ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author focuses on the discordance of race and gender within colonised cultures with a view to elucidating some of the issues surrounding the contiguities and oppositions between feminist and postcolonial theory. Until recently, feminist and postcolonial theory have followed what Bill Ashcroft et al. call ‘a path of convergent evolution’. In its more irritable moments, then, postcolonial theory tends to regard liberal feminism as a type of neo-Orientalism. In the course of its quarrel with liberal feminism, post-colonialism—as people have been arguing—fails conclusively to resolve the conflicting claims of ‘feminist emancipation’ and ‘cultural emancipation’. A productive area of collaboration between postcolonialism and feminism presents itself in the possibility of a combined offensive against the aggressive myth of both imperial and nationalist masculinity. Ashis Nandy elides the story of Indian nationalism’s derivative masculinity to tell an altogether different—and considerably more interesting—story about dissident androgyny.
