ABSTRACT
The Irish poet Eavan Boland has written of her need to combat ‘the association of the feminine and the national—and the consequent simplification of both’ (1990, 24). Such an ‘association of the feminine and the national’ has prevailed not only with regard to Irish and European expressions of nationality, but also in a wide range of colonial and anti-colonial discourses including India, Africa, Australia and Canada. Over the past decade, discourses of nationalism and gender and the interaction between them have been the subject of a number of conferences and books (see especially Parker et al., 1992, and Nasta, 1991), but these books and papers tend to generalize on the basis of one nation’s experience, or to assume that the manifestations of nationalism are specific only to that particular geographical area. Thus Ashis Nandy (1983) draws upon the experience of India to argue that colonial and anti-colonial discourses generally tended to narrow concepts of sexuality and set up a sharp dichotomy between an aggressive warrior masculinity and a submissive, passive femininity as the normal gender roles. There are indeed many similarities between gendered expressions of nationality and race in different geographical areas, but also significant differences which relate in the specific cultures and histories of both the colonized and the colonizer. This essay seeks to compare constructions of Irish and African women within a gendered colonial and anticolonial discourse (with specific reference to Mother Ireland and Mother Africa and the sexual dichotomies set up within such discourse). Such a comparison may allow us to see more clearly the circumstances and political relations which reinforce associations of the feminine, the national, and the racial, and thus to combat the consequent simplification of each.
