Globalization, Post-Eurocentrism, and the Future of Feminist Literary Studies
By Sara Lennox
In his most recent book, Habitations of Modernity, Dipesh Chakrabarty remarks:
“Achieving a critical perspective on European forms of knowledge . . . is part of the
interrogation of their colonial inheritance that postcolonial intellectuals must carry out”
(18). In this paper I want to pursue the implications of that observation for feminism,
as I investigate what shape post-Eurocentric forms of knowledge might take and how
feminists might deploy them. Though I don’t wish to engage the contentious debate on
how to define the phenomenon termed “globalization,” for my purposes here I would
like to assume that globalization entails the successful extension of orginally European
or Euro-American economic, political, social, and cultural forms across the entire earth,
so that, at least in one sense of the term, globalization can reasonably be regarded as
“Eurocentric.” Moreover, though the term is also a vexed one, like many other scholars
of globalization I would like to use the term “modernity” to characterize the new
material and culture practices that have conquered the globe. However, I would
simultaneously like to stress the obvious fact that neither Eurocentrism, nor modernity,
nor the transnational corporations that enforce them now remain the province of Euro-
Americans alone; to the contrary, the term globalization emphasizes “the omnipresence
globally of the institutions and cultures of a Euro-American modernity” (Dirlik History
36). Thus, as feminists earlier understood that it is quite impossible to “shed” the
structures of a masculinist society to return to a sphere of uncontaminated femininity,
so likewise we now must recognize that we cannot counter modernity or Eurocentrism
by retreating to terrains construed to be “outside” their sway; some other strategies will
be necessary.
So what might “post-Eurocentrism” mean for those of us who in the main cannot
claim the designation “postcolonial intellectual”? Might we also, perhaps as a
consequence of our own opposition to transnational capitalism or US imperial
ambitions, wish to pursue our own critique of the “European forms of knowledge” that
seem to underwrite them? What is the relevance of these debates for the feminist
scholarship, especially for the feminist study of European literatures and cultures
central to the work of Women in German? Quite remarkably, at least in my
observation, Europeanists and feminists have been startlingly absent from such
discussions, as scholars whose work focuses on non-Western countries have advanced
the startling claim that scholarly opposition to globalization necessitates a fundamental
rethinking of many intellectual paradigms that derive from European modernity. Thus
as a heuristic experiment I would like here to investigate how the new scholarly
paradigms critical of European knowledges might be applied to the study of Europe,
and how feminists especially might make use of them. I want to assert that a post-
Eurocentric conception of Europe would entail “provincializing Europe,” to use
Chakrabarty’s felicitous phrase, displacing Europe itself from its central role on the
world-historical stage and European paradigms from their claim to comprehend all of
human experience while nonetheless continuing to insist on the importance of European
society and culture, though now only as one locus among many. A post-Eurocentric
perspective on Europe, I want finally to argue, might make it possible for feminists to
construct a quite different version of European history and culture than the one that has
hitherto been transmitted to us.
If we wish to understand Europe via a post-Eurocentric optic enabled by
globalization, we must first, most obviously, and least controversially concede that we
can no longer study areas of the world in isolation from one another, or more
specifically for our purposes, to produce knowledge about Europe that does not situate
Europe within its global context. Instead, we must understand Europe (and the
individual regions of Europe) as both influenced by and influencing events that happen
elsewhere in the world, for, if colonies were once conceived as passive recipients of
metropolitan civilizing missions, now it is necessary to recognize that colonies
responded to colonizing efforts in active, culturally-specific, and often ingenious ways
that influenced the metropoles in return.. More grandly, it may be necessary to probe to
what degree the very emergence of European modernity is itself a consequence of the
contributions of the rest of the world, a point Frantz Fanon encapsulated in the pithy
phrase: “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World” (102). A new post-
Eurocentric perspective will thus requires better information about parts of the world
about which we may at present know very little, a revised understanding of the
relationship of the European to the non-European world, and also an increased
interdisciplinarity to comprehend the global economic and political changes that
underwrite (and perhaps have always underwritten) cultural production.
Perhaps more controversially, I would also contend that, as a consequence of the
real economic, political, and cultural challenges to Eurocentrism issuing from non-
Western areas of the world, we must reconceptualize the nature of the modernity
conceived to emanate from Europe. Within the frameworks elaborated by classical
Western social theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, modernity itself has been
taken to be a condition that characterizes contemporary Western societies, though to
which non-Western societies may aspire and will eventually–willingly or unwillingly–
succumb. However, scholars critical of Eurocentrism have shown that that the
diffusion of capitalism throughout the globe (i.e. the phenomenon now known as
globalization) has produced heterogeneous, not homogeneous, political, social, and
cultural effects, bringing other parts of the world into being that are just as modern as
the West, but differently so. Arjun Appadurai has called the forms of social
organization he had observed in contemporary Latin American, India, and East Asia.
“alternativemodernities,” and Arif Dirlik argues: “[M]odernity may no longer be
approached as a dialogue internal to Europe or EuroAmerica but as a global discourse
in which many participate, producing different formulations of the modern as lived and
envisaged within their local social environments” (Modernity 17).
It is important to emphasize that thinkers like Chakrabarty, Appardurai, and Dirlik
are putting into question not only our description of observed phenomena like say,
major global cities, but, more importantly for an examination of Europe and the West,
also for the frameworks within which they are understood. A post-Eurocentric
paradigm, critics of Eurocentrism assert, demands that we Western scholars recognize
that the European-derived categories which “we” have taken to be universal are merely
expressions of a specific particularism that has proclaimed itself to be universal and at
least since 1492 has possessed the global power to enforce that claim. . Post-
Eurocentric scholars conclude instead that categories of European theory may be
necessary, but are not sufficient to grasp such new realities. From the perspective of
alternative modernities, classical Marxism’s Eurocentrism can be recognized, and many
types of neo-Marxism also founder if current global realities are considered to be
incommensurable rather than constituting a totality. Nor can the inevitable
consequence of modernity be understood as the production of revolutionary subjects (a
global proletariat, say), whose subjection to the same forces allows them to recognize
their commonality. Notions of the individual, of the division between public and
private, of gender and sexuality taken to be universal now call for further interrogation.
Even development and the formation of the nation-state and its citizen-subjects, once
thought to be the inevitable and proper aim of decolonizing populations, might be
conceived as a Eurocentric framework ultimately imposed by Western-dominated
international organizations. And certainly scholars of Europe will have to abandon the
familiar binaries that have structured our thought for so long (including,
obviously,¨”modernity/tradition” but also, say, “inside/outside and “self/other”).
Instead, we may now have to think in terms of differences no longer conceivable as
oppositions. As Dirlik maintains: “It is not that there are no outsides but that those
outsides must of necessity be conceived of as post-Eurocentric, as products of
contraditions generated by the dialectic between a globalizing Euro-America and places
that struggle against such globalization” (History after Eurocentrism 36).
A post-Eurocentric paradigm as well demands a rethinking of a conception of
history culminating in the production of a Eurocentric modernity. With assistance
from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Chakrabarty terms
this conception of history “historicism,” a linear conception of history as secular,
homogeneous, empty time progressing relentlessly towards the present that
encompasses all human experience. Instead of allowing for simultaneous
incommensurabiltity (or, alternatively, plural contemporaneity), this conception of
history conceives difference as time lag, so that, say, non-Western cultures,
European peasants, or the GDR, can be conceived as exiting in a time anterior to
“our” own, an idea Ernst Bloch expressed in his notion of “Ungleichzeitigkeiten.”
This is the agenda that has underwritten the development projects of the World
Bank and other international agencies, vividly illustrating the on-the-ground policy
effects of so apparently abstract a concept. More provocatively still, Chakrabarty
sometimes suggests that a post-Eurocentric interrogation of dominant paradigms
may go so far as to put in question the utility of historical and social-scientistic
frameworks themselves, since they seem to assume that all human experience can
be reduced to a single common denominator. Chakrabarty proposes instead that
post-Eurocentric scholars conceive of different historical realities instead in a
relationship of translation that does not forfeit the singularity or difference of either.
The singular, he maintains, is “that which defies the generalizing impulse of the
sociological imagination” (Time 45). Thinking in terms of singularities, he
continues, “is not to make a claim against the demonstrable and documentable
permeability of cultures and languages. It is in fact to appeal to models of cross-
cultural transactions that do not, unlike in sociological or social-scientistic thinking,
take a universal middle term for granted” (Time 46).
So where does gender enter this discussion? Astonishingly, globalization theorists
have barely mentioned gender issues (Cf Jay 46, Carla Freeman 1007-19), and, though
feminist scholar Susan Stanford Friedman asserts, I think correctly, that feminist
scholarship on globalization is perhaps “the hottest new area for academic feminism”
(107), only feminist scholars whose work addresses either capitalism and its effects or
on the non-Western world have to this point focused significantly on globalization’s
impact on women. To be sure, feminist theorists have played a leading role in
advancing critiques of universalizing categories as they attempted to acknowledge
differences among women and elaborate explanatory frameworks adequate to the
description of the specificities of female experience, as Lowe and Lloyd acknowledge:
“Feminist critiques of Western epistemology and imperialism have perhaps gone the
furthest in theorizing the importance of location in relation to multiple axes of
determination and systemic intersecting oppressions” (28). But it appears to me that
feminist theorists have not taken the necessary next step. Certainly postmodern
feminists’ critiques of universalism often include the obligatory descriptor “Western,”
but I know no feminist thinker who troubles to investigate alternative epistemological
models. (Indeed, feminists critical of postmodernism often contend that all is lost if
universals are abandoned.) Chandra Mohanty has been rightly critical of First World
feminists’ postulation of an undifferentiated Third World woman, but in her most
recent reconsideration of her classic 1986 essay “Under Western Eyes,” she insists that
she never wished to abandon universalisms, merely specify difference in order “to
theorize universal concerns more fully” (226). Gayatri Spivack adamantly denies that
the “subaltern,” i.e. the native woman, can speak within hegemonic Western discourse,
but she does not explore whether the subaltern can represent herself within some other
framework I know no feminist scholarship that investigates how Europe, or more
generally the “developed world” itself, might be differently understood via the lense of
a post-Eurocentric perspective. Very little feminist work even explores globalization’s
obvious impact on First World women, analyses urgently necessary if feminists are to
elaborate their own agendas within the burgeoning anti-globalization movement.
So what specifically should feminists do, should they undertake to pursue post-
Eurocentric approaches to their subjects? As Sebastian Conrad, editor of Jenseits des Eurozentrismus and a young historian critical of Eurocentrism within German
historiography, has noted: “Das ist eine Problematik, deren Thematisierung noch
weitgehend den Status programmatischen Tastens und Fragens besitzt” (151). That is
to say, that question cannot really be answered yet, though it is possible to begin
tentatively to grope in the direction of answers. It is obviously necessary to understand
all literature and culture to derive finally from the complex global circumstances that
enabled their production, though global contributions may be present only in very, very
coded traces or will be evident only in gaps and absences of the cultural product, that
about which it can’t or won’t speak. We need also fully and deeply to interrogate the
categories we utilize for literary and cultural analysis, including those commonly used
to understand gender relations, to make sure that we are not taking the very
Eurocentric, social-scientistic terms for granted that we need to draw into question.
Particularly, we need to investigate how cultural practices, including those undertaken
by women, have contributed to the production of modernity, an issue Benjamin and
Benedict Anderson has broached with respect to the novel and the newspaper, what
kind or kinds of modernity they have helped to bring into being., and to what degree
conceptions of “alternative modernities” help us to understand women’s place within
modernity differently. Deconstruction and queer theory have already helped us to think
about the tenability of the binary oppositions so often foundational in cultural texts—
say, presence/absence, self/other, masculinity/femininity, but now we can further and
more critically probe such dualisms with an understanding of additional hegemonic
structures they also serve to underwrite. We can raise objections to a teleological
conception of history as progress by drawing attention to heterogeneous voices of
dissent and protest that have been occluded in dominant cultural narratives, and we can
also draw attention to the heteroglossia of canonical texts and submit dissenting
readings of them. It may be possible for scholars of European culture to begin to
understand that, to produce the modern nation-state, the varied populations of European
regions were subjected to colonializing practices sometimes as violent as those
Europeans imposed on the rest of the world, and we can read cultural texts both as
evidence for that violence and as a place where suppressed elements have nonetheless
be preserved. While acknowledging that culture is always intertextual and necessarily
presents itself in forms shared collectively (like language itself), we can also insist that
literature is also the purview of the particular and singular, perhaps even beginning to
explore how the aesthetic moment itself can operate as a form of resistance to
homogenizing forces, an argument that was broached by the Frankfurt School among
other German thinkers. Finally, we can recognize, even make a virtue of, the
situatedness of our own readings of cultural product, acknowledging that our
interpretations are always culturally and historically-specific, thus, unless they willfully
distort the evidence of the text, neither right nor wrong but simply different than others’
readings. Of course we should not delude ourselves that, as feminist scholars of
language, literature, and culture, we can turn the tide of a destructive globalization. But
because we believe in the power of education and in the power of culture, we can begin
to elaborate other possibilites for our students, our colleagues, and ourselves that model
other frameworks for thought and action, and they might help to produce a different
kind of future. As Chakrabarty puts it: “We write, ultimately, as part of a collective
effort to teach the oppressed of today how to be the democratic subject of tomorrow”
(Habitations 33). Also turning to Benjamin, Lowe and Lloyd conclude: “Our moment
is not one of fatalistic despair; faces turned toward the past, we do not seek to make
whole what has been smashed, but to move athwart the storm into a future in which the
debris is more than just a residue: it holds the alternative” (27).
In October 2003, the future is very unclear, and not just for feminist scholars of
literature and culture. Dirlik comments: “It is not clear . . . whether globalization is the
final chapter in the history of capitalist modernity as globalized by European power, or
the beginning of something else that is yet to appear with any kind of concreteness.
What is clear, however, is that globalization discourse is a response both to changing
configurations in global relations—new unities as well as new fractures—and the need
for a new epistemology to grasp those changes” (Reconfiguring 6). Whatever happens,
as Dirlik also argues, it is likely that the coming years will demand “new ways of
thinking our way out of the burdens of not only the past, but, more importantly, of the
present,” (Rethinking 447). I have always found quite cheering Marx’s observation
that humankind “only poses itself such problems as it can solve,” and I am certain that
complicated ways, by insights fostered by globalization. This talk exists in multiple
incarnations: I delivered its first version at a meeting of the U.S. German Studies
Assocation in Washington, DC, at the beginning of October 2001, only two subway
stops from the site at which a plane commandeered by terrorists plowed into the
Pentagon. I finished the talk’s second version in an internet shop in Oaxaca, Mexico,
located, as it happened, in the Calle de Humboldt, and sent it off by e-mail for inclusion
in a Festschrift dedicated to Frank Trommler, a German-born scholar of U.S. German
Studies whose own work has often focused on globalization and migration. Its third
version was presented to the School of Languages and Literatures at Melbourne
University in Australia, deeply informed by my endeavor to understand Australia’s
efforts to comprehend itself as a settler society with ties not only to white Europe.
Perhaps in this fourth version I have, changed by journeys through many intellectual
and physical landscapes, come home again, back to a Women in German conference
sited in a state not far from where I grew up. In Mexico, among the grafitti on a wall
near the stairs of Oaxaca’s Cerro (Hill) de Fortín, long a Mixtec fortess before
Europeans arrived in Mexico, in 1456 conquered by the Aztecs, themselves vanquished
in 1521 by the invading Spanish conquistadors, I discovered the utopian demand:
“¡Globalicemos la esperanza!”—“Globalize hope!” That is, I thought then and still
think now, an agenda for globalization to which feminist scholars of literature and
culture might well wish to commit themselves.
WORKS CITED
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
—–. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 2002.
—–. “The Time of History and the Times of Gods.” The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1997. 35-60.
Conrad, Sebastian. „Doppelte Marginalisierung: Plädoyer für eine transnationale
Perspektive auf die deutsche Geschichte.“ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002):
145-169.
—–, and Shalini Randeria, eds. Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt/Main: Campus,
2002. Post-Eurocentric Historiographies. Ed Arif Dirlik, Vinay Bal, and Peter Gran.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 25-47.
—–. “Modernity as History: Post-Revolutionary China, Globalization and the
Question of Modernity.” Social History 27.1 (January 2002): 16-38.
—–. “Reconfiguring Modernity: From Modernization to Globalization.”
Grove Press, 1961.
Lowe, Lisa, and David Lloyd. “Introduction.” The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Ed. Lowe and Lloyd. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. 1-32.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Spivack, Gayatri Charavorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988. Dirlik, Arif. “Is There History after Eurocentrism?” History after the Three Worlds: www.sidint.org/programmes/politicsplace/politicsDirlik.Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York:
Globalization, Post-Eurocentrism, and the Future of Feminist Literary Studies by Sara Lennox
Sara Lennox
Globalization, Post-Eurocentrism, and the Future of Feminist Literary Studies
By Sara Lennox
In his most recent book, Habitations of Modernity, Dipesh Chakrabarty remarks:
“Achieving a critical perspective on European forms of knowledge . . . is part of the
interrogation of their colonial inheritance that postcolonial intellectuals must carry out”
(18). In this paper I want to pursue the implications of that observation for feminism,
as I investigate what shape post-Eurocentric forms of knowledge might take and how
feminists might deploy them. Though I don’t wish to engage the contentious debate on
how to define the phenomenon termed “globalization,” for my purposes here I would
like to assume that globalization entails the successful extension of orginally European
or Euro-American economic, political, social, and cultural forms across the entire earth,
so that, at least in one sense of the term, globalization can reasonably be regarded as
“Eurocentric.” Moreover, though the term is also a vexed one, like many other scholars
of globalization I would like to use the term “modernity” to characterize the new
material and culture practices that have conquered the globe. However, I would
simultaneously like to stress the obvious fact that neither Eurocentrism, nor modernity,
nor the transnational corporations that enforce them now remain the province of Euro-
Americans alone; to the contrary, the term globalization emphasizes “the omnipresence
globally of the institutions and cultures of a Euro-American modernity” (Dirlik History
36). Thus, as feminists earlier understood that it is quite impossible to “shed” the
structures of a masculinist society to return to a sphere of uncontaminated femininity,
so likewise we now must recognize that we cannot counter modernity or Eurocentrism
by retreating to terrains construed to be “outside” their sway; some other strategies will
be necessary.
So what might “post-Eurocentrism” mean for those of us who in the main cannot
claim the designation “postcolonial intellectual”? Might we also, perhaps as a
consequence of our own opposition to transnational capitalism or US imperial
ambitions, wish to pursue our own critique of the “European forms of knowledge” that
seem to underwrite them? What is the relevance of these debates for the feminist
scholarship, especially for the feminist study of European literatures and cultures
central to the work of Women in German? Quite remarkably, at least in my
observation, Europeanists and feminists have been startlingly absent from such
discussions, as scholars whose work focuses on non-Western countries have advanced
the startling claim that scholarly opposition to globalization necessitates a fundamental
rethinking of many intellectual paradigms that derive from European modernity. Thus
as a heuristic experiment I would like here to investigate how the new scholarly
paradigms critical of European knowledges might be applied to the study of Europe,
and how feminists especially might make use of them. I want to assert that a post-
Eurocentric conception of Europe would entail “provincializing Europe,” to use
Chakrabarty’s felicitous phrase, displacing Europe itself from its central role on the
world-historical stage and European paradigms from their claim to comprehend all of
human experience while nonetheless continuing to insist on the importance of European
society and culture, though now only as one locus among many. A post-Eurocentric
perspective on Europe, I want finally to argue, might make it possible for feminists to
construct a quite different version of European history and culture than the one that has
hitherto been transmitted to us.
If we wish to understand Europe via a post-Eurocentric optic enabled by
globalization, we must first, most obviously, and least controversially concede that we
can no longer study areas of the world in isolation from one another, or more
specifically for our purposes, to produce knowledge about Europe that does not situate
Europe within its global context. Instead, we must understand Europe (and the
individual regions of Europe) as both influenced by and influencing events that happen
elsewhere in the world, for, if colonies were once conceived as passive recipients of
metropolitan civilizing missions, now it is necessary to recognize that colonies
responded to colonizing efforts in active, culturally-specific, and often ingenious ways
that influenced the metropoles in return.. More grandly, it may be necessary to probe to
what degree the very emergence of European modernity is itself a consequence of the
contributions of the rest of the world, a point Frantz Fanon encapsulated in the pithy
phrase: “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World” (102). A new post-
Eurocentric perspective will thus requires better information about parts of the world
about which we may at present know very little, a revised understanding of the
relationship of the European to the non-European world, and also an increased
interdisciplinarity to comprehend the global economic and political changes that
underwrite (and perhaps have always underwritten) cultural production.
Perhaps more controversially, I would also contend that, as a consequence of the
real economic, political, and cultural challenges to Eurocentrism issuing from non-
Western areas of the world, we must reconceptualize the nature of the modernity
conceived to emanate from Europe. Within the frameworks elaborated by classical
Western social theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, modernity itself has been
taken to be a condition that characterizes contemporary Western societies, though to
which non-Western societies may aspire and will eventually–willingly or unwillingly–
succumb. However, scholars critical of Eurocentrism have shown that that the
diffusion of capitalism throughout the globe (i.e. the phenomenon now known as
globalization) has produced heterogeneous, not homogeneous, political, social, and
cultural effects, bringing other parts of the world into being that are just as modern as
the West, but differently so. Arjun Appadurai has called the forms of social
organization he had observed in contemporary Latin American, India, and East Asia.
“alternative modernities,” and Arif Dirlik argues: “[M]odernity may no longer be
approached as a dialogue internal to Europe or EuroAmerica but as a global discourse
in which many participate, producing different formulations of the modern as lived and
envisaged within their local social environments” (Modernity 17).
It is important to emphasize that thinkers like Chakrabarty, Appardurai, and Dirlik
are putting into question not only our description of observed phenomena like say,
major global cities, but, more importantly for an examination of Europe and the West,
also for the frameworks within which they are understood. A post-Eurocentric
paradigm, critics of Eurocentrism assert, demands that we Western scholars recognize
that the European-derived categories which “we” have taken to be universal are merely
expressions of a specific particularism that has proclaimed itself to be universal and at
least since 1492 has possessed the global power to enforce that claim. . Post-
Eurocentric scholars conclude instead that categories of European theory may be
necessary, but are not sufficient to grasp such new realities. From the perspective of
alternative modernities, classical Marxism’s Eurocentrism can be recognized, and many
types of neo-Marxism also founder if current global realities are considered to be
incommensurable rather than constituting a totality. Nor can the inevitable
consequence of modernity be understood as the production of revolutionary subjects (a
global proletariat, say), whose subjection to the same forces allows them to recognize
their commonality. Notions of the individual, of the division between public and
private, of gender and sexuality taken to be universal now call for further interrogation.
Even development and the formation of the nation-state and its citizen-subjects, once
thought to be the inevitable and proper aim of decolonizing populations, might be
conceived as a Eurocentric framework ultimately imposed by Western-dominated
international organizations. And certainly scholars of Europe will have to abandon the
familiar binaries that have structured our thought for so long (including,
obviously,¨”modernity/tradition” but also, say, “inside/outside and “self/other”).
Instead, we may now have to think in terms of differences no longer conceivable as
oppositions. As Dirlik maintains: “It is not that there are no outsides but that those
outsides must of necessity be conceived of as post-Eurocentric, as products of
contraditions generated by the dialectic between a globalizing Euro-America and places
that struggle against such globalization” (History after Eurocentrism 36).
A post-Eurocentric paradigm as well demands a rethinking of a conception of
history culminating in the production of a Eurocentric modernity. With assistance
from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Chakrabarty terms
this conception of history “historicism,” a linear conception of history as secular,
homogeneous, empty time progressing relentlessly towards the present that
encompasses all human experience. Instead of allowing for simultaneous
incommensurabiltity (or, alternatively, plural contemporaneity), this conception of
history conceives difference as time lag, so that, say, non-Western cultures,
European peasants, or the GDR, can be conceived as exiting in a time anterior to
“our” own, an idea Ernst Bloch expressed in his notion of “Ungleichzeitigkeiten.”
This is the agenda that has underwritten the development projects of the World
Bank and other international agencies, vividly illustrating the on-the-ground policy
effects of so apparently abstract a concept. More provocatively still, Chakrabarty
sometimes suggests that a post-Eurocentric interrogation of dominant paradigms
may go so far as to put in question the utility of historical and social-scientistic
frameworks themselves, since they seem to assume that all human experience can
be reduced to a single common denominator. Chakrabarty proposes instead that
post-Eurocentric scholars conceive of different historical realities instead in a
relationship of translation that does not forfeit the singularity or difference of either.
The singular, he maintains, is “that which defies the generalizing impulse of the
sociological imagination” (Time 45). Thinking in terms of singularities, he
continues, “is not to make a claim against the demonstrable and documentable
permeability of cultures and languages. It is in fact to appeal to models of cross-
cultural transactions that do not, unlike in sociological or social-scientistic thinking,
take a universal middle term for granted” (Time 46).
So where does gender enter this discussion? Astonishingly, globalization theorists
have barely mentioned gender issues (Cf Jay 46, Carla Freeman 1007-19), and, though
feminist scholar Susan Stanford Friedman asserts, I think correctly, that feminist
scholarship on globalization is perhaps “the hottest new area for academic feminism”
(107), only feminist scholars whose work addresses either capitalism and its effects or
on the non-Western world have to this point focused significantly on globalization’s
impact on women. To be sure, feminist theorists have played a leading role in
advancing critiques of universalizing categories as they attempted to acknowledge
differences among women and elaborate explanatory frameworks adequate to the
description of the specificities of female experience, as Lowe and Lloyd acknowledge:
“Feminist critiques of Western epistemology and imperialism have perhaps gone the
furthest in theorizing the importance of location in relation to multiple axes of
determination and systemic intersecting oppressions” (28). But it appears to me that
feminist theorists have not taken the necessary next step. Certainly postmodern
feminists’ critiques of universalism often include the obligatory descriptor “Western,”
but I know no feminist thinker who troubles to investigate alternative epistemological
models. (Indeed, feminists critical of postmodernism often contend that all is lost if
universals are abandoned.) Chandra Mohanty has been rightly critical of First World
feminists’ postulation of an undifferentiated Third World woman, but in her most
recent reconsideration of her classic 1986 essay “Under Western Eyes,” she insists that
she never wished to abandon universalisms, merely specify difference in order “to
theorize universal concerns more fully” (226). Gayatri Spivack adamantly denies that
the “subaltern,” i.e. the native woman, can speak within hegemonic Western discourse,
but she does not explore whether the subaltern can represent herself within some other
framework I know no feminist scholarship that investigates how Europe, or more
generally the “developed world” itself, might be differently understood via the lense of
a post-Eurocentric perspective. Very little feminist work even explores globalization’s
obvious impact on First World women, analyses urgently necessary if feminists are to
elaborate their own agendas within the burgeoning anti-globalization movement.
So what specifically should feminists do, should they undertake to pursue post-
Eurocentric approaches to their subjects? As Sebastian Conrad, editor of Jenseits des
Eurozentrismus and a young historian critical of Eurocentrism within German
historiography, has noted: “Das ist eine Problematik, deren Thematisierung noch
weitgehend den Status programmatischen Tastens und Fragens besitzt” (151). That is
to say, that question cannot really be answered yet, though it is possible to begin
tentatively to grope in the direction of answers. It is obviously necessary to understand
all literature and culture to derive finally from the complex global circumstances that
enabled their production, though global contributions may be present only in very, very
coded traces or will be evident only in gaps and absences of the cultural product, that
about which it can’t or won’t speak. We need also fully and deeply to interrogate the
categories we utilize for literary and cultural analysis, including those commonly used
to understand gender relations, to make sure that we are not taking the very
Eurocentric, social-scientistic terms for granted that we need to draw into question.
Particularly, we need to investigate how cultural practices, including those undertaken
by women, have contributed to the production of modernity, an issue Benjamin and
Benedict Anderson has broached with respect to the novel and the newspaper, what
kind or kinds of modernity they have helped to bring into being., and to what degree
conceptions of “alternative modernities” help us to understand women’s place within
modernity differently. Deconstruction and queer theory have already helped us to think
about the tenability of the binary oppositions so often foundational in cultural texts—
say, presence/absence, self/other, masculinity/femininity, but now we can further and
more critically probe such dualisms with an understanding of additional hegemonic
structures they also serve to underwrite. We can raise objections to a teleological
conception of history as progress by drawing attention to heterogeneous voices of
dissent and protest that have been occluded in dominant cultural narratives, and we can
also draw attention to the heteroglossia of canonical texts and submit dissenting
readings of them. It may be possible for scholars of European culture to begin to
understand that, to produce the modern nation-state, the varied populations of European
regions were subjected to colonializing practices sometimes as violent as those
Europeans imposed on the rest of the world, and we can read cultural texts both as
evidence for that violence and as a place where suppressed elements have nonetheless
be preserved. While acknowledging that culture is always intertextual and necessarily
presents itself in forms shared collectively (like language itself), we can also insist that
literature is also the purview of the particular and singular, perhaps even beginning to
explore how the aesthetic moment itself can operate as a form of resistance to
homogenizing forces, an argument that was broached by the Frankfurt School among
other German thinkers. Finally, we can recognize, even make a virtue of, the
situatedness of our own readings of cultural product, acknowledging that our
interpretations are always culturally and historically-specific, thus, unless they willfully
distort the evidence of the text, neither right nor wrong but simply different than others’
readings. Of course we should not delude ourselves that, as feminist scholars of
language, literature, and culture, we can turn the tide of a destructive globalization. But
because we believe in the power of education and in the power of culture, we can begin
to elaborate other possibilites for our students, our colleagues, and ourselves that model
other frameworks for thought and action, and they might help to produce a different
kind of future. As Chakrabarty puts it: “We write, ultimately, as part of a collective
effort to teach the oppressed of today how to be the democratic subject of tomorrow”
(Habitations 33). Also turning to Benjamin, Lowe and Lloyd conclude: “Our moment
is not one of fatalistic despair; faces turned toward the past, we do not seek to make
whole what has been smashed, but to move athwart the storm into a future in which the
debris is more than just a residue: it holds the alternative” (27).
In October 2003, the future is very unclear, and not just for feminist scholars of
literature and culture. Dirlik comments: “It is not clear . . . whether globalization is the
final chapter in the history of capitalist modernity as globalized by European power, or
the beginning of something else that is yet to appear with any kind of concreteness.
What is clear, however, is that globalization discourse is a response both to changing
configurations in global relations—new unities as well as new fractures—and the need
for a new epistemology to grasp those changes” (Reconfiguring 6). Whatever happens,
as Dirlik also argues, it is likely that the coming years will demand “new ways of
thinking our way out of the burdens of not only the past, but, more importantly, of the
present,” (Rethinking 447). I have always found quite cheering Marx’s observation
that humankind “only poses itself such problems as it can solve,” and I am certain that
complicated ways, by insights fostered by globalization. This talk exists in multiple
incarnations: I delivered its first version at a meeting of the U.S. German Studies
Assocation in Washington, DC, at the beginning of October 2001, only two subway
stops from the site at which a plane commandeered by terrorists plowed into the
Pentagon. I finished the talk’s second version in an internet shop in Oaxaca, Mexico,
located, as it happened, in the Calle de Humboldt, and sent it off by e-mail for inclusion
in a Festschrift dedicated to Frank Trommler, a German-born scholar of U.S. German
Studies whose own work has often focused on globalization and migration. Its third
version was presented to the School of Languages and Literatures at Melbourne
University in Australia, deeply informed by my endeavor to understand Australia’s
efforts to comprehend itself as a settler society with ties not only to white Europe.
Perhaps in this fourth version I have, changed by journeys through many intellectual
and physical landscapes, come home again, back to a Women in German conference
sited in a state not far from where I grew up. In Mexico, among the grafitti on a wall
near the stairs of Oaxaca’s Cerro (Hill) de Fortín, long a Mixtec fortess before
Europeans arrived in Mexico, in 1456 conquered by the Aztecs, themselves vanquished
in 1521 by the invading Spanish conquistadors, I discovered the utopian demand:
“¡Globalicemos la esperanza!”—“Globalize hope!” That is, I thought then and still
think now, an agenda for globalization to which feminist scholars of literature and
culture might well wish to commit themselves.
WORKS CITED
Chakrabarty, Dipesh.
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
—–. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 2002.
—–. “The Time of History and the Times of Gods.” The Politics of Culture in the
Shadow of Capital. Ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1997. 35-60.
Conrad, Sebastian. „Doppelte Marginalisierung: Plädoyer für eine transnationale
Perspektive auf die deutsche Geschichte.“ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002):
145-169.
—–, and Shalini Randeria, eds. Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale
Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt/Main: Campus,
2002.
Post-Eurocentric Historiographies. Ed Arif Dirlik, Vinay Bal, and Peter Gran.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 25-47.
—–. “Modernity as History: Post-Revolutionary China, Globalization and the
Question of Modernity.” Social History 27.1 (January 2002): 16-38.
—–. “Reconfiguring Modernity: From Modernization to Globalization.”
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Lowe, Lisa, and David Lloyd. “Introduction.” The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of
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Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,
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Spivack, Gayatri Charavorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the
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Dirlik, Arif. “Is There History after Eurocentrism?” History after the Three Worlds: www.sidint.org/programmes/politicsplace/politicsDirlik.Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: