Date: 18 Jul 00 08:26:33 MDT From: Abu Nasr <abu-nasr at usa.net> To: marxism at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: [Spivak & Marxism-Feminism (was Re: And another thing)]
Dear Yoshie and all!
I think it's interesting and significant that when I visit a conventional bookstore in the USA (Borders, Barnes & Noble, etc.) I find nothing in the way of translations of the debates and theoretical works coming out in Arabic about current politics, society, imperialism, etc., although there is a steady stream of such things, often very interesting. About the only thing coming close to this would be the publications of Edward Said. These are fine, but there's lots more in Arabic. (And as regards Said, there was an excellent Marxist critique of Said by Sadiq Jalal al-Azm of Syria called "Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism" not long after Said's "Orientalism" came out in 1977. Yet despite the debate that raged over "Orientalism" in the West, that critique to my knowledge was not translated.)
I'm not sure that the sociological studies of migrant labour by Saad ed-Din Ibrahim of Egypt count as theoretical works, for these have been translated and published in the west. But then please note that his recent detention has become a cause celebre and he a "hero" of the "human rights" struggle in Egypt (waged mostly from western countries), while the Arabic press (not only in Egypt) has been pointing up how he has gladly taken tens of thousands of dollars in European grant money and has for a long time been cavorting about with the staff of the Israeli Embassy as an outspoken supporter of "normalization" with the Zionist state.
On the other hand in the big bookstores in the USA one can readily find the writings of Nawal al-Sa`dawi, an able Egyptian feminist writer as well as other materials by Arab and Muslim women writers about, if you will, feminist issues.
I'm not alleging reverse discrimination or anything like that. What I'm saying is that somehow the feminist discourse can be decontextualized in the west, detached from the broader social context that created it and published in the west where in effect it becomes part of the dominant imperialist discourse, quite in opposition to the intentions of Sa`dawi and other Arab and Muslim feminists who are well aware of the broader social issues in which the "woman question" is embedded.
Meanwhile other social issues about which much is written in Arabic remain untranslated, and I suspect because things like debates over the impact of globalism are more difficult for the mainstream western discourse to decontextualize and co-opt.
Clearly this is not a fault of feminism per se, but a result of the imperialist political economic world system under which these debates are managed.
Revolutionary greetings!
Abu Nasr
Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> >Katha Pollitt wrote:
> >
> >>and a way for imported academics like Gayatri Spivak to score points
> >>from guilty liberals.
> >
> >What has Spivak said about the Taliban? Last time I heard her speak
> >she was talking about Kant.
> >
> >Doug
>
>Spivak doesn't say that sexist practices in poor nations should be
>excused because they are part of their "culture" or anything like
>that. The main point she is making is basically that oppressed women
>in the Third World become a kind of political football between
>nationalist men and liberal Western imperialists (including liberal
>feminists). At the risk of oversimplification, I say that
>Third-World nationalism often mobilizes the idea of the nation that
>masks class & gender oppressions (with a partial exception of
>revolutionary nationalism inflected by Marxism); Western liberalism
>smugly presents itself as "enlightened" in contrast to "backward
>cultures" and uses this contrast as an excuse for denying
>self-government to poor nations (in the process Western liberalism
>also turns a blind eye to the fact that its own imperialism has
>helped to perpetuate and often to intensify the very backwardness
>that it pretends to deplore [e.g., Western liberal support for
>fundamentalist "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan]). Neither
>nationalism nor Western liberalism serves poor women's interests
>(first of all, because neither abolishes material conditions that
>give rise to the oppression of poor women). So far, so good.
>Spivak, however, used to argue that trapped between the rock and hard
>places "the subaltern [e.g. poor women in poor nations] cannot speak"
>(I don't know if she's still committed to this statement). I'd say
>that Marxism-Feminism (coupled with fight against imperialism, it
>goes without saying) is necessary to avoid the problem that Spivak
>points out.
>
>Yoshie