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Unsettling the South through Postcolonial Feminist Theory
ACROSS THE ACADEMY, POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISM is often understood to only apply to "the postcolony," that is, geographic regions now commonly referred to as "the global South." This assumption not only fails to capture the significant intellectual contribution of postcolonial feminist theory, but actually has the effect of reproducing the same logics that postcolonial feminism critiques. These include: (1) the idea that (post) colonial describes phenomena that are fixed in certain geographies and locations (i.e., in the global South and not the global North); (2) the presumption of a temporality in which the colonial exists only in the past; and (3) either a denial of the contemporary realities and lived experiences of white settler colonialism or an artificial separation of these realities from those of the postcolony.
In this essay, we argue for the contemporary relevance of postcolonial feminism as a diverse body of theory offering analytical insights that extend beyond the postcolony or a singular application to "women's lives." In particular, we chart the significance of postcolonial feminisms as a lens through which we might "unsettle the South" and attend to all of the representational baggage carried in references to the global South. In doing so, we respond to recent provocations to develop a more relational understanding of the global North and South, within which the global South is seen as "everywhere and nowhere" at the same time.1 This understanding also requires an unsettling of not just the ways in which we know the global South as a location but also how and where we apply postcolonial feminism. The four books we review serve as examples of contemporary postcolonial feminist work that moves us forward in rethinking the geography and meaning of the global South, toward a more relational understanding of inequality, power, and "development."
We begin by briefly outlining some key interventions of postcolonial feminist analysis, and then we elucidate how the books under review build on and make new pathways for a more nuanced understanding of postcolonial feminist theory. In laying out our argument, we concentrate on how the monographs reviewed here take up three significant themes: the central role of gender and sexuality in racialized imperialist projects; liberal modernity and colonial definitions of "the human";...