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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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