If I had to parallel M.I.A.’s artistic assault on Western representations of ghettoized “third world” women and men with the work of one academic thinker and activist, I would have to pick Chandra Talpade Mohanty.

Her landmark essay, “Under Western Eyes,” takes its title from Joseph Conrad’s 1911 eponymous novel, which articulated the shortcomings and downright failures of revolutionary social movements.  Both similar and different than Conrad’s novel, Mohanty criticizes the eurocentrism of revolutionary Western feminist discourse but also offers new strategies toward the recognition and re-representation of global, historically-specific feminisms.  Her article, like M.I.A.’s music, attempts to articulate multiple and divergent feminisms from across the “third world,” eventually proving that it is both futile and counterproductive to impose any sense of unity on the experiences and actions of women across the globe.

Mohanty argues that Western feminist discourse tends to suggest that there is one “monolithic ‘third world woman’,” and that this “third world woman” exists in a binary relationship with the “First World Woman.”  The use of this Cold War era discursive binary not only essentializes women and feminist movements around the globe, but also erroneously supports the notion that there is one unified Western feminist movement.  While scholars like Hazel Carby and bell hooks deconstructed this notion of a monolithic Western feminism from the perspectives of people of color in American and British contexts, Mohanty deconstructed the notion of a monolithic Third World Woman from the perspectives of women and cultures throughout the globe, constituting her representation of each from within their own particular social, historic, and political contexts.  She foreshadowed and perhaps shaped the work of global hip hop artists who, like M.I.A., would create albums that hit similar notes.

Mohanty’s article also points toward the future of global feminisms, insisting that a fresh look at the specific contexts of women from across the globe will not only eliminate both sides of the debilitating First World/Third World binary, but also allow for much needed global coalitions to grow—coalitions that take into consideration the disparate situations of women on every continent.  Perhaps similar themes will emerge on M.I.A.’s next record.  So what exactly are these notes and themes that can be heard both in textbooks and on stereos?  I’ll give it a go…

First, Mohanty explains the sticky aspects of recent Western feminist discourse, drawing attention to its participation in the construction of “the cultural discourse of what is called the ‘third world’.”  She argues that Western feminists participated in the structural domination of the third world through their “suppression … of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question,” or through their ignorance of the specific contexts of supposedly third world women.  Instead of investigating these specific contexts, Western scholars and feminists tended to impose their own concerns and contexts upon women of the third world, doing exactly the kind of thing that got M.I.A. angry in her interview with Pitchfork Media.  However, whereas Western feminists were careful to describe their grievances and agency (or power to change their situations), they often imposed similar grievances on third world women but failed to ascribe any agency to these women.  In other words, Western feminists used third world women as back-up singers who quietly echoed the lead singers.  Mohanty argues that this process of essentialization was tantamount to colonization, in that it participated in the silencing and oppression of women throughout the globe and simultaneously bolstered the power of Western men and women.  This “ethnocentric universalism,” according to Mohanty, was the product of the analytic assumptions and methodologies of Western feminism.

The first assumption is the belief that all women have similar concerns, regardless of their class, race, culture, age, and gender ideology system in which they live.  In other words, all women share a similar oppressor and oppression.  Thus, when Western feminists talked about third world women, they were quick to see them as exploited, powerless, and victimized.  Third world women were held up as evidence of the assertion that women were indeed universally oppressed by men, and that they needed to be liberated by the revolutionary ideas of Western feminism.  Although the apparent oppressor might have had many different names in Western feminist discourse (colonialists, the Arab family structure, Islamic codes), these oppressors were represented as being fairly homogeneous and reflective of the white upper-class Anglo-American men who were considered to be the central oppressors of white middle/upper-class Anglo-American women.  Most western feminists and scholars looked into the faces of women across the globe and only saw images of themselves.  Mohanty argues that the solution to this misrepresentation of third world women is a re-theorizing and re-interpretation, from within the specific context of each situation, of the oppression and resistance of women.  Only after Westerm feminists and scholars understand the specific oppressors, oppressions, and power that shapes the specific situation of a group of women can they offer assistance or form coalitions for global change.

Secondly, Mohanty takes issue with the methodology of Western feminist scholarship, criticizing the tools that Western feminists used to establish and prove their erroneous generalizations about third world women.  First, Western feminists tended to find one symbol, such as the veil, and quickly interpret it to be a sign of oppression.  Without paying attention to the specific historical and cultural values attributed to the veil within diverse communities (often separated by thousands of miles), they simply used the large number of veil-wearers to prove the “fact” that millions of women were oppressed my Muslim men.  Similar to this misleading “arithmetic method,” concepts such as labor, family, marriage, and patriarchy were often seen through a Western lens.  Although some descriptions of third world situations might have been accurate, the analysis was often eurocentric.  Once again, they were seeing themselves in the eyes of millions of women across the globe.  Because these throngs of women were seen as having little power over their situations, they were discursively excluded by Western feminists from their own attempts at “liberation” and deemed incapable of writing their own counter-histories.  Obviously, women like M.I.A. were and are doing just the opposite, talking back to Western generalizations and ideologies with a sense of purpose and power.

But members of the media and music industry would not easily let go of their preconceived notions of M.I.A.  As she was being nominated for both a Grammy and an Oscar for “Paper Planes,” M.I.A. started to be labeled a terrorist due to her Tamil ethnicity.  This brings up the other stereotype of third world women.  If they’re not being shown as completely powerless and victimized, then they’re probably being falsely exposed as being full of irrational hatred and violence—in other words, a “terrorist.”  Speaking back to those who called her a terrorist, M.I.A. has been using her fame not only to challenge representations of Tamils and call attention to the possibility of genocide in Sri Lanka, but also to challenge the discourse on terrorism.  She touches on these issue with great intelligence and clarity in a recent interview with Tavis Smiley.  Check it out, and in a few days we’ll turn our discussion back to M.I.A., the situation in Sri Lanka, and terrorism.

I was working on a new series of posts about global hip hop star M.I.A., when I realized that I still have a lot of packing to do before I leave for Thailand.  So, this series will be postponed for a while.  Once I’m in Bangkok, I’ll try to finish and post the series.

Meanwhile, check out the series on the financial crisis.  Some intelligent people have made some smart remarks about the topic.  Also, many new links have been added to the blogroll.  Please check those out too, especially “The Living Consequences.”

Thanks,

Ed

I’ve been absent from this blog for too long!  Luckily, my absence has got me thinking about the idea of absence and how one hip hop artist in particular has also thought about the idea of absence.  Enjoy.

The following types of people might have objections to this post:

1.) If you do not believe that hip hop artists are creators, consumers, and connoisseurs of contemporary critical theory and philosophy.

2.)  If you believe that anyone bellow the age of 25–especially one without an M.A. or PhD–should not discuss critical theory and philosophy.

Although you might fall into one of these categories, I hope that you will read on and, more importantly, make your presence felt by adding a comment or two to this post.  As for myself, I will try, as I write, to think not only about those people who will read and possibly enjoy this post, but also about those who will read it and find it out of touch, lacking focus, or simply untenable.

After all, this blog is not only constituted by those who read it and write it, but also by those who do not read it and do not write it.  It is as much about the presence of certain readers and writers as it is about the absence of other readers and writers.  Although this blog is dedicated to a discussion of hip hop, it is always already dedicated to a discussion of everything that is not hip hop.  Why?  Because it is impossible to define hip hop without thinking of everything that is not hip hop.

Therefore, everything that is not hip hop is actually here in this blog, pushed away into the background, seemingly absent but actually imperturbably present.  For example, we can’t identify someone as a hip hopper without ignoring or covering up the idea that that person is also a student, an American, a Chicagoan, a man, or an entrepreneur.  Stuart Hall, an eminent cultural studies scholar, provides us with an even more eloquent example.  Discussing British identity in a (post)colonial world, Hall argues that one

"Everything I'm not made me everything I am"

cannot be British without being Indian, Chinese, and Carribbean.  He uses a cup of tea to illustrate his point.  Although we might think that having a cup of tea is a marker of British identity, we also need to remember that the tea leaves are probably from India, and the cup is probably made out of porcelain from China, and the sugar at the bottom of the cup of tea was probably harvested by a worker in one of the cane fields of the West Indies.  We might identify the person enjoying the cup of tea in London as being British, and thus push all other identities into the background, but that British identity would not be perceivable if we didn’t believe that all those other identities were absent.  Of course, the Indian, Chinese, and Caribbean elements are present however much we tend to ignore them.  They may seem absent, but they are in fact critically present.

With the caveat that I do not wield an extensive knowledge of philosophy or critical theory, I think that it is safe to say that Jacques Derrida, one of the “founders” of Deconstruction, was the loudest and perhaps first scholar to voice the idea that absences are always present.  And who is the only artist in the music industry, as far as I know, that has been able to creatively build on this concept and apply it to his own career and music?  Kanye West.  (Please post comments about other artists who also feel the presence of absences!)

Contrary to the title of West’s track “Everything I Am,” Kanye actually uses the song to define himself by discussing everything that he is not.  He explains that he’ll never have the sex appeal of singers like Beyonce or be as stylish as mink-wearing artists like Killa Cam and Will.Iam.  Directly speaking to his audience, West wisely and humbly asks his listeners to define who he is: “Let me know if you feel it man / cause everything I’m not made me everything I am.”  Kanye knows that he cannot control his own identity and that, in fact, the public’s perception of him plays a crucial role in the constitution of his identity.  This idea that we do not control who we are goes against the grain of conventional American wisdom and, on a more local level, the idea that hip hop artists are self-made men and women who rise to the top because of their individual talent and work ethic.  Like his mentor Jay-Z, Kanye West knows that many things that are not under his control and seemingly absent from his performances–from the circumstances surrounding his upbringing to the hip hop artists that came before him and shaped his style–affect who he is today and what he has been able to accomplish.  Although some artists may be either unconscious of these absences or unwilling to discuss them, West forces them out of the shadows, pushing these absences into the spotlight for all to see.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss “Everything I Am” in more detail, analyzing the specific absences that West decides to rap about.  We will also need to ask ourselves both why he chooses these specific absences and what other absences lurk beneath the surface of the song.  In the meantime, feel free to make your absence felt by commenting with questions, concerns, and thoughts.

Listen to the song.

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