East-West Encounters and the Making of Feminists

Abstract

East-West Encounters and the Making of Feminists Antoinette Burton. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. xi + 301 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2161-6 (cl). Kumari Jayawardena. The White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule. New York: Routledge, 1995. χ + 310 pp. ISBN 0-415-91105-2 (pb). Peter Conn. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xxvi + 468 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-521-56080-2 (cl). Géraldine Forbes. Women in Modern India. The New Cambridge History of India, Part IV, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xix + 289 pp. ISBN 0-521-26812-5 (cl). Mala Mathrani Recent scholarly concerns with the makings of culture and identity have informed and simultaneously been informed by East-West dialogues. Postmodern and postcolonial scholarship has pointed to the cultural and intellectual dimensions of power by emphasizing location, the role of the Other, and the many connections between the center and the outside. Central to all of this is the argument—derived primarily from Foucault—that systems of power and dominance are reflected in bodies of knowledge, and in the way that knowledge is organized, thereby consolidating hegemonic positions. Regardless of whether individual scholars accept, reject, or modify these arguments, such Foucauldianderived perspectives have come to dominate studies of imperiaUsm, colonialism , and the whole array of East-West encounters. The themes of women's agency and feminist consciousness have become intertwined with the issues of colonial power and western dominance, and serve to frame discussions about women in transnational contexts. Each of the four books I will be discussing provides a different perspective on the East-West discourse. Antoinette Burton's Burdens of History points to western women's "complicity" in the dominant culture of imperialism. Kumari Jayawardena's The White Woman's Other Burden examines both "complicity and resistance" and suggests looking beyond these constructs.1 Peter Conn's biography of Pearl Buck presents another paradigm for viewing East-West relations, one that does not address issues of location, hegemony, and power. And Géraldine Forbes's Women in Modern India reveals how much historical writing © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. 3 (Autumn) _______ 216 Journal of Women's History Autumn on women of the "East" is shaped by the contours of the present EastWest dialogue. Burton's Burdens of History most forcefully adopts a Saidian approach in her analysis of British middle-class feminism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 She argues that British feminists linked the emancipation of women to the well-being of their nation and that of the British Empire. That the organized women's movement emerged as Britain reached the height of its imperial power was no coincidence. Rather, Burton asserts that the Empire and imperial culture were central to British feminists' demands. And through their appropriation of imperial ideology to support their demands, British feminists revealed all the characteristics of an imperial culture permeated by notions of racial and moral superiority. Burton emphasizes the links between the domestic feminist movement and Britain's empire, through feminists' association with the nationstate . Both suffragists and non-suffragists alike sought inclusion in the nation-state on the basis of their moral authority as women and emphasized the contributions that women could make to the nation. That they conceived of the nation-state as an imperial entity was obvious, she argues, from their concerns about "racial motherhood" and their emphasis on women's role as "race creators." Women could thus further the "superior race" (48-49). British feminists' insistence on inclusion in the superior race (and on sharing the glories of the Empire) had much to do with the Victorian idea that British women were the "inferior sex in the superior race." According to Burton, feminists' identification with the imperial nation "worked to undermine the Victorian construction of woman as the Other by identifying her with the Self of nation and empire" (35). Consequently, feminists constructed an alternative Other. The Indian woman, imagined as helpless, unemancipated, and unciviUzed— the exact opposite of the British woman—served to fill...