Erasing Diversity and Hybridity

Erasure of the Euro-Asian: Recovering Early Radicalism and Feminism in South Asia, by Kumari Jayawardena, Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo, 2007, iv+312 pages + photographs

The significant contributions to history of Euro-Asians – a term coined by Kumari Jayawardena to encompass Burghers, Anglo-Indians and Eurasians – are documented in detail in this book, which deals mainly with Sri Lanka, but also takes up some cases in India, and a few elsewhere. The central question posed by it is the following: There were many men and women of mixed European and Asian descent in India and Sri Lanka, who questioned both foreign domination and oppressive local social structures – visionaries and agitators who supported national liberation, feminism, pluralism, secularism and the rights of workers and peasants – yet their contribution to history has largely been erased. In the case of Euro-Asians of maternal European descent, such as Ananda Coomaraswamy, they have been recognised, but at the cost of erasing their mothers. What is the reason for this denial? 

Introduction to a Special Issue of the Journal of Gender Studies on Gender and Nationalism

 

This issue of the Journal takes up the problematic relationship between gender and nationalism. The ambiguity of this relationship derives mainly from the two-sided character of nationalism. The feminist struggle is one for liberation from gender oppression; to the extent that it stands aside from other struggles against oppression (bourgeois feminists who ignore class oppression, white feminists who ignore racism), it becomes limited and partial: that is, it fails to recognise the gendered ways in which racial and class oppression operate, and thereby accepts the oppression of some women. Similarly, foreign domination and ethnic oppression also affect women in specific ways, and a feminism which stands for the liberation of all women cannot be neutral: it has to take a stand against oppression and for liberation.

However, nationalism is not simply about liberation from foreign domination or ethnic oppression; indeed, this dimension is not even present in most forms of nationalism (British nationalism being an obvious example), whereas all forms of nationalism are about the establishment and perpetuation of state power – an inherently authoritarian and hierarchical institution – over a certain area of the earth’s surface. Where this is the only dimension in nationalism (where it is imperialist and racist, for example), there is no dilemma for feminists: they can unambiguously be opposed to it. It is when the liberationist element is also present that the problems arise. This is the grey area where a struggle may be against foreign domination or ethnic oppression but also may be fundamentalist or otherwise oppressive to women, or stand for its own form of ethnic oppression, or in other ways seek to establish a totalitarian state power. Where should feminists stand when the goals of nationalism diverge from those of feminism?