Gender and Colonial Knowledge of the Other

1. Gender and ColonialKnowledge of the Other “Given the role that women have played in colonial knowledge of the other, it should be no surprise that matters pertaining to gender have been central to the Chinese state’s successive imaginaries of modernity” (xiv).

11. Characteristics of Modernity/ies • The idea of modernity grew and spread through processes of colonialism and become integral to the nation-state system that emerged. • It entails a narrative of progress, a break from an “irrational” tradition and a teleological unfolding, in which we always overcome and surpass that which came before. • Modernity is put into effect through science and management projects, the development of new social institutions (e.g. prisons, hospitals, factories, schools), and new ways of organizing people.

12. Understandings of modernity Rofel is “writing against” Modernity arose discretely in the West and then was simply mimicked in the rest of the world. Modernity arises autonomously within nation-states. Modernity leads to the same practices and effects everywhere one finds it. Through globalization, modernity makes the world homogenous. Understandings of modernity Rofel proposes Modernity is a story people tell themselves (an imaginary) about themselves in relation to others. The experiences of people caught up by modernity’s “enchantment” do not always fit smoothly and cleanly into the narrative. These disjunctures reveal the powerful ways in which modernity operates. The discrepancies between different versions of modernity provide a way of challenging its power. Other Modernities

13. Imaginary (n.) • Synonyms: narrative, yearning • Lisa Rofel brings together ideas of national “imagined communities,” of “social imaginaries” that shape identity, and of the psychoanalytic “imaginary.” With this term, she want “to emphasize the powerful hold of modernity, its phantasmic qualities, its displaced desires, and its necessarily dialogical constitution” (285). • For more on her definition, see footnote 2 on page 285.

15. Cohort • Groups who developed “a sense of identification in coming of age through particular political movements and state regimes--the early years of Liberation, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao era” (10). • Cohort analysis highlights the dynamics of temporality and history. • Rather than analyzing a singular moment of cohort formation, Rofel emphasizes the reformation of cohorts as they live through diverse historical periods.

20. Subaltern • Originally a term applied to subordinates in military hierarchies. • Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Diaries writings about hegemony, covertly adopted the term (as of way of encrypting his writing to get it past prison censors). He used it to signify a non-unified “proletarian,” those whose voices could not be heard as a result of being structurally written out of the capitalist bourgeois narrative. • The Subaltern Studies Group later picked up the term from Gramsci in order to locate and re-establish a “voice” or collective agency in postcolonial India for those denied access to representation by colonialism. • Gayatri Spivak, one of the group’s members, wrote a well-known and debated article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In it she argues that efforts to give collective voice to a subaltern group inevitably run in to the problem of creating dependence upon intellectuals to “speak for” the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. • Rofel uses the term to refer to “a category of subjectivity that represents the underside of power” (3-4).