Himani Bannerji, Sharzad Mojab, and Judith Whitehead,Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. 244 pp. $60.00 cloth; 24.95 paper.

Abstract

The authors succinctly note that contemporary studies of nationalism tend towards oversimplification. This oversimplification is manifested in a tacit and serious misrepresentation. The misrepresentation is a bifurcation of the colonial experience into the primary or self and the other. Such a manifestation is best represented by Said (1978) in terms of “orientalism.” Such a binary configuration of the colonial experience is an oversimplification for two reasons. First, it fails to acknowledge the interdimensional diversity of the colonized. To ignore interdimensional diversity is to fail to account for the role that gender and class play in the construct of the colonized. Second, binary configurations tend to misrepresent path dependence or the historical unfolding of particular nationalisms. In this sense, nationalism acquires an assumption of natural progression in terms of rights and welfare. The authors challenge the assumption that gender rights are acquired consummately in conjunction with nationalism. Instead, the authors make the argument that nationalism often acquires a regressive effect in terms of gender-class rights and welfare. As an example, Sharzad Mojab notes that Kurdish nationalism has had a conflictive relationship with the progression of women's welfare in addition to rights. Contemporary Kurdish nationalism has tended towards the regression of women's welfare. The root causes of a resort to regression are noted by Mojab to lie in the failure to effectively transform the preexisting precapitalist gender and class structure.