The Center Can(not) Hold: American Studies and Global Feminism (2000)

Turning and turning in widening gyre, falcon cannot hear falconer; Things fall apart; center cannot hold.... William Buffer Yeats, The Second Coming What is woman of color, professor in Women's Studies and scholar of Asian American literature, doing, quoting William Butler Yeats, male Irish poet of early twentieth-century? In my comments I wish to urge us toward discourse in which figures of falcon and falconer, Yeats's symbol of man's mastery of nature and of society, can be dismantled, even as, in poet's word, the rough beast of twentieth-century slouches toward Bethlehem to be born anew. In her introduction to Third World Women and Politics of Feminism, Chandra Talpade Mohanty describes different spatial vision of world. Not spiraling gym with its shattered center (of which one must ask, whose center, who is falconer, who falcon?), but vision of a world traversed with intersecting lines of power and resistance, world which can be understood only in terms of its destructive divisions of gender, color, class, sexuality, and nation (2). Mohanty calls for new structure, evoked in Bettina Aptheker's words, of a world which must be transformed through necessary process of pivoting center ... for assumed center (Europe and United States) will no longer hold (2). It has been argued that there is now no center, or that pivoted center is everywhere. But, as present insecurities demonstrate, even paradigm of globalization advanced by theories on postmodern cultures and societies, acknowledges prevailing centers--for economics and finance, in fashion and entertainment, higher education and technology--that continue to aggregate influence and power. These centers, no doubt, are linked to their peripheries for their wealth and power. chief economist of Deutsche Bank-Asia noted, in different context, Thailand and Malaysia are so small. So is Hong Kong. How can they trigger global market crash? Because around world are linked. enormous bull run of dollar has been central to pulling in to finance America's `Goldilocks' economy. In essence, America's boom has been financed with other people's money (Thurow B7). But these linkages should not disguise dominance of specific players. James Flanigan, Senior Economics Editor of Los Angeles Times, observed, The astounding world-wide stock market turmoil of [October 1997] signals ... demand by global investors that all countries adapt their to dictates of markets. By open however, Flanigan explained that he meant the triumph of American economic system of over state-run economies (Flanigan A1). This slippage from trope of open markets to identification of American dominance is where one should pause to ask: what does American system--of markets, of media entertainment, of political organization, of technological innovation--signify in context of global feminism? recent critiques of feminism as Western-produced discourse offer an initial direction. Indeed, from outside white Euro-American academe, American women writers and scholars of color, such as Angela Davis, Judy Yung, and Chela Sandoval have introduced categories of race and ethnicity, to focus attention on what I call U.S. women's studies. Until recently, this field had elided contributions of nonwhite women to social movements and neglected study of their culture-specific, immigrant-history-specific struggles in United States. Rebuttals to new scholarship reveal fears of balkanization of American society, should race and ethnicity enter as analytical tools in methodologies of social sciences and humanities. My aim is to focus on question of women's studies in order to make an alternative although not an oppositional argument. …