In the second half of the nineteenth century, artists and activists travelled to Algeria, taking with them ideas about women, nation and race. In the colonial theatre, as in debates over slavery, they defined themselves by categorising others and by understanding difference in terms of race and ethnicity. Feminist

involvement in abolition is well known. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's writings on slavery, prompted by a visit to the southern states of America in 1857 and 1858, were published in The English T#man's Journal, sometimes in tandem with features on Algeria.6 Writing to Bodichon during her short period as editor, Emily Davies remarked, 'I don't think I should be afraid to insert an anti-South article. If we exist for anything surely it is to fight against slavery, of negro as well as other, women.,7

In a complex passage Spivak explores the links between subject formation, activism and imperialism:

The first is domestic-society-through-sexual-reproduction cathected as 'companionate love'; the second is the imperialist project cathected as civil-society-through-social mission. II

Not so much an oppositional 'other', Algeria seeped into mid-century feminism, putting pressures on campaigning, discourse and practice. Polarised divisions between (near) east and west, coloniser and colonised will be of little assistance in coming to terms with the connections between Algeria, then a French colony, and the women's movement in Britain. Jacques Derrida's writings on the 'logic of the supplement' provide a way of approaching these often oblique, tangential and tensile relations. Dispensing with the arguments that meaning is produced through binary opposition in which one term is pitted against another, Derrida proposes that meaning is produced through difJ"france, endlessly proliferating, continually deferred. The 'logic of the supplement' is a textual movement which destabilises and unsettles. Alluding to the double meaning in French of supplement as addition and replacement, Derrida writes in Dissemination that the supplement adds to and displaces the meanings in play, so loosening a structure of meaning achieved through binary oppposition. But more than this, the supplement is dangerous precisely because its textual movement is one of violence, fracture and interruption: 'Why is the supplement dangerous?' he asks. 'Its slipperiness steals it away from the simple alternative between presence and absence. That is the danger.' In intervening, pushing in/between, adding to and displacing, the supplement is a movement of violence, as Derrida's description with its suggestions of house-breaking, stealth and robbery emphasises. Derrida writes of

that dangerous supplement that breaks into the very thing that would have liked to be able to do without and which allows itself to be simultaneously cut into, violated, filled and replaced, completed by the very trace through which the present augments itself in the act of disappearing into it.12