Feminism and the Politics of Difference

Sneja Gunew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429710773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Versions of Jacki Huggins's 'Pretty deadly tidda business' have appeared in Hecate vol. 17, no. 1; 1991, I lndyk, ed.; Memory (Southerly 3, 1991) HarperCollins, Sydney, 1991; Second Degree Tampering, Sybylla Feminist Press, Melbourne, 1992. Laleen Jayamanne's 'Love me tender, love me true... ' was first published in Framework 38139, 1992. A version of Smaro Kamboureli's 'Of black angels and melancholy lovers' appeared in Freelance (Saskatchewan Writers' Guild), xxi, 5 (Dec. 1991-Jan. 1992). Roxana Ng's 'Sexism, racism and Canadian nationalism' appeared in Race, Class, Gender: Bonds and Barriers, Socialist Studies/Etudes Socialistes: A Canadian Annual no. 5, 1989. Trinh Minh-ha's 'All-owning spectatorship' has also appeared in her collection of essays When the Moon Waxes Red, Routledge, NY, 1991.

1
Feminism and the politics of irreducible differences: Multiculturalism/ethnicity/race

Sneja Gunew

so eager is he to name everything that he runs into the unnamable. ¹

Nationalism: cultural difference

Working for social justice is not necessarily at odds with a commitment to critical theory ‘even’ in its postmodern variants. It is necessary to state this in the face of consistent critiques which suggest that social justice issues inevitably translate into firmly entrenched binary oppositions, which are hierarchically positioned and involve mutual homogenization and reductionism. Whether these oppositions be men and women, or mainstream feminists versus minority women, or indigenous peoples versus settler societies, or biculturalism versus multiculturalism, nothing is served by holding to such crude characterizations. The dismantling of hegemonic categories is facilitated by the proliferation of difference rather than the setting up of binary oppositions that can merely be reversed, leaving structures of power intact. This is not to deny the fact that political manoeuvrings sometimes set these categories against each other, or that matters are somehow constructed in such a way that it appears a choice must be made between two parties, but this does not mean that we have to accept the terms of such manipulations. If we have a specific role as intellectuals it is precisely that of scrutinising and, if need be, redefining the conceptual terms of these debates.

This essay examines the tensions between ethnicity, race and women in relation to literature and multiculturalism. Since I have been primarily situated in Australia, it addresses the terminology and debates which haunt any discussion of cultural difference within that context. I would, however, like to extend the discussion to encompass biculturalism within the New Zealand and Canadian contexts. For example, in the former, biculturalism often means simply the opposition between Maori and Pakeha, with the latter grouping usually encompassing only the descendants of British colonial settlers and not the many other groups that comprise modern New Zealand. In other words, I would like to explore some of the dynamics between biculturalism and multi-culturalism. Interpretations are usefully complicated and qualified when one’s own local debates are situated within a larger global schema. I will therefore not only refer to the diasporic phenomenon in general but also allude to Canadian women writers as well as New Zealand and Australian ones.

A central question in this paper is why debates around ethnicity are consistently conflated with those of race. Does the indisputable existence of racism and the need to oppose it require a concomitant adherence to traditional concepts of race? But before I move on to this topic I will attempt a quick summary of some of the ways in which multiculturalism resonates within Australia. It became enshrined as official policy in 1989 with the launching of the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia which conspicuously did not deal with cultural matters, as they are usually figured, at all. In the wake of this quite recent event which calls on all government institutions and agencies to implement recognition of Australia’s ethnic diversity, I find it ironic that I am increasingly asked to participate in panels and events, or performances, where I am to speak (authentically, of course) about ways of moving beyond multiculturalism—which increasingly generates a great deal of anxiety in Australia. At its simplest level, this development represents an instance of the classic conflation of multiculturalism as a system of government policies designed to manage cultural diversity, and multiculturalism insofar as it arises from the desires of various communities and individuals who feel excluded by the discourses and practices surrounding Australian nationalism. The two meanings of multiculturalism are very different but are often confused, so that cynicism with respect to government policies of any kind spills over into condemnation of legitimate challenges to the status quo which emanate from those groups and individuals conspicuously excluded by prevailing orthodoxies.

My own response to topics like ‘Beyond Multicultural Writing’ consists of emphasising that there have certainly been enough puerile and ill-informed debates around this theme and that I would prefer to ask the people who raise such a topic to do their homework and direct those interested in pursuing the matter further to the appearance of such publications as Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra’s Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind; Kateryna Longley’s and my own Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations, and the recently published Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers, which includes around 900 published writers—not apprentices, but those who have managed to prevail, to continue writing, against the odds. Criteria for inclusion in the Bibliography were that the writer be either born in or have a parent or grandparent deriving from a language and culture other than those of England or Ireland. As it turned out, about one-third of such writers publish in languages other than English, another third in both English and other languages, and one-third in English only. This compilation represents a rather belated attempt to begin to analyze the contributions of those Australians whose cultural traditions and languages are from places other than England or Ireland, as well as to encourage critics to look at cultural location and differences across the spectrum of Australian cultural productions. Contrary to the opinions of some, these events are hardly a matter of marginalizing the writers concerned. Instead, they reveal that we have been operating within narrow definitions of the national culture, and they alert those interested in cultural matters to a new area which urgently requires detailed research. While I do not deny that there are problems with terminology in this field, one needs to think about what is being abandoned when discussion shifts ‘beyond’ these terms.

The term ‘multicultural writer’ is flanked by others such as ‘migrant writer’ and ‘ethnic writer’. These often indicate simply that they are ‘other’, that is, not part of the mainstream. I agree that all have flaws and none pinpoints the real issue of contention, which is the role of cultural difference in Australian culture and specifically within literature. It may be useful at this point to indicate that my deployment of the term ‘cultural difference’ derives from Homi Bhabha’s resonant formulation:

Cultural difference marks the establishment of new forms of meaning, and strategies of identification, through processes of negotiation where no discursive authority can be established without revealing the difference of itself. The signs of cultural difference cannot then be unitary or individual forms of identity because their continual implication in other symbolic systems always leaves them ‘incomplete’ or open to cultural translation … Cultural difference is to be found where the ‘loss’ of meaning enters, as a cutting edge, into the representation of the fullness of the demands of culture … Cultural difference emerges from the borderline moment of translation … The transfer of meaning can never be total between differential systems of meaning, or within them … it is the articulation through incommensurability that structures all narratives of identitification, and all acts of cultural translation. (Bhabha 1990:313–317)

A few decades ago, battles comparable to the ones I’ve been sketching took place around women’s writing. Scandalously, very few women writers were seen to be part of Australian or any other writing. All this has changed, of course, and we certainly no longer have anthologies that exclude women, though they may not yet be automatically represented in equal numbers to men.

Not so long ago, too, Australian literature itself was not recognized as a respectable territory. It is only relatively recently that Australia has come of age, so to speak, and that it can rest assured that its literature is a recognized field among the world’s literatures in English. And there’s part of the rub. The fight to establish Australian literature was intimately bound up with the battle to secure Australia’s cultural independence from its British colonial heritage. On the one hand we had the love-hate relationship with the monuments of British literature and on the other the need to separate from the paternal figure and assert Australian independence. Some of this was bound up with the major dissenting strain in Australian culture linked to the Irish factor, which ensures that Irish working class and Catholic experience dominates the republican element in Australian political history in general and cultural politics in particular. Ned Kelly becomes the quint-essential Australian hero and writers from Furphy to Keneally construct a literary genealogy conspicuous in which is a writer called Henry Lawson or Henry Larsen whose father, it transpires, was Norwegian. Recently, Michael Wilding (1992) and others have explored Larsen/Lawson’s non-Anglo connections. This is an example of what I mean by suggesting that cultural difference (including linguistic difference) is as indispensable a critical category as are gender and class. By cultural difference, I do not simply mean mapping the influence of various European elements on well-known writers or the fact that some Australian writers have shown an interest in Europe or Asia. I mean, among other things, that the monuments of British literature these days include works by such writers as Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri and Kazuo Ishiguro. I also mean that there is now a general awareness that literatures in English are quite a different matter from English literature.

Back to Australia. After the great postwar migrations, the various scatterings, had produced the next generation, people like myself started to wonder what place there was in our picture of Australian culture and its literature for our own or our parents’ experiences and their symbolic transformations. Our own diasporas connected us to places everywhere but England and Ireland, yet this did not come through in the various narratives that constructed the nation. By now, as everyone knows, ‘we’, those who have come since the Second World War, represent about a third of the population. Where were our histories, our writings? This question has motivated my own work. Increasingly I had to acknowledge the fact that this simple act of cultural retrieval presented an enormous threat to certain interests. Nonetheless, a number of us have produced bibliographies and established collections of these other writings. They will be here for future researchers even if current work becomes the casualty of prejudice.²

So at this point let us explore some of the difficulties inherent in prevailing terminology. If we use the term multicultural, we are homogenizing more than 100 different cultural and linguistic groups and this to some extent defeats the larger purpose of setting up much-needed precise research into differences and specificities. It constitutes a lumping-together of something which needs carefully to be teased apart. If we use the other favoured term of ‘non English-speaking background’ (NESB), we are presented with a definition in terms of a negative, as though these writers lacked something instead of having something extra to offer, another language, an intimate and insider’s access to other cultures. In the words of poet Ania Walwicz, ‘foreigner has some extra at back of head is another country’ (Walwicz 1989:85). There is also some truth to the charge that multiculturalism has been used to obscure the differences relating to the rights of the indigenous peoples, notably in relation to land claims.³ On the other hand we do need a mechanism, including terminology, for drawing attention to a visible absence, the absence of these writers, languages and cultural traditions from acknowledgment as part of Australia’s differentiated culture.

Alas, these factors are not automatically taken into account in the many festivals and celebrations exploring Australia’s national culture. This is partly because that culture has only recently gained a measure of definition, and its architects, having won that difficult battle, do not take kindly to further incursions into their terrain or challenges to their assumptions. Interestingly, the challenge which has (none too soon) been issued by Aboriginal culture has somehow found greater purchase than those other, ‘ethnic’ ones. This is possibly due to the fact that Aboriginal Australians number at most only four per cent of the population and therefore simply don’t constitute the same threat as the ‘ethnic’ 33 per cent. Symbolically their questions will, of course— and rightly—upset the whole edifice of the carefully designed national culture. As will the interrogations which emanate from the other groups that constitute Australia, those ‘English plus’ people who are neither monolingual nor monocultural.

The time has now come to seek out and celebrate those differences instead of having to argue for their very survival. Focusing for the moment on the case of Canada, I am not saying that these writers of ‘other solitudes’, as they were called in a recent anthology (Hutcheon & Richmond 1990), have an entirely smooth run there. Indeed, one of the editors, commenting on that anthology’s reception, noted that it had evidently ‘hit a raw nerve in the Canadian psyche’ (Hutcheon 1992:9). Nonetheless, many more such books are being published and put on curricula; this is perhaps partly because Canada was never simply English-speaking in the way that Australia was. Its policy of biculturalism, in relation to French and English, has operated for a long time and its recognition of multiculturalism in relation to other groups is also well-established. There is certainly a far greater curiosity there, a more earnest seeking-out of what these writers have to offer, and an acceptance that they may write in English or French or they may not.

Here is the Greek-Canadian Smaro Kamboureli:

This is the first time I use the word immigrant with reference to myself. This word hits me in the face and in the heart. It ejects me from what I cannot leave (my past/my Greek language), and throws me into a place that constantly excludes me on the principles of difference. My ideas, my habits, my amorous moods, my temperament are, quite often, not seen as expressions of me, but as specimens of the Greek stereotype I am supposed to represent. How can I explain that, although I am a Macedonian like Aristotle, I am not a mimetic being, a signified brand. I am expected to be homogeneous at the expense of my personal heterogeneity. I’ve said ‘No’ to those who invited me to recite Homer by heart. I’ve given no response to those who described to me, very vividly, the dirty washrooms they visited in the small island towns of Greece. (Kamboureli 1985:8)

Such clear-sighted analytical distinctions are commonplace among those who inhabit more than one language and thus do not see any language as ‘natural’ or universal. They help remind us that the creative productions which are reinscribing the world are part of ethnic fermentations which are taking place everywhere, particularly in the wake of the break up of the Soviet empire. And multiculturalism is a term that links Australia to these global upheavals. It does not function in the same way everywhere; in the US, for example, it relates very much to relations across racial divides and the claims of Hispanic and African Americans. But all these movements are marked by attempts to define local differences, to undermine the impulse to homogenize, and to deflect the suppressive effect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Feminism and the politics of irreducible differences: Multiculturalism/ethnicity/race
• 2 ‘Feminisms, reading, postmodernisms’: Rethinking complicity
• 3 ‘Authentic voice’: Anti-racist politics in Canadian feminist publishing and literary production
• 4 Pretty deadly tidda business
• 5 ‘Love me tender, love me true, never let me go … ’: A Sri Lankan reading of Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries—A Rural Tragedy
• 6 Changing contexts: Globalization, migration and feminism in New Zealand
• 7 Colonizing women: The maternal body and empire
• 8 Timing differences and investing in futures in multicultural (women’s) writing
• 9 Of black angels and melancholy lovers: Ethnicity and writing in Canada
• 10 All-owning spectatorship
• 11 Little girls were little boys: Displaced femininity in the representation of homosexuality in Japanese girls’ comics
• 12 Sexism, racism and Canadian nationalism
• 13 Slash and suture: Post/colonialism in ‘Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza’
• 14 Voice and representation in the politics of difference
• Index