Pius Adesanmi
3 October 2007
opinion
Pius Adesanmi questions the omission of African feminists scholars from the Norton Anthology** and challenges the editors as to why "an entire continent is seen to have produced nothing of feminist theorizing "I am interested in the conscious and the subconscious processes that led you to the conclusion that Africa, an entire continent of fifty-four countries and over a billion people, has contributed nothing, absolutely nothing, to five centuries of feminist theorizing. After all, as seasoned academics in the United States, you both know that exclusions tell much louder stories than inclusions."
Dear Sandra and Susan, I salute you both in the name of feminism, women's liberation, gender equality, and, most importantly, global sisterhood. The publication of your much-anticipated Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader is such an epochal event that I must interrupt the blissful and well-deserved eternal sleep that was eventually accorded me when the people and government of France, ever so fatherly and motherly when it comes to taking care of poor Africa, graciously returned my brain and backside to the South African government for burial in my ancestral homeland a few years ago. I join the American and the global feminist family in congratulating the two of you on the publication of this truly wonderful volume. It is obvious that feminist intellectual labor will never ever be the same again. Resounding success, I must say, has become synonymous with the long history of intellectual collaboration between the two of you. Afterall, The Mad Woman in the Attic, the first gift of your collaborative efforts to humanity, has remained the only inevitable, unavoidable bible of feminist scholarship ever since it was published.
The reference to the magnanimity of France in returning my remains to the government and people of South Africa should have given my identity away by now. However, it is always safe and wise to swear by the natural invisibility of Africa and Africans in matters of global import. And in your immediate context in the United States, it is outright foolish to assume that anybody considers anything about Africa worth knowing. Except, of course, hunger, starvation, poverty, wars, AIDS, famine, and Western charity or "giving" (apologies to President Bill Clinton). I must therefore assume complete ignorance of my identity and introduce myself. I hope you will find it in your hearts to pardon my presumptuousness if you are both already familiar with my story.
My name is Sarah Baartman, also famously known internationally as "the Hottentot Venus". I will spare you the sassy details of my story and focus only on the essential. I was lured to London in 1810 where I soon became a prisoner of Europe's rapacious and capitalistic voyeurism. I'm sure I don't have to tell you the story of 19 th century Europe and its treatment of its Others in Africa and other places. No doubt, you still remember your Orientalism - Edward Said has been a very good friend since he got here. The Europe of this period was also a formidable theatre of all kinds of exhibitions.
Zoophilism was in the air. The colored Other needed to be displayed publicly and regularly in London, Paris, and Lisbon as colonial fauna.
As fate always manages to arrange these things, I was what Europeans called - and still call- an "African tribeswoman" gifted with an exceptional backside. Europe's science promptly concluded that my buttocks suffered from a biological deformity known as steatopygia.
The lips of my womanhood were also considered to be too huge and elongated for the civilized global standards determined by the labia of white women. And so from Britain to France my backside and the lips of my womanhood became objects of visual consumption in the public spheres of White patriarchy. For an extra fee, White men could even touch my behind while I was on display.
Death eventually came calling. You must know that where I come from in Africa, death is no finality. I merely transitioned to ancestor hood in the worldview of my people, hence the reverence with which Africans treat the dead. Not so Europeans. They took their knives and carving objects, carved out my brain, the lips of my womanhood, and my backside, put them in bottles, and kept them in public display at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. Yes, I can see you cringe. You should. All sensitive feminists should. The idea, just the idea! The bitter tragedy of a woman's most vital parts captured by men, carved out of her dead body by men, and stored in the Museum of Man! Of all places!
My parts remained in public view in that museum, ultimate evidence of patriarchy's victory over feminism, until 1974 when they were withdrawn into a private sanctuary. Finally in 2002, France returned her precious conquest to the people of South Africa.
Dear sisters, the significance of my story to the feminist cause and to global feminist intellectual labor should be quite obvious by now.
For nearly two centuries, I was an international feminist cause célèbre, the very embodiment of patriarchal control over African female sexuality, black female sexuality, and, I daresay, female sexuality. Let me be clear: the story of my body in the international economy of meaning is the story of your own bodies, the story of every woman's body. The difference lies merely in the detail or what your postmodernist colleagues would call local particularities.
Given the fact that my narrative has become one of the most formidable sites - I hate it when I sound like you academics! - of global feminist contestation and intellection, it stands to reason that any reasonable person would expect me to make a grand, celebrated entrance into your Norton volume through the work of any of the numerous African feminist scholars of international repute who have written about me. At the risk of sounding immodest, nobody would expect to pick up a summation of five centuries of feminist intellectual labor - which your Norton anthology represents - and draw a blank with regard to the story of Sarah Baartman. After all, I've been theorized, postcolonized, and postmodernized in all the faddish versions of feminisms out there. I didn't think it was possible for me to be disappeared in any serious historiographical account of feminist theory. I didn't expect to be Ralph Ellisoned.
Trust me my dear sisters, I was not motivated to write you by any narcissistic self-indulgence. You will admit, from what you now know of my story, that I am quite used to being silenced, being disappeared. I am actually more worried by the broader, deeper ideological implications of your having disappeared me softly from your Norton volume. I am interested in the stories told - or untold - by your editorial choices and options, the instinct to include and the impulse to exclude. I am interested in the conscious and the subconscious processes that led you to the conclusion that Africa, an entire continent of fifty-four countries and over a billion people, has contributed nothing, absolutely nothing, to five centuries of feminist theorizing. After all, as seasoned academics in the United States, you both know that exclusions tell much louder stories than inclusions. I know we are on the same page here.
Some people may praise you for making this volume truly global and representative by including the multi-layered voices of the Other.
They would be right if they did that. After all, you included essays by bell hooks, Hortense Spillers, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, evidence of your awareness of Africana feminist voices and practices; you included essays by Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty, evidence of your awareness of the expansive field of Third World/postcolonial/transnational feminist voices and practices; the entry by Paula Gunn Allen saved the day for Native American feminisms; Gloria Anzaldua - another good friend of mine here - thankfully guarantees the presence of Chicana feminisms in your volume. In essence, the presence of these Other voices, strategically sprinkled in the text, is a laudable proof of the fact that you paid attention when Hazel Carby screamed in an article: "White Woman Listen"! You listened. You agreed with her that feminism could and should no longer be the gospel of the White western female according to Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Elaine Showalter and others too numerous to mention. You agreed with Carby that the narratives of the French delegation - Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, and Julia Kristeva - should no longer be deemed universal. You agreed that Chinese women are probably better positioned to speak for and about themselves than be represented and spoken for by Julia Kristeva's About Chinese Women.
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