Context is Everything.

            In Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, she examines the façade of Antigua as seen by tourists, tourists who cannot understand or even identify Antigua’s cultural history because of the colonization of the island. Many of the post-colonial examples Kincaid talked about reminded me of my travels to Trinidad. I was one of the “disgusting tourists” about whom Kincaid writes, and the example she used of how the hotel closed off the Antiguan beach to Antiguans was something I also witnessed in Trinidad as a means of segregation. Government officials guarded the nice beaches’ entrance, requiring a payment to get in. No chairs were allowed, as those could be rented from the government as well. In Antigua, Kincaid notes, the government is constantly trying to exploit the country’s tourism value, rather than produce any real change for its citizens. This creates a major disconnect and even resentment between the tourists and the locals, making it difficult for any sort of transnational alliance, in any regard.

            Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” examines this disconnect between first- and third-world countries, especially as it pertains to feminism. She says American feminists cannot self examine unless it does so in a “global economic and political framework,” as the “complex interconnections between first- and third-world economies [have] a profound effect on the lives of women in all countries” (63). I’m curious about Mohanty’s end goal: Is she trying to get Eurocentric feminist thinkers to change their thought process? Is she calling these “third-world feminists” to action? Or is she simply trying to encourage a plurality, a transnational spirit? Personally, I think Mohanty is trying to redefine our concept of womanhood and feminism itself to become more inclusive and less reflective in their meanings.

            Becoming more inclusive and less reflective is something I think Uma Narayan fails to do at times in “Contesting Cultures.” By breaking down her experience as inherently Indian, she acknowledges the uniqueness of her experience; however she tries to ignore the context in order to create a universal feminist experience. I understand the importance of unifying the world’s feminists, but do we have to get rid of the context in order to find common ground? Can we not find the common ground and use the varying contexts to identify all the ways colonialism and patriarchal society has reared its ugly head? To me, acknowledging the hegemony of theory and feminism is the best way to create genuine transnational feminism. As Kaplan and Grewal say in their Introduction, “Very often, feminist poststructuralist or psychoanalytic theorists do not utilize a transnational frame or consider colonial discourse or discourses of race” (3).  It seems that fixing this could be best accomplished only with an acknowledgement and acceptance of the varying contexts.