Feminism and Postcolonialism: (En)gendering Encounters

Postcolonialism and feminism as critical discourses have enriched the understanding and explanatory potential of international relations. One could argue that in the last two decades these two theoretical approaches have grown exponentially in their capacity to embrace the diversity and unpredictability of global political and social life. They stand resolutely in support of subversion and change in the political, cultural and social landscape; not just to bridge the distance between the centre and the margins but also to bring the knowledge of and from the margins to the centre. As Leela Gandhi notes, it is the encounter with feminism that encourages postcolonialism to 'produce a more critical and self reflexive account of cultural nationalism' On the other hand, postcolonialism offers feminism the conceptual tool box to see multiple sites of oppression and to reject universalisms around gendered experiences of both men and women. But at best, they who should be natural allies, have forged an uneasy alliance, maintaining strict discursive boundaries. As Leela Gandhi notes, the foundations of the postcolonial nation state occurs at the moment when generic conformity is established between anti colonial nationalism and European imperialism. In that sense the postcolonial, in its temporal and spatial understandings celebrates anti colonial nationalisms as the act of resistance and overlooks the internal orthodoxies, injustices, silences and marginalisations. The conflicting claims of nationalism and feminism have always troubled postcolonialists. Feminists on the other hand collide with postcolonials on the understandings of the 'third world women' and the overruling of gender hierarchies in racialised spaces. This absence of the acknowledgement of 'difference' in feminist understandings of global oppressions of women was brought to the fore by Chandra Talpade Mohanty as she persuasively drew attention to discursive colonialism in the production of the 'Third World Woman' as singular monolithic subject in some (Western) feminist texts. But as we now know, difference is not just between the West and non West but within these geographies and temporalities as well and any universalism is discursive violence that writes out histories and mutes voices. How do we account for these gendered differences and universalisms in the violence embedded in postcolonial state structures? Whose voices remain unheard in postcolonial states and the multiple forms of violence they embody and experience? To address some of these issues, a two day workshop was jointly convened by the School of Social Sciences, Monash University and the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne on 24 and 25 November 2014. Drawing on critical postcolonial and feminist approaches together with empirical case studies from countries such as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Congo and Ireland the workshop engaged with the ontological formations of the postcolonial state and its capacity and willingness to adapt to the global and local contestations around its identity and purpose. Violence in its multiple forms remained the overarching