ABSTRACT
One of the major 'contact zones' of post-colonial theory has concerned the practice and politics of ethnography, the study and representation of cultures and, historically, 'races'. Kumari Jayawardena in her book Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World points out that feminist struggles for emancipation were in many cases acted out against and mobilized during the nationalist fight for identity and independence. Giddens sees globalization as 'the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa'. Gilroy argues that diaspora provides a way of understanding modernity and cultural identities. Post-structuralism's emphasis on language at the expense of history has been interpreted as yet another denial of the realities of colonialism. Discourses of nationalism and gender cut across each other in the most elementary way in the pervasive trope of nation-as-woman.
