post colonial feminism, hibridity, why violence? politics of the veil, fanon and the violence

1. Mohd Arshad Bin
Khadir @ Krishnasamy
D20101038185
Muhammad Shahril Bin
Saibon
D20101038302
Muhammad Yazid Bin
Rosly
D20101038223
Santhiya A/P Ramadas D20101038252
Navitha A/P Sanmugam D20101038253

3. What is Postcolonial Feminism?
 Subset of Feminism
 It was developed as feminism focused more on Western
cultures
 It seeks to study the effect of colonialism on non-white,
non-western women in the postcolonial world.
 It often argues that non-western women are
misinterpreted.

4. Western view on Non-western
Women
 White men or women are needed to save
brown women from brown men (Roy,
2002)
 All women are united under a sisterhood of
exploitation by patriarchy.

5. Westerners as the Saviours
 George W Bush in large part justified the war in
Afghanistan through an appeal for the liberation of
Afghan women.
 The women of Afghanistan constituted the
ultimate victims, putting the United States in the
position of ultimate protector
(Young, 2003)

6. Politics of the Veil
 The veil has been concerned, intrigued, fascinated and
troubled the western commentators most.
 Some westerners desire of freeing women from the
prison of their veil (Spivak, 1994)
 Kirklees Council in Dewsbury suspended classroom
assistant Aishah Azmi for refusing to remove her veil at
school.
 In France, decision was made to ban the wearing of
headscarves by Muslim girls in school, along with large
crosses and other covert religious symbols.

7.  The veil symbolizes an exotic and seductive Orient that
has long intrigued the Westerners.
 Non-western women feel that it is part of their own identity.
 A British Muslim woman said that she saw the hijab as an
act of solidarity with Muslim women all over the world.
 Many independent and capable women are veiled

8. Indigene Du Caire

9. Taken from the Stockton Postcolonial
Projects

10. Postcolonial Feminists on Western
View
 Many women are oppressed by much more than
patriarchy
 Western women have set the agenda of feminism
 It focuses more on geographic and cultural
specificity

11.  By using the term "woman" as a universal group,
women are then only defined by their gender and
not by social class, race, ethnicity, or sexual
preference.
 Postcolonial feminism began as a criticism of the
failure of Western feminism to cope with the
complexity of postcolonial feminist issues

12. Postcolonial Feminism & Race
 mainstream Western feminism has largely
avoided the issue of race
 Race was not seen as an issue that White
women needed to address.[15]


13. Critiques of Post colonialism
Feminism
 Postcolonial feminism is itself a critique of western
feminism
 Western feminist movement criticizes postcolonial
feminism is on the grounds that breaking down women into
smaller groups
 This criticism claims that postcolonial feminism is divisive
 Postcolonial feminism and third world feminism are also in
danger of being ethnocentric

14. HYBRIDITY

15. Framing Hybridity
 Among postcolonial theorists, there is a wide consensus that hybridity
arose out of the culturally internalized interactions between
“colonizers” and “the colonized” and the dichotomous formation of
these identities.
 This theoretical perspective will serve as the foundation for the
considerations explored in this paper, employing hybridity as a
powerful tool for liberation from the domination imposed by bounded
definitions of race, language, and nation.

16. Race
 Racial hybridity, or the integration of two races which are assumed to be
distinct and separate entities, can be considered first in terms of the physical
body.
 Mixed births such as mestizo, mulatto and muwallad were stigmatized as a
physical representation of impure blood, and
 Racism long served as a tool of power that maintained that even in this
blending of two bodies, just “one drop” of black blood would deem the body
impure and alien, an abomination.
 In embodying the inability to bind identities to race, racial hybridity both in
the physical body and in consciousness offers a means of deconstructing the
boundaries of dichotomous racial identities.

20. Language
 In addition to race, language has long been bound in definitions as a symbol of nation
and a mode of exclusion. As a means to connect with other social beings, communicating
with language is a meaningful performance in that speaking requires two parties, one to
perform language and an audience to observe and absorb language.
 Fanon’s theorizing addresses the power of language in the formation of identity as he
says,
“To speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a
civilization,” (1967: 17-18).
 The use of a colonizer’s language by the colonized to speak of the crimes of colonialism
is its own transgression and act of resistance.

22. National Culture
 “How do you tell who is indigenous to the country and who is not? Given a history of
migration, what is the dividing line between the indigenous and the nonindigenous?”
(Mamdani 2005: 10).
 Hybridity in a postcolonial world muddles the very definitions of culture by which
nations define themselves.
 Said shows the diverse processes by which dominant cultures are formed at the service
of Others. Using words like “shape,” “definition,” and “transmute,” he describes the act
of defining nation and the artificial nature of these boundaries.

25.  Some forms of postcolonialism have suggested
that a more direct form of intervention is required
for change.
 Frantz Fanon even called for the necessity of
violence.

26. Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)

27.  Colonial world is a Manichean world
- a world of black and white alone
- colonial knowledge sought to completely
separate black from white.

28. Two element of colonialism in
tension:
1. Through colonial rule and education, the colonised
were constantly told of the superiority of colonisers’
values and these should be aspired to and copied.
2. However, at the same time there was the existence of
what Fanon called ‘the fact of blackness’, in other
words, the manner in which a colonised person can
most immediately identified is by the colour (or other
features) of their skin. This ‘fact of blackness’ was a
marker of inferiority which was inescapable.

29.  The copying of colonizers' values- can never be totally
successful, and it is this which maintains the superiority of
the colonizers
“Indians can mimic but never exactly reproduce English
values… their recognition of the perpetual gap between
themselves and the ‘real thing” will ensure their subjection”
(Loomba, 1998)

30.  Psychic trauma occurred when the colonized subject
realised that he would never be able to attain the whiteness
he had been taught to desire, or shed the blackness he had
learnt to devalue.
“At the risk of arousing the resentment of my coloured
brothers, I will say that the black man is not a man”
(Frantz Fanon- Black Skin, White Masks)

32.  Fanon produced analysis of the psychological problems
facing black men and women in a white world.
 The condition he identified was self-division or alienation
from the self.
 He presented a number of case notes recording ‘colonial
war and mental disorder’

33.  Fanon reversed the ideas of the colonizers.
 “Rather than seeing colonialism as the result of the failings
of the other (namely, European colonialism was needed as
the others were not able to rule themselves), we now saw it
as the cause of the mental defects of the other”
 Negative traits of colonised (violence, hysteria, laziness)
were brought actually by the colonialism.

35.  From European point of view – saw native as
being uncivilized and lack the ability to rule
by themselves.
 Anti-colonial resistance denote to the
European that the native are being violence
 Fanon thinks otherwise.

36. Fanon
 European initial act of conquest – power over body and
mind.
 Thus to maintain the European power violence is
inevitable.
 Natives starts decolonization
 Bring the native together with common purpose
 Gaining self respect.

37. After decolonization
 Neo- colonialism – western- dominated international
capital which would not allowed newly independent
country to develop in peace
 Fanon vision has a gender bias
 Woman as sexual violence
 Example through the movie The battle of Algiers

38. References
 Sharp, J. (2009). Geographies of post-colonialism (1st ed.).
London: SAGE.
 The Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project,. (2011). Veils
and Postcolonial Feminism. Retrieved 19 May 2014, from
https://blogs.stockton.edu/postcolonialstudies/veils-and-
postcolonial-feminism/