Anti-colonial Discourse Research Articles

Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya, ca. 1930–1950

ON THE VERY FIRST PAGE OF THE very first “nationalist” history of Kenya, published in 1966, Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham proclaimed that the “largely middle class oriented and religiously fragmented Indian population played only a marginal role in the expanding conflict between the white power elite and dominated African population.”1 While this book opened up new and exciting avenues of research into the history of nationalism in colonial Kenya, it closed off the same spirit of inquiry for the study of the politics of Indian immigrants, who appeared irrelevant and marginal to the story of anticolonialism in the country. Furthermore, it anticipated two interrelated arguments made by scholars three decades later. First, diasporas are a priori assumed to be politically insular, leading to a focus on their internal social and economic organization. Second, territorially and racially bound nationalist narratives of anticolonialism are privileged over diasporic articulations of the same, thus reinforcing the myth of their political obscurity. A closer analysis of the politics of diasporic Indians in Kenya calls these conclusions into question. While the 1940s did witness a political fragmentation among Indians along seemingly religious lines, as highlighted by Rosberg and Nottingham, those cleavages did not signify Indians’ marginality within the anticolonial conflict between European settlers and Africans. Rather, the debates that took place underscored the deep political engagement of a diasporic Indian community with anticolonial nationalist movements in both Kenya and India. In moving the study of diasporas beyond social identity to explore anticolonial nationalism across territorial boundaries, and in taking seriously the political ideas that emerge in diasporic contexts, we can create a new paradigm for analyzing diasporic politics that is located squarely and simultaneously within both the homeland that migrants leave and the hostland where they arrive. In this conceptualization, diasporas emerge as the embodiment of transnational history, in whose political articulations the extraterritorial resonance of anticolonial nationalist discourses can be identified. Scholars have situated contemporary South Asian diasporic identity in between

Islamist Feminism: Constructing Gender Identities in Postcolonial Muslim Societies

AbstractThis article analyzes the emergence of female Islamist leaders in the Middle East and North Africa, and the glaring contradictions between their feminist views and their roles as political activists for the Islamic State. The two Islamist leaders who form the primary focus of this analysis are Zaynab al-Ghazali (d. 2005) of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Nadia Yassine of Morocco's Justice and Charity Society. Our analysis reveals the existence of “Islamistfeminism,” distinguished from broader secular-oriented Islamic feminism, as a logical, albeit unique, extension, and expression of Muslim anti-colonial discourse rooted in the intellectual currents of twentieth century independence movements that still resonate today.

DECONSTRUCTING MASCULINITIES, FEMINIST RECONSTRUCTIONS

The non-inscription of women in the process of forming national identities in anticolonial discourse is often constructed on differential and hierarchical polarizations which engender counter-productive identities of women in the African postcolonies. This exclusion privileges skewed monologues of masculine iconographies which have political and positional resonances in the identification of women. African women writers, however, engage in contesting the sociocultural and ideological structures that engender their occlusion from the important sites of nationhood, national literary canons and identities. The critical parameters of this study, therefore, emerge from an investigation of the postcolonial context of the possibilities of reconfiguring modern African political and literary discourse, suggesting in its process a displacement of the assumptive traditional, masculinist ethos and the inauguration and reconstruction of a more inclusive sociocultural order. A beginning point in this process requires a critique of existing masculinist hegemonies prevalent in African literature. This is typified by Nigerian female writer Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo in her novel The Last of the Strong Ones (1996). This novel provides the linchpin for the critique of and opposition to the fetishization of oppressive tradition found in much postcolonial writing. The dual process of the reconstruction of new self-images of women and the deconstruction of masculinities is the two-hander structure of this study.

Mexican Indigenismo, Choctaw Self-Determination, and Todd Downing's Detective Novels

Todd Downing, the Choctaw author of ten detective novels published between 1933 and 1945, is one of the most prolific and most neglected American Indian writers of the twentieth century. In eight of the novels, Downing appropriates and refigures Mexican indigenismo —the official post-revolutionary celebration of Mexico's indigenous history and culture—to reveal evidence of the modern indigenous people obscured by indigenismo discourse. He also makes three extraordinary discoveries in the context of mid-twentieth-century American Indian literary and activist histories. He detects a persistent though enervated European colonial presence and a more potent neocolonial invasion of Mexico by U.S citizens. He also identifies a contested yet successful indigenous Mexican resistance to this invasion. Finally, Downing's literary model of self-determination in novels such as The Cat Screams anticipates the anticolonial discourses of the American Indian civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the literary renaissance that attended it.

Reclaiming the Wasteland: Samson and Delilah and the Historical Perception and Construction of Indigenous Knowledges in Australian Cinema

Reclaiming the Wasteland: Samson and Delilah and the Historical Perception and Construction of Indigenous Knowledges in Australian Cinema

The search for a scientific temper: nuclear technology and the ambivalence of India's postcolonial modernity

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between India's nuclear programme and its postcolonial identity. In particular, I argue that making sense of the anomalies and contradictions of India's nuclear behaviour, such as the gap of two decades between its nuclear tests, its promotion of nuclear disarmament and its failure to sign non-proliferation and test-ban treaties requires an understanding of the racially gendered construction of India's postcolonial modernity and the central roles given to science and morality within it. I suggest that India's postcolonial identity is anchored in anticolonial discourses that are deeply ambivalent toward what was viewed as a Western modernity that could provide material betterment but was also potentially destructive. What was desired was a better modernity that took into account what was believed to be Indian civilisation's greater propensity toward ethical and moral conduct. India's nuclear policies, such as its pursuit of nuclear technology and its promotion of disarmament cannot be seen in isolation from the successes and failures of this broader project of fashioning an ethical modernity.

Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States

In this groundbreaking book, David Luis-Brown methodically and convincingly turns postcolonial studies and American studies on their heads and casts a keen, hemispheric eye on the anticolonial discourses of author-activists like José Martí (Cuba), Claude McKay (Jamaica), and W. E. B. DuBois (United States). With a North-South gaze, he transcends the limits of the nation and reveals his understanding of how the work of certain Cuban, Californio, Mexican, Jamaican, and U.S. writers exemplify the antiracist, anti-imperialist, local/global struggles that were being taken up by discriminated and displaced peoples in the Americas during the 1880s–1930s.Luis-Brown presents the essays, novels, and poetry of Martí, McKay, and DuBois, along with authors like Nicolás Guillén and Jesús Masdeu (Cuban), María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (Californian), Helen Hunt Jackson (U.S.), and Miguel Ángel Menéndez (Mex-ican) to expose the sociocultural and politico-economic aftermath of the “American century,” the period of territorial expansion to the west and southwest (after the United States annexed Texas in 1845 and provoked the Mexican-American War in 1846–48), and to the south and the Caribbean (after the Spanish-American War of 1898). This expansion inspired the aforementioned writers and others to contribute to a rich production that reflects and promotes a sentimentalist but universalizing and relational approach to indigenismo, negrismo, mestizaje, and to the problems of racism, human rights, and decolonization.After solidly establishing that DuBois and Martí “construct history as a story of successive waves of decolonization and democratization,” Luis-Brown goes on to examine how this transnational framework reveals how writers and thinkers from across different national, linguistic, and politico-cultural boundaries strove to establish the concept of hemispheric citizenship as the one unifying idea that could bring together and empower diverse groups of disenfranchised people. In chapter 1, Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885) are shown to expose and critique conflicts over land, class, and race in the United States, all in the context of other U.S. sentimentalist writing by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and Alexander Kinmont. In chapter 2, Martí and DuBois are shown to promote civil rights, a “human brotherhood” that extends beyond race and speaks of a need for “broader unities.” Chapter 3 contextualizes works by Mexicans Manuel Gamio, José Vasconcelos, and painter Diego Rivera, Dominican essayist Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Jamaican Claude McKay, Cubans Jesús Masdeu and Nicolás Guillén, and U.S. writers and intellectuals Langston Hughes, Carleton Beals, and Katherine Anne Porter. It recasts in transnational terms Mexican indigenismo and negrismo and the Harlem Renaissance, which were initially seen as distinct national and ethnoracial discourses, to combat what these authors saw as a neocolonial “co-opting” of primitivism as a weapon against European-style “civilizing” discourse. Chapter 4 examines the work of German American anthropologist Franz Boas, Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio, American sociologist Robert E. Park, and American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston to reveal how they theorized race, hybridity, and migration and created virtually a “new ethnography” for the modern city. In the book’s final chapter, Luis-Brown brings the reader to the first decade of the twenty-first century to illustrate how contemporary immigrant activist groups throughout the Americas are deploying hemispheric citizenship as a strategy to address the economic, political, and racial problems facing migrants in the United States and elsewhere.Waves of Decolonization is convincing in its argument for a transnational, decolonizing approach to American studies. It is accessible, grounded, and thorough. It will equally captivate researchers and students of this hemisphere and anyone interested in an alternative understanding of this hemisphere’s intertwined history and destiny. Luis-Brown’s approach is a refreshing and very necessary shift away from the national, ethnolinguistic, and racial boundaries that have most often defined American, African American, Latino, Mexican, Mexican American, Cuban, and Caribbean studies. Furthermore, it is equally important that his recasting of the ethnic and nationalist discourses of the 1880s–1930s has crucial relevance for today, a time of intense world migration and globalization. Contemporary discourses that address the borderless nature of human migration and capital most certainly have their roots in the thinkers and writers of this earlier period, an era whose production Luis-Brown captures and examines masterfully.

Gender and colonial transitioning: Frantz Fanon's Algerian freedom fighters in Moroccan and Caribbean novels?

This article analyses the ways in which Frantz Fanon's revolutionary narrative in L'An V de la revolution algerienne is reworked in selected novels of Tahar Ben Jelloun and Shani Mootoo. Focusing on Fanon's transitional politics, it draws out how these novelists employ gender transitioning to challenge colonial, nationalistic and familial violence. The article suggests that the intersections of anti-colonial rhetoric and familial discourse present in Fanon's work are reconfigured in these novels through a questioning of assumed gendered, sexual and national taxonomies of belonging. It proposes a notion of community that seeks to avoid the reiteration of colonial and familial violence through a transitional politics and an ethics of becoming.

Using the Enemy’s Vocabularies: Rethinking the Origins of Student Anti-State Nationalism in 1980s Korea

This study explores how anti-colonial discourses of student anti-state nationalism in the 1980s were influenced by the state nationalism during the Park Chung-Hee era. With few exceptions, studies on Korean democratization have exclusively focused on the growth of civil society, independent from the authoritarian state government. Nevertheless, this trend in research overlooks the simple historical fact that student protesters in the 1980s had been heavily indoctrinated by the state discourses of nationalism to the point of having to recite the National Charter of Education in elementary schools. This study investigates the symbolic structure of student anti-state nationalism in the 1980s and its connectedness with the state nationalism of the 1970s and argues that the force of nationalism produced both domination and resistance in those two decades.

A Voice beyond the South: Resituating the Locus of Cultural Representation in the Later Writings of Anna Julia Cooper

A Voice beyond the South:Resituating the Locus of Cultural Representation in the Later Writings of Anna Julia Cooper Shirley Moody-Turner (bio) In the century since her best-known and often quoted work A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South was published in 1892 when Anna Julia Cooper was only thirty-four years old, it has been all too easy to mythologize her as a lone, quaint figure relegated to the 1890s American South. Valorized as a founding mother of black feminist thought or dismissed for her ostensibly middle-class Victorian values and Christian moral code, it has been much more difficult to recover the nuances and complexities of a woman whose career spanned three generations. After A Voice from the South, Cooper's national and international career as a writer, scholar, educator and activist continued for another six decades. She produced several essays and articles, she translated Charlemagne's Pilgrimage so that a new generation of U. S. students could study this classic French text, she penned her memoir, The Early Years in Washington: Reminiscences of Life with the Grimkés, and she completed her dissertation, L'Attitude de la France à l'égard de l'esclavage pendant la Révolution (France's Attitude toward Slavery during the Revolution), a work which rivals A Voice in its scope and insistence on reconstructing a history that places the voices of the colonized at the center and not the margins of colonial and anti-colonial discourse. In this article I examine two of Cooper's later essays in which issues of voice and cultural representation are central themes. Her essay "The Negro's Dialect," written in the 1930s, utilizes a practical linguistics approach to expose the politics of cultural representation, while "Sketches from a Teacher's Notebook," written circa 1923, interrogates both the theory and praxis of giving voice to the voiceless. By evaluating the challenges and possibilities of expanded cultural representation for African Americans and by offering a more nuanced examination of the politics of voice, both essays update and/or revise critical models launched in Cooper's earlier writings. In "The Negro's Dialect" Cooper offers a sophisticated examination of the interplay between the production of cultural images of African Americans and the perpetuation of racialized domination, analyzing what Ralph Ellison would later refer to as "the endless sacrificial rites of moral evasion" in which constructions of blackness in American popular culture are part of the framework used to conceal the discrepancy between the professed ideals and the practiced realities of American democracy ("Perspectives" 778). For Cooper, the production of dominant cultural images of African Americans worked to conceal blacks' humanity and diversity while contributing to an essentialized and hierarchal notion of African American difference. In the essay Cooper critiques the role of the popular press in constructing and reinforcing stereotypical images of African Americans, focusing specifically on misrepresentations of what were supposedly African American linguistic practices. Her analysis suggests that the implied deficiencies in African American linguistic practices were presented by the dominant press as a metonymy for a general lack of genuine civility on the part of African Americans. She then asserts that the press reports and dominant popular cultural images of African Americans not only buttressed the social and political status quo, but also were economically lucrative. [End Page 57] Additionally, her cultural critique lays the groundwork for later intersectional analyses of gender, class and economics in relation to the politics of race, rights and cultural representations. Cooper begins "The Negro's Dialect" by recalling an anecdote regarding Paul Robeson's performance in Othello, a "story" she notes "that has gone the rounds in the press" (238). According to reporters and critics, Robeson, while performing the height of Othello's "sublime fury," slips into his "Southern dialect," demanding, "Where am dat handkerchief, Desdemona?" In stating that there's nothing like "a bit of local color" to create interest on "this side of the Atlantic, where a black man is not true black unless he says 'am dat,'" Cooper begins her critique of the "am dat" construction, exposing the process through which supposedly African American characters are constructed on the stage and...

<i>Neonacionalismo</i> y fatiga de identidad en Puerto Rico

The aim of this work is to analyze the neonationalist discourse in Puerto Rico. It shows the hegemonic politics of USA towards Puerto Rico. It argues how an anticolonial discourse has been replaced by an identity politics. The result is a tiredness nationalism which serves as a legitimating frame of subaltern relationships.

Katrina, Cronulla Beach and France on Fire: An Anti-Colonial Critique of Empire in 2006

With a focus on both the theoretical and practical implications of anti-colonial theory, this article discusses a number of conflicts that have brought the oppression of marginalized bodies to the forefront of mainstream media attention. The authors formulate an anti-colonial response to the human-made disasters in the Southern United States, France and Australia. While race is finally being taken up in the mainstream media with regard to these events, such coverage has largely involved strategic denials, powerful silences and re-invocations of dominant colonial and racial paradigms. The anti-colonial discursive framework looks to the voices of the oppressed and to the various forms of, and potentialities for, agency and resistance to guide its response to the social and discursive disasters discussed herein. Given the prominence of ‘post’ discourses in the academy, a resuscitation of the anti-colonial discourse is necessary in order to provoke action-oriented resistance-based responses to modern colonial practices.

The Congress and the INA Trials, 1945–50

Whilst during the war the Indian National Army (hereafter INA) could be charged with having been the ‘puppet army’ of a fascist regime, the INA was brought firmly into the realms of anti-colonial and nationalist discourse after the war. Despite its earlier very distanced position, the Congress chose in 1945 to appropriate the trials of the INA soldiers to its own political advantage. Due to its emotive value, the INA became a symbol of national pride and anti-colonial resistance. Political engineering of the Congress can largely explain why the INA men had their biggest impact as prisoners of war, rather than as actual soldiers. Whilst the Congress dominated the perception and portrayal of the INA, the issue also helped to reinforce the ‘secular’ and ‘nationalist’ image of the Congress itself. The cause of the INA, the Congress and even the Indian ‘nation’ began to merge. The Congress by appropriating the perception and portrayal of the INA also managed to champion the very meaning of ‘nationalism’ itself.

DuBois the pan-Africanist and the development of African nationalism

While W.E.B. DuBois's importance as a political activist and writer is well-documented, a ‘DuBoisian’ political theory has proved illusory. I argue that the key to change and continuity in DuBois's work is his pan-Africanism, which he used to develop a broad theory of anti-colonial nationalism. This reading of his legacy emphasizes DuBois's singular role in shaping anti-colonial discourse in the postwar era, especially in Africa, as well as in theorizing African nationalism and the African diaspora. It also allows us to understand the contradiction of the early, liberal DuBois's views on race and his later preoccupation with Communism. I suggest that across both positions, DuBois's actual political arguments remained over-determined by his positionality within the colonial world, producing a set of anti-colonial arguments that while rooted in the economic exploitation of the colonies, appeal to liberal universalizing standards of progress and modernity.

Damning the Flow

Damning the Flow

The Poets Fight Back: East Timorese Poetry as Counterdiscourse to Colonial and Postcolonial Identities

This article examines whether the experiences of Portuguese and Indonesian colonial rule in East Timor acted as a unifying factor, creating a sense of East Timorese national identity, inspiring its poets to engage in a revolutionary and anti-colonial lyrical discourse that mirrored the aspirations of those fighting for independence. At the same time, it considers the significance of contemporary East Timorese poetry that has elements of a counterdiscourse in a postcolonial, independent East Timor, asking whether the apparent unity of anti-colonial lyric voices has fractured, and whether the disappearance of the oppressive presence of Indonesia means that there is no power that can inspire a concerted reaction amongst East Timorese poets. Finally, although the 'other(s)' against which the colonial and postcolonial poetic counterdiscourses of East Timor are reacting may be different, the negative effects of which they are accused become themes that are common to the poetry of both historical periods. Accordingly, this article will seek to pose some questions regarding the validity of the term 'postcolonial' when applied to East Timorese poetry.

Chinua Achebe’s Early Anti-Imperialism in the Court of Postcolonial Theory

Chinua Achebe is well known for his trenchantly anti-imperialist literary positions. In his critical interventions, he excoriates the unrepentant Conradian eye of imperialistically minded foreign critics of Africa’s artistic works. However the current postcolonial turn in both critical practice and cross-cultural sensibilities has brought about some drastic redescriptions of both imperialism and anti-imperialism. This paper returns to some of the earliest construction sites of Achebe’s anti-colonial discourse in order to examine, in the light of postcolonial theory, the strengths and aporias of Achebe’s double-edged policy of unconditional cultural protectionism towards Africa and unmitigated critique of imperialism.

A Hunger for History: A Study of Ma-Yi Theater Group's "Project: Balangiga"

During the open forum held after each performance of the play Project: Balangiga by Theater Company (New York City, August 2002), several young Filipino Americans profusely thanked the company for talking about the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). (1) These Filipino Americans, most of whom were college students, did not know much about the war, nor did they have an extensive knowledge of the history of colonization in the Philippines. Current studies in Filipino American history focus mainly on issues of migration, assimilation, and integration, rather than on the Philippines' colonial history. Thus, though they knew of the struggle of migrant farm workers, they were not aware of the struggle of the Filipinos in the Philippines against American imperialism. Project: Balangiga, written by Ralph Pena and Sung Rno, satisfies their hunger for history, and, at the same time, interrogates Philippine-American relations. Using a documentary-style format, the play features actors of various ethnicities (Asian Americans and Caucasian) playing themselves as they narrate their investigation of the events surrounding the Balangiga massacre (2) and the succeeding controversy over the seizure of the Balangiga church bells. (3) Interwoven in the play are the actors' discussions on the processes of research and staging. This article discusses both the workshop production staged by in August 2002 and Pena's and Rno's revised draft for a future full production of the play. Although the actors playing actors in the play talk about objectivity, the play discards the myth of benevolent assimilation propagated by President McKinley in 1898 and implies a history of deceit and violence in America's occupation of the Philippines. Staged in New York, symbol of imperialist triumph, site of grief after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and home to many Filipino Americans, the play urges its Filipino American audience to confront possible contradictions in their appreciation of their ethnic/diasporic situation by understanding the colonial history of the homeland of their parents and grandparents. Furthermore, the play positions artists and writers as historians and activists who use theater both as a venue for discussion and as a weapon of protest. Their involvement in the play links them with theater artists and writers who participated in anti-colonial discourses in the Philippines, and American artists and writers who have continuously been involved in peace struggles. Theater Company, Its Audience, and Negotiation of Identity The Theater Company was established in 1989 by a group of former University of the Philippines (UP) students who were also members of the theater group UP Tropang Bodabil (later known as Peryante). (4) The name Ma-Yi comes from the ancient Chinese word for the islands now known as the Philippines. In its website and souvenir programs, the company explains that its mission statement includes the commitment to representing the Asian American experience and engaging communities in dialogue to take Asian American aesthetics beyond stereotypical markers. The company started by producing Filipino works first staged in the Philippines, but has since expanded its season's offerings to include new works by Asian American writers. Among the plays it has produced are: Chris Millado's peregriNasyon (1993 and 1997) on the parallel experiences of peasants and the Philippines and migrant farm workers in the United States in the 1930s; Ralph Pena's Flipzoids (1998) on Filipino American identity politics; and Sung Rno's Drizzle and Other Stories (2000), based on Korean short stories. Why stage Project: Balangiga? There was, of course, the current controversy about the Balangiga bells, appropriated as war booty during the Philippine-American War. For the people of Cheyenne, Wyoming, where two of the bells are displayed, they are a symbol of the grief of the American people for the soldiers who lost their lives during the massacre in the town of Balangiga, Samar, in the central Philippines. …

Courts of World Opinion: . Trying the Panama Flag Riots of 1964

In January 1964, riots broke out along the so-called border between Panamanian cities and the U.S.-run Canal Zone, resulting in loss of life among Panamanians and U.S. citizens and serious economic and political damage on both sides. While historians have mainly focused on the causes of the riots and the U.S.-Panama diplomacy that followed, a close look at the lesser-known international investigations of the violence adds texture and detail to the riots themselves as it also uncovers broader cultural and political dynamics surrounding the episode. This essay, informed partly by interviews with Panamanian participants and by documents from the Panamanian government, argues that Panamanians expressed a potent anticolonial discourse during the investigations, one that allowed them to conceal their government’s substantial irresponsibility during the riots and help convince the U.S. government to negotiate the devolution of the canal into Panamanian hands. A nagging question still hangs over the Panama Flag Riots of January 1964: Who won? To be sure, the United States had military might on its side, and only four U.S. soldiers, as opposed to twenty-one Panamanians, died in four days of fighting. But how the confrontation altered the balance of power in this most imbalanced of relations is far less obvious. To be sure, there were no immediate payoffs for either the U.S. or Panamanian governments. With dozens of lives lost, hundreds of belligerents and innocents wounded, millions of dollars in property destroyed, and relations between their two countries broken, Presidents Roberto Chiari and Lyndon Johnson faced an unwelcome crisis at the outset of an election year for both men. To most Panamanians, the most positive potential outcome of such a tragedy would be the transfer of the Panama Canal, for long a U.S. asset, into Panamanian hands. It was a long shot. Chiari had not demanded devolution before the riots, conceding that Panamanians were not ready to run the canal.2 No U.S. president, meanwhile, had ever even considered in public handing over the canal. On 18 December 1964, however, less than a year after the riots, Johnson promised that the United States would not hold on to the waterway “in perpetuity,” as the Treaty of 1903 between the two countries stated. Johnson’s statement proved a major breakthrough: it led to the signing of two 1977 treaties in which President Jimmy Carter promised to hand over the canal to Panama by 2000. Certainly, in 1964 the canal was already not the economic or military treasure that it once had been. Nevertheless, a less valuable canal was still a valuable canal. What exactly compelled Johnson even to consider giving it away?

Mother, Memory, History: Maternal Genealogies in Gayl Jones'sCorregidoraand Simone Schwarz-Bart'sPluie et vent sur T�lum�e Miracle

It is by her and through her, through "mother as a source of memory," that one is rooted in a genealogy, a past, a people, a tradition. "Mother" is often represented as a valuable source of unmediated, direct memory and as such is frequently and forcefully "kept in the past," located outside of history. Writing about the place of "mother" within the modern national (and anticolonial) discourse, Anne McClintock argues that women often function as unmediated channels of oral memory, while they are themselves "denied any direct relation to [historical] agency" (90). Positioning women/mothers as primary sites of (personal and social) memory, which is set in opposition to (official and written) history, national and anticolonial discourses limit the role of women, as Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval suggest, to "biological producers" and "transmitters of culture" (7). To this observation Partha Chatterjee adds that a system of dichotomies of inner/outer, home/world, tradition/modernity and feminine/masculine is responsible for assigning to "mother" the double role of "victim and hero." The maternal figure is supposed to represent the muted and stoic expression of a lost traditional identity and the hope for the future growth of the nation's spiritual essence (251).