Delbello - Shahot

This week’s readings deal with diaspora studies and the work of women in the so-called non-Western settings. In her introduction to Talking Visions Ella Shahot focuses on how to be an activist and a scholar, and escape and the same time the Eurocentric narratives of victimology “that reduces African or Asian cultures and women to such practices, while muting or marginalizing African or Asian agency and organizing (p.9)” and particularly, she tries to “transcend the narrow and often debilitating confines of identity politics on favor of a multicultural feminist politics of identification, affiliation, and social transformation.”

Thus Shahot tries to disrupt the hegemonic narrations of victimology or, if we want to use another term, the discourses of power generated around the reified category of “Third World” scholars. In attempting to overcome this narration that usually recreates, subtly and indirectly, the false dualism between tradition and modernity, she articulates that she decided to use the term “multicultural feminism” as opposed to “Third World feminism,” to escape Eurocentric narratives that rebuild the colonial discourses of a First and a Third World, of a dialectic of master and slave, of perennial recognition.

She also describes how the notion of resistance has been subjected to a shift, from a more unitary subject to a more polarized and postmodern one. She argues that multicultural feminism would serve the goal of challenging Eurocentric ordering of women’s cultures.

I think she makes a very interesting and urgent point. It’s connected to many other writers we have read over the course of this semester, especially the notion of differance and how to engage methodologically in a world that reifies new social categories every day. It’s a very fresh approach to question of identities, which many sociology articles could use to question how the system co-opts any attempts to resist it.

My question is if using the term multicultural is a good idea, given the connotation it has with liberal capitalist types of narrations, and also, how do we avoid the reification that leads us to fixed categories? Is the notion of negation still a useful tool to dismantle and decolonize Eurocentric categories of women?