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GRR Seminar 8th March 2002, Rm 336, 13:00-14:30 ‘truth-telling’ narratives? feminism and ‘third world women’ Amina Yaqin South Asia Department, SOAS Chandra Mohanty in her seminal essay ‘Under Western Eyes’ has alerted us to the unequal power dynamic of a universal feminism which speaks on behalf of sisters in struggle from all parts of the world. In the Zed Press ‘Women in the Third World’ series, authored by feminists, ‘who identify themselves as culturally or geographically from the west’, Mohanty assesses a ‘colonialist move’ in feminism which is enunciated from the west and claims to speak for the East (Mohanty 1994: 199). The problem in Mohanty’s analysis, as identified by Sara Suleri, is that it is premised on the politics of authenticity (Suleri 1994: 247). Suleri’s own recommendation for postcolonial feminism is to focus on ‘lived experience’. Putting theory into practice, she points to Pakistani women and their encounter with Islamic law as an example of how lived experience may be determined by external factors outside autobiography. I will argue that while both these arguments offer useful insights for decoding the agenda of an international feminism they also advocate an autobiographical activist third world feminist narrative as the ideal solution. To problematise the issue, I will refer in detail to the poetry, autobiography, and travel narratives of the Pakistani Urdu writer Kishwar Naheed. Naheed’s poetry and prose is caught between two worlds, her authentic voice as a Pakistani woman and her broader outlook as an international feminist. In Naheed’s own words her story has been layered with different voices such as Malaqa, Layla, Zarin Taj, Mira Bai, Sana, Yashodra, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and many others. Her central theme remains the search for a feminist poetics for her community. Essentially her writing proffers a case for a pluralistic discourse of feminisms which cannot be tied to any one location or a singular authentic story. _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx