Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity – By Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s book Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing and Solidarity is divided into three parts and discusses the primary subjects that have previously occupied Mohanty’s writings and interests: decolonizing feminism, demystifying capitalism, and reorienting feminism. The first part criticizes the Western-centric nature of feminism and identifies the need for more nuanced analyses. The second part delves into the politics of knowledge, with a specific focus on academia in the US. The third section ‘revisits’ her earlier writing ‘Under Western Eyes’: This revision suggests a reorientation of “transnational feminist practices towards anticapitalist struggles, by examining feminist pedagogies and scholarship on globalization and by exploring the implication of absence of racialized gender and feminist politics in anti-globalization movements” (p.13). The three topics/sections are inseparable in understanding her argumentation on reorienting feminism. For Mohanty, there is no such thing as an apolitical scholarship, and her academic work is not seen as distinct from her political engagement. A feminist solidarity cannot emerge without decolonising knowledge and “practice[ing] anticapitalist critique” (p.7). Those two, scholarship and practice, co-exist and are shaped by the interaction between each other. As she mentions, “I think and write in conversation with scholars, teachers, and activists involved in social justice struggles” (p. 1).

The first part provides a more nuanced analysis of women’s agency in specifically ‘historical’ settings. Moving beyond the gaze of white feminism, where a universality imposed on Third World women misses historical particularities, Mohanty wishes to avoid an abstract analysis of women which penetrates many white feminism publications. The representation of women as a ‘unified’ group, an ahistorical generalisation, hides historically specific conditions that represent more complex realities (p. 37). This idea of a pre-determined unified and universal ‘sisterhood’ that sees women only through gendered lenses tends to erase material and ideological power differences and does not take into the material politics of everyday life. For Mohanty, to define feminism only in gendered terms conceals other elements related to womanhood such as race, class, nation, or sexuality (p. 55). But a feminism that is not preoccupied with all kinds of power relations and the inequalities produced and does wish to address them is by nature another representation of a hegemonic (Western, White, and Middle Class) feminism. Mohanty demonstrates how Western feminism has shaped and dominated academic scholarship, and by extension, it has led to marginalisation and misconception of women that did not fit into these (Western) analytic categories. Hence, Western feminist writing on women in the Third World cannot be considered outside the context of the global hegemony of Western scholarship: the ‘somewhat idea’ that Western knowledge is the core of a ‘universal knowledge’ impacts the way we ‘perceive’ Third World women and their struggles. This colonised gaze not only reinforces stereotypes but also implies two kinds of feminisms, hierarchically structured: a noble feminism (practised by white middle-class women in the West) and an ‘inferior’ one (anything that does not fit in their white middle-class Western paradigm).

In Chapter 2, to demonstrate the need for more nuanced analyses and a decolonial feminist scholarship and praxis beyond the gaze of white feminism and Western eyes, Mohanty cites Audre Lorde’s essay: “Most people in the world are Yellow, Black, Brown, Poor, Female, non-Christian and do not speak English” (Cited in p. 43). Yet, Western feminism has long been privileged in dominating academic and nonacademic discussions. One of the topics that Mohanty does not explicitly develops in her book is the dominance of English-speaking literature and scholarship, along with the use of English as the lingua franca of academia and the implications this has for knowledge production in general and for feminist knowledge production and praxis in particular. Here, I wish to engage in a dialogue
with the author rather than review her arguments stricto sensu. Knowledge production does not only happen in English, and scholarship is and has always been produced in languages other than English. Yet non-native English-speaking scholars (especially the ones having studied in non-English speaking academic institutions) tend to be disadvantaged in comparison to native English speakers even when it comes to studying their “own” regions, with the former having fluency in the language needed and the latter not. As a historian on the making myself, knowing the language of the country(ies) you are researching is a crucial to understand historical particularities otherwise invisible to the eye, but it is also necessary tool in order to decolonise knowledge. The idea that English alone is enough qualification to study a non-English-speaking region or/and a country and its people as a scholar due to the abundance of English literature further (re)colonises, rather than decolonises, knowledge, especially in fields like history where the use of primary sources is an indispensable tool for the historian. Writing the ‘history of certain [people/women]’ without the appropriate language skills, one has great limits on understanding the people/women and societies she/he wishes to research. Without speaking the language or at least getting into the effort of learning it, one misses important historical particularities that become more than a ‘lost in translation’ kind of fault: they reproduce Orientalist misconceptions.

Personally, the chapter that touched me the most in Mohanty’s book was the Chapter 5. In this chapter, Mohanty’s personal experience as an immigrant and a feminist activist mingles beautifully with her academic interests in transnational feminist antiracist and anticapitalist movements. Mohanty shows how she struggled to answer the questions of what home is for her and where it is. As an immigrant, her identity is placed in several geographical spaces. For Mohanty, how one defines home is rather pollical: she continues on demonstrating how she ended up defining ‘home’ upon reflection and how this was transformed through her participation in the struggle. Her sense of home emerges in relation to women of colour in the US and their common participation in the struggle: “Home not as a comfortable, stable, inherited, and familiar space but instead as an imaginative, politically charged space in which the familiarity and sense of affection and commitment lay in shared collective analysis of social injustice, as well as a vision of radical transformation” (p. 128). The chapter, as personal as it is to Mohanty, also became personal to me. As an immigrant, questions of identity and what constitutes my home (Is my home ‘Greece’ where I originally came from? Or is it in the UK where I wish to stay for the foreseeable future?). The UK does not feel much home when someone asks me the following questions: Where are you from? Are you Spanish? How long have you been living in the UK? By that time, they have decided for me who I am, I am a [Greek] immigrant with my accent becoming my ‘acoustic’ point of difference. I may “visibly” belong at first glance, but my first language decides to manifest my difference through my accent, placing me immediately in the immigrant community. It took me a while to decide for myself that my identification as an immigrant was a personal choice, my personal belonging. Besides, sometimes Greece seemed foreign to me growing up there: as a granddaughter of Greek Rums who were forced to leave Istanbul in the 1970s, I grew up with Turkish television series, politiki kouzina (Istanbul’s cuisine), grandparents who transmitted me their love and nostalgia for Istanbul, along with a cross-generational trauma of loss, and the need to navigate this heritage of being a ‘Turkish seed’.  By the moment I finished Mohanty’s book, however, I had finally managed to define (my) home: home was never a place for me up until now; home was always defined by the relationships I have built in different locations. Like Mohanty, home is also political to me: I feel at home when I organise with people believing in the same causes as I do through our common antifascist/antiracist/feminist/decolonial/anticapitalist struggles. But home also exists outside strict spatial norms: I consider home the people I care and love in the different locations I grew up, imagined living through the lens of my grandparents, or living at the moment.

To conclude, written in 2003, twenty years ago, Mohanty’s book continues to be an indispensable reading for scholars and for everyone who wishes to challenge their own blind spots. Mohanty’s conclusion, ‘Reorienting Feminism’, was left open to explore new possibilities for engagement: I want to believe that twenty years after the publication, decolonising knowledge and scholarship has further developed and moved forward, despite the long road ahead of us. My interests outside academia with publications from and for the Global South like the ‘kohl journal’, radical archives, such as ‘the archives of the struggles of women in Algeria’, radical spaces like the ‘Feminist Autonomous Space’ in Athens, newly founded magazines that move beyond Westernised representations of women, such as the bi-lingual Arabic and English magazine ‘al hayya’, and even cinematic experiences that wish to tell stories of gendered migrations like the ‘MiQ festival’, 3 has inflicted me both with enthusiasm and optimism. That is not to say we should rest, “vanishing away with the dream of revolution” 4 ; these indicative decolonial manifestations demonstrate the progress, but they are also indispensable weapons for the continuation of struggle and decolonisation. While engaging with them, we can smile out of hope while we continue the fight.

Review written by Christina Chatzitheodorou