colonialism
A question that I see coming up in a lot of people's posts and that I'd like to talk about in class is just what's going on when Kartini calls Javanese people lazy, dumb, uncivilized, and Europeans modern and superior. How much of this is her internalizing colonialist beliefs and feeling herself as a Javanese woman, to be inferior; how much is about her feeling superior to other Javanese because they don't have the education and access to Western culture that she does; and how much is simply a strategic mood, taking on the language and attitude of Dutch people like Stella Zeehandelaar in order to get her point across, and being self-deprecating because convention says she should? In a lot of the historical writings -- Wollstonecraft, Pizan, and some of the characters in Maria de Zayas -- we see women adopting this very humble and even *inferior* attitude even as they're arguing for equality, and here we have the added dimensions of race and colonial positioning. And I want to know whether it's really about convention, strategy, or a real sense of inferiority.
The early part of the Cote article reminded me of the Tani Barlow article from our first class, the (for me rather disturbing) idea that when Western feminists criticize the treatment of women in colonized countries or "third world" countries they're really asserting the superiority of Western ideas and practices, saying that native women need help to be protected from the uncivilized native men. This kind of "international feminism" really supports a colonialist or neocolonialist project.
Cote started out comparing the Dutch women's movement of the late 19th and early 20th century to the one in Britain, but I was frustrated that she didn't continue that comparison, I guess since I have almost no knowledge of Dutch colonialism and I would have liked more comparisons and contrast. In particular I was curious about the idea that Sarah pointed out, toward the end of the article, where R.A. van Sandick (I think in 1898) says that Dutch women need to be sent to Indonesia in order to preserve European virtue and culture, to keep the Dutch men from "going native". How does this compare to discourses used in other colonizing countries in different periods?
I know that in the Portuguese empire there was always quite a bit of "going native", a lot of Portuguese men having sex and having children with native African and Asian and American women. In the 1930s and '40s the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre wrote about this Portuguese tendency for miscegenation in a positive light, saying that this pattern made Portuguese form of colonialism less brutal and harmful than the ones practiced by Britain, France, and the Netherlands. Freyre's ideas were later co-opted by the Fascist Salazar regime in Portugal and used to justify holding on to their colonies in Africa and Asia into the 1970s, when other European powers had mostly given up on empire. In the greater Portuguese nation, so the story goes, we're all one big happy family and there is not the racism or domination or subjection that you see in other colonies.
Sorry, I went pretty far off topic there, but I guess I am interested in this question, which comes up in the Cote article, of what the role is for European women in colonized countries, whether it's even possible for them to speak or work on behalf of native women, or whether they'll necessarily be supporting the colonial project. It relates to the Alcoff article from the first day and our continuing discussion of what we as US feminists can say and do in support of and in dialogue with women from other countries, in particular less powerful countries.