture; radical thinking dulled,
political edge blunted. However, it is important that the political,
intellectual, economic-power-interests are made explicit in these
debates and that these are seen as a continued struggle for knowl-
edge/politics; it is here that feminist and postcolonial work comes
together in an investigation of subjects in and of power and the role of
the academy in the re/production in teaching, learning and research.
Given these complexities it is unsurprising to see how hard it is to
align the two fields unless through a methodological commitment to
feminism. While it is not possible to fully neuter feminism, we can ‘use’
postcolonial theory as if it were neutral, and then make gender work in
relation to it. Thus it is possible to invoke the methods used in
‘Orientalism’ as a methodological framework (even if Said would not
want it) and then to ‘gender it’. Likewise we note that Spivak’s
commitment to deconstruction takes white, European male theorists’
work and again turns it to the service of feminist enquiry. In this sense
the theoretical preference for deconstruction, Marxist literary criticism
 Introduction: Challenging knowledge 205
or a form of feminist materialism can be engaged with texts, people,
states, organizations (subjects?)
the important feature of this work
that would mark it as both feminist and postcolonial would be an
engagement with the centrality of gender matters, in conjunction with
a specified neo-, post-, anti-colonial stance. Ali Rattansi (1997)
suggests that we might more usefully think of ‘postcolonialism’ and
‘postcolonial studies’ as relating to a particular form of intellectual
enquiry and use ‘postcoloniality’ to index a set of historical epochs
(with emphasis to be placed on the plurality). In a similar fashion I
would suggest that, given the diffuseness of the ways in which
postcolonial approaches take shape, using a term like ‘postcoloniality’
implies not only ‘conditions’ under which people live in the continuing
present, but ways of thinking or sets of principles or analytics that can
be drawn upon in the study of the social world. After some hesitation,
I now consider that the usefulness of thinking this is perhaps after all a
form of ‘postcoloniality’ that is positioned as being the subject of a
form of postcolonialism as ‘community’ or ‘movement’ in their loosest
terms; that is an intellectual and political identification that requires
an affiliation to an ‘-ism’. Here then it maps onto a feminist
engagement which requires a political and intellectual affiliation
with feminism. Despite the discomfort with both feminism and
postcolonialism as simple collective nouns, there is a way of using
these terms productively. Where the two debates are sharply distin-
guished is in relation to the idea of a ‘condition’
there is no condition
that relates to a feminist position.
The articles here all use feminist postcolonial perspectives in relation
to the themes that have been part of the debates outlined above: that is
issues of knowledge politics, the political economy of representation
(in its broadest sense) and subjectivities. They use innovative
approaches to a range of social issues, and both challenge and extend
existing epistemological and methodological parameters, suggesting
further areas for research. Hazel Carby refuses the positioning as ‘a
postcolonialist’, yet is clearly engaged with the problematics of
postcoloniality and the theoretical and empirical interventions that
come from postcolonial literatures. She does identify as feminist and
her work has always gendered race and raced gender. Her article takes
the onset of debates about postcolonial studies as fostering un-
American sentiment and moves on to teaching and researching in
this climate. Weaving together the historical and the contemporary in a
poetics of politicised autobiography her essay examines how the
history of slavery continues to impact contemporary understandings of
blackness in Britain. Carby’s subjects are situated in the liminal spaces
of theory and practice and creatively engage the knowledge/politics of
postcolonial feminism.
206 Suki Ali
Sara Ahmed is an author with a history of writing that names itself
both feminist and postcolonial, but is also allied to a black feminist
politics (e.g. Ahmed 1998, 2000). Her article draws upon a long
engagement with feminist postcolonial theories of difference to
challenge the move to diversity practices in Higher Education in the
UK. She explicitly challenges the institutional knowledge politics that
have moved away from issues of inequality, racism, sexism and
heterosexism and now embrace inclusion, performance and diversity.
Ahmed shows how the performative ‘diversity’ actually serves to
obscure the real problems of sustaining anti-racist practice in colleges.
While the references to postcolonial literatures are less explicit in this
particular piece, her work nonetheless like Carby’s, is engaged with the
legacy of a particular way of thinking about racialization and
difference that is continually felt and enacted in institutional sites.
In a more ‘traditional engagement’ with what we might understand
as postcolonial studies, Amal Treacher and Ranjana Khanna both use
texts as resources for understanding contemporary postcolonial
subjectivities. As I have noted the investigation of subjectivities has
been a major strand of postcolonial theory and both these authors
have made important contributions to this area (see also Treacher
2005; Khanna 2003). In these two articles subjectivities are situated
historically, economically, geographically and legally. Despite being
quite different essays they share themes around the affect of/in politics
and the politics of affect, and particularly investigate the issue of
shame, and the injuries of colonialism to and through subjectivities.
Khanna draws upon a range of theoretical and philosophical texts and
interrogates the role of the human and the processes by which subjects
are made and refused. In her article she particularly engages legal
definitions of rights, dignity and human worth and expands and
explains these in relation to postcolonial literatures. Her argument
calls for the recognition of a radical alterity that enables political
transformation. Amal Treacher takes on the history of colonialism in
Egypt and its impact upon contemporary Egyptian masculinities. Her
essay considers the ways in which the colonial past impacts the present
in the production of gendered subjectivities, and the injurious nature
of unresolved grief and shame from the ‘failures’ of political struggles
and resistances to oppression. Using personal testimony, historical
biography, history and psychoanalytic theory Treacher carefully
inaugurates a discussion of the way in which political change must
engage with the collective forgetting of the colonial past.
Shirley Tate also engages with affect and emotion, and again shame
appears here as a central motif. Tate works with data coming from an
empirical project with young Black women in the North of England
and engages with postcoloniality and embodiment through the tropes
of beauty and naturalness (see also Tate 2005). Drawing upon the
 Introduction: Challenging knowledge 207
productive aspects of the concept of melancholia, Tate argues that the
young mixed race women in her study are opening new ways of
understanding twenty-first-century black femininities and break with
the injurious histories of slavery and empire that shaped discourses of
belonging and authenticity. Again the work crosses disciplinary
boundaries and effectively raises questions for understanding the
ways in which the ‘continuing present’ bears upon everyday cultural
practices. Her subjects are providing challenges to orthodox knowl-
edge and Tate’s sympathetic readings enhance the fields of enquiry.

Conclusion
Despite the disparate form of the articles collected, they might then be
considered part of the emergent field of ‘feminist postcolonial theory’.
The essays here help to suggest future research agendas that open up
the possibilities of feminist postcolonial work. It is imperative that we
consider the naming practices attached to these endeavours, but that
we also look at the ways in which these authors are providing us with
insights into ways of thinking otherwise about ongoing and emergent
social problems. Within the collected articles we see that working with
uncertainties can be productive, as can raising questions that as yet
have no answers. Yet there are some other noticeably bold moves. In
different ways the authors all make a methodological commitment to
feminism and postcoloniality, which might even be considered
postcolonialism. The feminist perspective to knowledge insists upon
noticing its own situatedness and partiality, and uses this as a strength
in the approach to the work. The postcolonial here is not separate, in
that a feminist consideration of gendered knowledge production must
now inevitably engage a politics of positionality-which in each of these
articles means using postcolonial approaches to racialization, nation
and ethnicity.
The ways in which the authors approach their diverse projects shows
the commitment to allowing for the complexities and ambivalences of
work that is seriously invested in challenging subjects of research.
These subjects are loosely and yet connectedly subjects of feminist and
postcolonial enquiry, those areas of enquiry that might be considerd
‘objects’, and the ways in which these not-quite-same objects call into
question other subjects
that is those who are subjectivated through
discourse and action, and who seek to resist. Despite not being
‘economic analyses’ per se, all the authors ground their work in the
material and economic conditions of lived experience; in some cases
mediated through texts. In each article these struggles over knowledge
are present in texts, in teaching, in action and reaction and show the
potential of continuing to attempt the imbrication of feminist and
postcolonial theory and research. Perhaps this is a form of feminist
208 Suki Ali
postcolonial theory that does, after all, require the transposition of the
terms in order to insist upon postcolonial feminism rather than
feminist postcolonialism. It is in the continuing engagement with these
subjects, rather than the provision of neat answers, that the benefits of
the struggles lie.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Editors of ERS for supporting this Special
Issue, and all the authors for their contributions. I would also like to
thank the Department of Sociology, LSE for funding the initial event.
In addition, Amal Treacher and Kirsten Campbell have offered a great
deal of editorial support and advice. Sara Ahmed, Kirsten Campbell,
Gail Lewis, Fran Tonkiss and John Solomos all gave helpful comments
on drafts of this article.

Notes
1. Feminism as a theoretical intervention is quite often included in more recent collections
on postcolonial theory (see below). It is also not unusual to see references to gender, or
indeed sections on ‘gender and. . . . ’ The only text that centrally names this field that I am
aware of is the collection of papers edited by Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (2003) and a piece
by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and You-me Park, although others such as Ahmed (2003)
explicitly engages with the terms.
2. Robert Jackson is a former Conservative minister for higher education who moved to
the Labour party in 2005. He recently endorsed this as a positive shift that should be
embraced and expanded upon (Jackson 2006).
3. It is true that to use the term ‘British’ obscures significant differences across national
borders and within and across disciplinary traditions. Although problematic I will use it here
as a broadly collective term.
4. That is not to say that these changes have followed a pattern of options being offered
and choices made. The exclusions and failures are as much a part of these histories.
5. Here again the term Europe is un-differentiated, yet the term feminist and feminist
work varies across countries see e.g. Griffin and Braidotti (eds.) (2002).
6. I am focussing here more specifically on social sciences in general and sociology in
particular.
7. The Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK and Ireland has compiled a list of
these closures.
8. Again I would guide the reader to e.g. Mishra and Hodge (eds) (1991); Hall (1996);
Frankenberg and Mani (1993); Rattansi (1997) or collections such as Ashcroft et al. 1998 on
‘key concepts’.
9. Postcoloniality is obviously a key aspect of work in other northern sites in Europe and
in, for example, Canada and Australia, and these sites are also represented in some of the
recent collections cited here.
10. It is worth noting that the term ‘feminist studies’ is rarely used in the UK to indicate
either courses or fields of work. Gender studies, women’s studies or feminist theory ‘applied
to’ or feminist approaches to subjects or disciplines are more usual. US colleges and
Universities continue to use Women’s Studies, European feminists often work with both.
11. Again it is impossible to indicate the range of authors who contributed to this area, but
many are discussed in the collections cited here such as Williams and Chrisman 1993.
 Introduction: Challenging knowledge 209
12. Toril Moi notes that Fanon writes admiringly of Sartre and could not have failed to
notice de Beauvoir’s position in relation to his work and her position in French intellectual
society.
13. See especially for example Dirlik 1999, Parry 2002, 2004.
14. Clearly there was a long engagement with the issue of whiteness within feminism before
these texts. Other than the somewhat rare reflexive statement on whiteness such as Fry
(1982); it was Black feminists and women of colour who had done most to make whiteness
visible in feminist work e.g. Lorde (1984); Amos and Parma 1984; Carby 1984. What Hall
and Ware do differently is to take the historical and material conditions of colonialism and
imperialism as central to their own understandings and analyses of the production of
gendered whiteness.
15. Mills and Lewis (2003) use this as an epigram for the introduction to their book.
16. I acknowledge the difficulty with this term but it is the term used in the majority of the
literature on policy and practice in Higher Education, for example by the trade union group
for the sector. It simplifies heterogeneous ‘black’ groups under a racial marker, and de-
racialises all the other others who do not affiliate to blackness despite the fact that they might
be marked by racialisation.
17. The meeting was funded by the Department of Sociology at the LSE to which I am
extremely grateful. In order to facilitate discussion the meeting was limited in size with an
invited set of speakers and participants. Despite my best intentions the event ended up having
a decidedly US/UK bias in terms of participants’ institutional location, even if intellectual,
personal and political histories were far more diverse. This was another indicator of the
difficulty in identifying those working within these frameworks who claim a feminist history,
the limits to the funding and institutional constraints (time and funds) for invited
participants.

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Magazine Articles
JACKSON, ROBERT, 2006 ‘University Challenges’ in Prospect April
2006 published by John Kelly

SUKI ALI is Lecturer in Sociology at the London School of

Economics and Political Science.
ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, LSE, Houghton Street,
London, WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: Bs.c.ali@lse.ac.uk
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