Editors' Note: Revising the Experiences of Colonized Women: Beyond Binaries

Abstract

In this volume, we present a number of essays intended to refocus debates about women and colonialism after some thirty years of historiography about this topic. When women's studies and women's history were beginning to engage in cross-cultural and cross-border issues in the 1970s, in concert with a trend among historians of non-Western peoples to look at history from the "bottom up," scholars began focusing attention on colonized women. This exercise was useful historiographically and philosophically in that it brought into question many heretofore-accepted historical conventions, especially those deriving from imperial history concerning the lack of history of colonized peoples and unquestioned colonial dominance. Analyses of race, class, and gender cast new light on colonial history. It quickly became clear that focusing on the experiences of colonized women diminished a concern with regional location or the particular form of colonial rule in favor of emphasizing the impacts of such commonalities of colonialism as "trans-metropole colonial methods of extraction, taxation, and exploitation of the continent's human and material resources" as Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi have said in regard to Africa. 1 However, specific knowledge regarding certain situations in regional areas enhances our understanding of women's lives within the framework of colonialism.