Decolonizing Feminisms

Perhaps the greatest challenge to feminism in recent decades has emerged from the Black or Third World women's movement, which charges that the work of White middle-class feminists is often complicit with the agendas of White supremacy and Anglo-Saxon imperialism. In "Decolonializing Feminisms" Laura Donaldson's analysis aims to show how the oppositional stances of `First' versus `Third' world, and `traditional' versus `postmodern' feminists, can be brought into a more supportive relationship. Donaldson places contemporary theoretical debates about reading, writing, and the politics of identity, within the context of historical colonialism. Her readings of the work of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, and such films as "A Passage to India", reveal the subtle inter-relationships of gender, race, class, religion and sexual practice.