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                                                 ••• Ann Brooks •••

                      interdisciplinary fusion of ideas and concepts drawing on feminist theory, literary
                      criticism, critical ethnography and film theory. Feminist (and non-feminist ) post-
                      colonial intellectuals provide a site for the intersection of debates on feminism, post-
                      colonialism, transculturalism and transnationalism. Many have and are operating
                      within cultural studies discourses. The interdisciplinary matrix of cultural studies has
                      provided a framework within which feminist, postmodernist and postcolonial theo-
                      retical debates have coalesced. The intersection of feminism and cultural studies has
                      become increasingly significant for the transnational and transcultural conceptualiza-
                      tion of debates around representation and identity. One such feminist postcolonial
                      intellectual is Trinh T. Minh-ha (1988a; 1988b; 1989; 1991; 1995a; 1995b). Trinh
                      (1989) raises concerns about the framing and language of postcolonial theory in terms
                      of using ‘the “master’s” tools to dismantle his house’ (ibid.), in addition, Trinh ‘refuses
                      to be “ghettoized” through the separate and/or combined essentialisms of gender, race
                      or ethnicity, seeing these consolidating positions – politically strategic as they may at
                      first appear – as new houses or rather out-houses of the “master(s)”’ (ibid.).
                        Trinh’s main treatise Woman, Native, Other (1989), subtitled Writing, Postcoloniality
                      and Feminism addresses the question ‘how can feminist discourse represent the cate-
                      gories of “woman” and “race” at the same time?’ (Suleri, 1995: 275). This is the sub-
                      text of many of the contested debates on feminist and postcolonial discourses, for
                      Trinh, the answer lies in relocating ‘her gendering of ethnic realities on the inevitable
                      territory of post feminism’ (ibid.). Trinh’s work is characterized by the intersection of
                      postcolonial, feminist and poststructuralist discourses and she is criticized by writers
                      such as Suleri for having a ‘free-floating understanding of “postcolonial”’ (Suleri,
                      1995: 276).
                        Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (1985a; 1985b), like Trinh T. Minh-ha, combines fem-
                      inist poststructuralist and postcolonial discourses in her work. Both are diasporic
                      intellectuals operating in theoretical terms at the ‘high end of deconstruction’ and
                      both are fundamentally concerned with the recognition of ‘difference’. However,
                      when it comes to the question of the recovery of the subaltern voice, there are sig-
                      nificant points of difference. The question of ‘who is permitted to speak on behalf of
                      whom?’ can often become an issue of ‘appropriation’. This can result in what Trinh
                      has called ‘the nativist line of teaching the “natives” how to be bona-fide anti or
                      decolonized others’ (Trinh, 1989: 59). The use of appropriation is analyzed by Trinh
                      in her essay ‘All Owning Spectatorship’. She describes in detail how white liberal fem-
                      inists intervene in the work of a Third World woman film-maker to ‘remind’ her of
                      the significance of ‘class’. Trinh’s point is that expectations held by Western feminists
                      of Third World women in relation to issues around representation illustrate how ‘the
                      mandatory concern for class in the exclusive context of films on and by Third World
                      members is itself a class issue’ (ibid.). Speaking on behalf of a minority, in the form
                      of an ‘appropriating’ voice, is closely linked to what has been identified ‘as a more
                      insidious version of appropriation’ that is the projection of the burden of authentic-
                      ity onto the minority’ (Gunew and Yeatman, 1993: xvii). The framing of authentic-
                      ity for Trinh is an aspect of the way ‘that differences are caught up in the
                      oppositional binary categories of oppressor and oppressed’ (Trinh, 1989: 59).
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