Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

There is a fundamental level at which the critical and political perspectives of postcolonialism, feminism, and womanism converge. As theoretical formulations committed to transforming political, race, and gender relations, all three discourses challenge hegemonic and oppressive systems, and explore possibilities for change. How connections between them have been rethought in recent scholarship may illuminate the various transformations that have occurred in each theorization. Initially, postcolonialism's emphasis on colonial relations steered it towards a narrowly anti-colonial agenda almost to the marginalization of other interests and constituencies within post-independence societies themselves. Its foundations in literary studies further oriented it towards interrogations of colonialist biases in aesthetics, deflating the political, social, and economic issues that were the real conditions of possibility for its emergence. While internal fissures within postcolonialism and the intersections of specific postcolonial histories have generated a rethinking of post-colonial theorizing, it is the interventions of feminism that have done more to complicate postcolonial notions like resistance, identity, subjectivity and difference. What after all is the meaning of postcolonial resistance in the face of other oppressions and power relations in post-independence societies? What does ... log in or subscribe to read full text