Colonial Patriarchy Research Articles

“remember that a white woman is a white man”: Ronelda S. Kamfer’s Black Feminist Poetry as Corrective to the Race Logic of White Afrikaans Literary Feminisms

Abstract The creation of the Afrikaner volk and the violent appropriation and institutionalization of the Afrikaans language as white cultural property around the beginning of the twentieth century in South Africa was a patriarchal project from the outset. The canon of Afrikaans literature reflects both the erasure of Black subjects from the official history and recorded footprint of the language as well as the failure of white Afrikaans feminism to challenge these erasures and patriarchal structures of white power. In this essay we argue that Ronelda Kamfer’s poetry collection Chinatown (2019) functions as a powerful corrective to literary Afrikaans whitestream feminism and that Kamfer’s defiant relational intersectionality enables an alternative way of world-making beyond the disciplinary mechanisms and exclusionary technologies of white colonial patriarchy.

An Invitation into the Mehfil: Muslim Women's Interregional Intellectual Networks

AbstractScholarship on prominent women's organizations of the early twentieth century highlights how American and European suffragists participated in and published reports about one another's activities. Less well-known are the exciting circuits of exchange that took place between women in Asia and Africa in spaces emerging out of colonial modernity. In this article, I explore how such circuits evoke cultural institutions embedded within shared histories of courtly patronage of the performing arts and rhetoric. To this end, I posit the mehfil as an alternative paradigm to capture how women's ideational networks operated within the Perso-Arabic sphere in the first half of the twentieth century. The mehfil, in addition to delineating neglected circuits of women's intellectual exchanges, also demonstrates how such exchanges, if attended to, pose certain tensions with known feminist histories. By broadening the definition of who we think of as early women activists or as pioneers of women's intellectual networks, it interrogates and intervenes within our understanding of first-wave feminisms. By foregrounding the interaction of claims for gender justice with anti-imperialist discourse, the mehfil provides an early model of women's collectivity that hinges not on demands for suffrage or other legislative reform, but on critique of colonial patriarchy.

Madness as Subversion: Decolonizing the Doubly Colonized Female Self in Wide Sargasso Sea

This research seeks to investigate the language of female madness as the central trope of the decolonizing struggle against double colonization. Rhys’ female protagonist in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette, is alienated and deprived of her original identity in race and class. The hegemonic process of colonial patriarchy embedded in the victimization of the female subject objectifies her through her double marginalization at the hands of colonial apparatus and patriarchy. Her decolonizing outburst against double colonization, when expressed through an unconventional language, is viewed as an act of madness by the society. This research routes its argument through the so-called sanity of a societal structure rooted in the dispensation of colonial atrocity which, as a consequence, gives rise to mental imbalance (madness) of the female protagonist. This study, located in the qualitative paradigm, develops its methodology on the qualitative grounds with an interpretive and exploratory design. It uses textual analysis as research method and deploys theoretical support from Postcolonial Feminism with a focus on ‘decolonization’ and ‘double colonization.’

Sex Slavery under Domestic and Colonial Patriarchy in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman

Sex slavery operated through the comfort women system during World War II has been a historical shame and an inconvenient truth for both the Japanese and the Korean. This study, through Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, investigates the life of a Korean character forced to become a comfort woman, arguing that domestic patriarchy and colonial patriarchy are the main institutions which transform her into a sex slave. A representation of Korean comfort women, she is exploited by the patriarchal oppression in her family and the Japanese colonial patriarchy. Her body is transformed into a commodity to sustain her family and offer comfort and pleasure to Japanese soldiers. Despite her liberation, she becomes a traumatised subject whose painful memories keep haunting her even when she relocates to the United States. Patriarchal violence in the form of sex slavery has destroyed her life and left a detrimental legacy preventing her from rebuilding a new successful life. The traumatic past causes this character and her daughter to be seen as weird Asians who are “double-othered” in the United States, a new world where they are unable to recover from profound trauma in spite of their new identity as Korean American.

Mujeres tejedoras del conocimiento: Mam Maya women curating past and present to weave the future in Guatemala

In this paper, I explore the political potentialities the ­women’s collective in the Mam Maya town of Toj Coman Guatemala open when they bring the historical moment of the Spanish invasion into their present work. I ask, which moments in space and time do women in Toj Coman collectively curate to envision a different future for their community? Drawing on collective members’ conversations about textile arts, their construction of a public water tank, and the Spanish invasion, I argue that how these histories are collected and shared unsettles dominant narratives and creates different openings, potentialities, and futures. I draw on insights from 4 months of arts-based collaborative research with the collective between 2018 and 2019 and theorizations of desire, colonial patriarchy, cuerpo-territorio, and refusal by Indigenous and decolonial scholars. I use the word ‘curation’ to signal the creative and selective ways that women draw on their experience and expertise to carefully both show and deny specific representations, knowledges, and memories across contexts.

Abolitionism and the Paradox of Penal Reform in Australia: Indigenous Women, Colonial Patriarchy and Cooption

In this article we provide an explanation of abolitionism in the context of the Australian colonial project. Our intention is 10 advance a critical understanding of the paradoxes and challenges presented to the abolitionist vision by the project of penal reform. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Australia has witnessed the emergence of a diffuse patchwork of abolition and prisoner rights campaigns, which have been informed by the unique political and cultural contexts of the various Australian state jurisdictions. 1 Some of these campaigns, specifically in States such as New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria, have had a profound impact by eliciting and shaping government and correctional penal reform programs (Brown and Zdenkowski 1982: Carlton 2007). Paradoxically, Australia has witnessed at the same time a revalorization of the prison and of punitive measures as primary solutions for dealing with social problems and structural disadvantage (Baldry et al. 2011).

Seeing Ms. Dhu: inquest, conquest, and (in)visibility in black women’s deaths in custody

ABSTRACTThis article examines the politics of vision and invisibility in Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and Coronial Inquests into deaths in custody. Ms. Dhu, a 22-year-old Yamatji woman, died in police custody in August 2014, in South Hedland, Western Australia, after being locked up for unpaid fines. Ms. Dhu’s final hours were captured by CCTV cameras built into South Hedland’s Police Station and Hospital, and that footage played a central role in the inquest into Ms. Dhu’s death. The article presents an account of the Coronial Inquest into Ms. Dhu’s death – examining both the footage and the manner of its presentation – to argue that the inquest was a contested theatre of power for the imposition of colonial patriarchy and settler sovereignty. But it also suggests that the modes of seeing Ms. Dhu can be transformed from a politics of neglect and carceral control to an ethos of care, community-building, decolonization, and decarceration, with ties stretching across Australia and to the Black Lives Matter, Say Her Name, and Idle No More movements in North America.

“Then You Are a Man, My Son”

This essay examines a hypothetical supplement to Rudyard Kipling's famous poem “If—” scripted by the judge during the Jacob Zuma rape trial in 2006. It places this into conversation with State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature (2012) and argues for the importance of interrogating specters of colonial patriarchy in South Africa's contemporary post–“rainbow nation” epoch. During the trial, Zuma invoked in his defense a certain masculine ideal of Zuluness, and the judge's invocation of Kipling similarly points to the ways in which nodes of masculinity and power in contemporary South Africa are deeply haunted by a colonial and apartheid-era past. On account of a history of brutal racism, various patriarchies have been at odds in this country, but they continue to work together in mutually constitutive ways, at the expense of black women, and with an even greater cost to queer black women.

Imprisoned Indigenous women and the shadow of colonial patriarchy

Imprisonment in Australia has been a growing industry and large numbers of vulnerable people find themselves in a state of serial incarceration. Women and Indigenous peoples in particular have experienced rapidly expanding imprisonment rates over recent decades. Our argument in this article is relatively straightforward: to understand contemporary penal culture and in particular its severity and excess in relation to Indigenous people and women, we need to draw upon an understanding of the dynamics of colonial patriarchy. We develop this understanding through a specific focus on Indigenous women. Although at a micro level, specific legislation and policy changes have had a negative impact on the imprisonment of vulnerable groups, it is within a broader context of the strategies and techniques of colonial patriarchy that we can understand why it is that particular social groups appear to become the targets of penal excess.

Australian Legal Geography and the Search for Postcolonial Space in Chloe Hooper's the Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island

This essay reviews Chloe Hooper’s non-fiction novel The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island, a book about the 2004 death in custody of Cameron (who will hereafter be referred to as Mulrunji) Doomadgee on Palm Island in far north Queensland. After setting out the factual background to the death and its legal and political aftermath, I argue that The Tall Man is an original and important work that opens up the possibility for a space of Australian postcoloniality far more effectively than any of the legal proceedings surrounding the death did. I argue that the book can be described as a work of critical legal geography because it analyses the tensions between Australia’s north and south, and traces the laws and state policies that continue to reproduce places of racial tension and violence. I further argue that Hooper’s narrative provides an insightful depiction of the relation of white colonial patriarchy that is protected, reproduced and embodied by the Queensland police force.

Crises of Whiteness and Empire in Colonial Indochina: The Removal of Abandoned Eurasian Children from the Vietnamese Milieu, 1890-1956

From 1890–1956, non-governmental welfare agencies worked with the French colonial government in Indochina to remove Eurasian children, who had been abandoned by their French fathers, from their Vietnamese mothers and the Vietnamese cultural environment. In an era marked by historical exigencies, perceived threats to white prestige, and inherent challenges to the colonial patriarchy, such children were believed to be a threat to colonial security and white prestige. The racial formations of abandoned Eurasian children in colonial Indochina changed repeatedly in response to these threats. Drawing from the rhetoric of racial sciences and led by anxieties over changes colonial security, French civilians increasingly and colonial government administrators increasingly made the case that these children where white and must be removed from their Vietnamese mothers’ care, using force if necessary.

The Ambivalence of Colonial Desire in Marguerite Duras'sThe Lover

This paper analyses the notions of desire and metissage that circulate in The Lover, Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel about an illicit and scandalous sexual relationship between an adolescent French girl and a wealthy Chinese man set in 1920s French colonial Siagon. Rather than celebrate The Lover as a tale of a young French girl's resistance to colonial sexual mores and regulations, this paper seeks to excavate how that resistance both affirms and challenges the racializing and racist dynamics of colonial society. In particular, I explore the intertwining discourses of colonial sexuality, gender, race, and Orientalism that both produced and constrained the specific forms of desire and subjectivities available to and taken up by European women in French Indochina, and that circumscribe the story that Duras is able to tell about the French girl's love affair in The Lover. I suggest that Duras's portrayal of the French girl as a sexually autonomous female subject – one whose erotic relations are not bound by the dictates of colonial patriarchy – is made possible only by the ambivalent structure of the girl's desire, by her simultaneous attraction to and repulsion of the racialized others of the French colonies.

A “Cinderella” Tale in the Hausa Muslim Women's Imagination

AN IMPORTANT ATTRIBUTE of Hausa oral literature, as of Afro-Islamic and other African oral literatures in general, is improvisation. tale exists only when it is narrated/performed, and with virtually every new narration it assumes a new life in response to the artist's interpretation of the new situation -time, location, setting, mood, and material conditions-within which it is contextualized. This essay looks at how Islam has impacted a recent narration of The Story of the Orphan who Marries the Prince of Masar-a wicked stepmother tale akin to the one popularly known as Cinderella in the West. This takes place at a time of increasing Islamic resurgence and a growing participation of women in redefining Islam in the Hausa culture of West Africa. Elsewhere I have argued that in general Hausa women's voices have been marginalized as a result of both the local culture and colonial patriarchy. Of course, a tiny minority of women of upper and middle class households did manage to contribute to the public sphere, especially in the field of Islamic knowledge and literary production (Alidou, forthcoming). cultural and political activism and literary works of the daughters of Sheikh Usman Dan Fodio, the Islamic founder and leader of Sokoto Caliphate, for example, of which Nana Asma'u's legacy remains one of the most remarkable, are already well documented (see Boyd; Boyd and Mack; and Mack and Boyd). In general, however, traditional (Islamic) colonial and postcolonial educational structures combined to disempower women. In this process, Islamic knowledge-still primarily under the control of men-was continuously deployed to construct an ideology that justified the silencing of women, especially in the public sphere. However, the wind of democratization that swept the continent in the 1990s, calling for pluralistic rights of social constituents-for example, Christians and ethnic minorities-in the Niger republic, created room for women to seek Islamic knowledge on their own terms (even if still within patriarchal space) as a means of reaching a new understanding of women's rights within Islam and Islamic societies. Ever since, women have seized the political space of liberalization to assert their own knowledge of Islam, to contribute to the socio-cultural and political reshaping of the nation, and to engage in the discourse of defining a Nigerien Muslim identity by providing a woman's perspective (Alidou, Women and the

Anti‐colonial Chicana feminism

During the 1980s and 1990s, a critical mass of Chicana feminist scholars established a space and a voice to express an identity of opposition. This paper is an overview of Chicana Studies writings since 1991, emphasizing the pain, recovery, and celebration expressed by Chicana writers. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, I discuss the anti‐patriarchal, anti‐colonial challenges posed by Chicana theorists and feminists. I also confront the impacts of “internalized colonialism” that influence relations among Chicanas. Finally, I pose questions about the future writing agendas of Chicana feminists. An examination of Chicana feminist writings reveals the anti‐colonial features of her process of recovery and survival. The greatest potential value of Chicana feminist writing, especially certain lesbian writing, is “speaking secrets” to challenge the structure of power, the colonial patriarchy, and our participation in perpetuating it. The “collective good” continues as a dream and as a goal for the anti‐colonial Chicana feminist.

Behind the veil

European women in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century India were usually banished from public or political activity by colonial patriarchy, but if politics is also enacted in various non-governmental arenas, it is evident that the domestic parlor, the kitchen, the servants' quarters, and other physical spaces that colonial women managed would also become spaces where colonial ideology was constructed and modified. This paper explores the construction of a bourgeois domestic ideology as an alternative voice within colonialist patriarchy, and at the inscription of the subaltern female body as a metonymic text of subaltern conspiracy and treachery. A bourgeois ethnographic tradition of looking at the subaltern female body finds articulation in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) and in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's (Halsband, 1965) Letters from the Levant (1716–1718). Keeping this tradition in mind, this paper will look specifically at the ethnographic body criticisms of Mrs. Kindersley, Mrs. Eliza Fay, and Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood. The “public” eastern woman appeared in many cultural contexts in the east, but in this paper she essentially signifies the eastern dancer — the nautch or tamasha girl — whose profession was frequently and unhesitatingly associated with sex work, and the Indian female domestic servant. The “private” woman, on the other hand, was the inhabitant of the zenana or the harem (the women's quarters). The profession of the dancing girl — an entertainment enjoyed by English and Indian observers — was interpreted to indicate the dancer's diseased and atavistic sexuality. However, while the public and private spheres were supposedly demarcated as secret and private in the case of the women's residential quarters, and shamelessly and spectacularly promiscuous and public in the case of the theatricl performance, in reality the narratives suggested a complicity between private and public subaltern sexual conduct and inclinations, the only difference in the case of the harem or zenana being a greater degree of masculine oppression and feminine self-censure. The strip-tease-like gradual discarding of the veil in the tamasha or nautch and its middle eastern equivalents appeared to be only the fully eroticized expression of the languid gestural language in the zenana or harem . Thus, one of the monolithic indices this body discourse achieves is a proclamation of the universal rampancy of subaltern female sexuality, destroying the patriarchally imposed distinction of public and private upon which western protofeminism constructed itself.