ABSTRACT
This essay draws from seminal works by historians since the 1990s that bring the histories of feminism and decolonization into dialogue. It takes literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) as an important provocation for subsequent historical work. Current summons to “decolonize” knowledge, history, the academy, and other discussions or institutions provides one frame, which gives particular attention to what some have called the “first wave” of decolonization: the series of South and North American countries that freed themselves from Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, and France during the so-called Atlantic Revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Key developments in these histories challenge the claims that anchor decolonial theory, even as they also demonstrate that the exclusion of women from political life was foundational to American developments, as it was concurrently in Europe. Developments in India, fin-de-siècle Turkey and Japan, Algeria, and Nigeria all receive extended attention, as histories that illuminate wider developments through the so-called era of decolonization, in the mid-twentieth century.
