ABSTRACT
Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,”1 indirectly reaffirms what has been integral to that aspect of colonial discourse which addresses the split between Third World and white feminisms. This split had been intellectually, and in terms of group-action or global feminism, profoundly shocking to those of us who did not wish to privilege women’s differences in colonial hierarchical terms but rather to understand the complexity of subject/object distinctions in the post-colonial milieu by utilizing a universal value system. Here, I am referring to the kind of “universalism” problematized by Bessie Head in A Question of Power2 as well as in her collected letters, A Gesture of Belonging.3
