From the Antipodes

by

Laura Severin

North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC

Review of:
Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space. By Radhika Mohanram. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.

Copyright © 2000 by Laura Severin, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. Copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.

  1. In Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space, Radhika Mohanram returns to the tense dialogue between Rashmi Bhatnagar, Lola Chatterjee, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, and Gayatri Spivak in "The Post-colonial Critic," where Spivak resists her Indian countrywomen's attempts to divide her from them as a Westerner. Mohanram's work mediates between now-absent parties by suggesting that the postcolonial critic is necessarily involved in the "double project of empowering her own identity while simultaneously engaging in the deconstruction of the logic of identity" (196). She grants the importance of locations and placements, so central to the arguments of Bhatnagar, Chatterjee, and Rajan, while at the same time complicating the meaning of place, so key to Spivak. Through an examination of theory from both Northern and Southern hemispheres, as well as antipodal texts constructed by women, she skillfully locates a third path between essentialist notions of space and the restiveness of a postcolonial theory that can forget the sexism and racism inherent in theories of boundary crossing.

  2. In her book's first section, Mohanram traces the meaning of the black body and the female body through many Western theoretical texts, revealing that these bodies are characteristically seen as rooted to their place of origin. To be white, on the other hand, has meant that one can, theoretically anyway, free one's self of body and place. When postcolonial theory delights in boundlessness, Mohanram implies, it ignores its own embeddedness in colonial practices. In Chapter One, "The Cartography of Bodies," she uses Frantz Fanon's anger in Black Skin, White Masks to critique texts of Lévi-Strauss, Crosby and Merleau-Ponty for their embodiment of blackness and their simultaneous disembodiment of whiteness; they characterize the white settler as mobile, while marking the black body as static and immobile. In Chapter Two, "The Embodiment of Blackness," she uses Fanon again to point out that Locke and Freud posit white consciousness outside history and politics, leaving blacks and women mired in social and political forces. In Chapter Three, "Women-body-nation-space," she contrasts Frantz Fanon's "Algeria Unveiled" with Marie-Aimée Hélie-Lucas' interview "Bound and Gagged by the Family Code" in order to illustrate that women are disembodied and desexualized within the nation.

  3. Having traced the binary oppositions of a Western theory that links whiteness and maleness with transcendence and blackness and femaleness with place, Mohanram goes on in Section Two to examine texts by both aboriginal and white women of the Antipodes, revealing the ways in which both are embedded in the histories of the places that became Australia and New Zealand. Together, this diverse array of texts points out the historical dimensions of place and the ways in which racial histories are complexly interwoven. In Chapter Four, "The Memory of Place," Mohanram looks at two versions of Donna Awatere's Maori Sovreignty as constructing a Maori people through photographs and text in order to maintain "first people status" and create a bicultural (rather than multicultural) New Zealand. Through this text, she shows that the Maori are not static but are actively reshaping their identity in a contemporary context. In Chapter Five, "Place in My Place," Mohanram examines Sally Morgan's autobiography to discuss how aboriginals and whites share space and history in ways that cannot be separated, despite colonial attempts to do so. In Chapter Six, "Britannia's Daughter," Mohanram explores letters of white female settlers to illustrate that British women's attitudes to race should be read within the context of their lack of subjectivity within the nation.

  4. Radhika Mohanram's Black Body is an incredibly rich book that draws from a broad array of sources to assert the importance of the body and place in the building of identities, without suggesting that these identities are unchanging or static. Her portrait is an important corrective to feminist postcolonial theory in that it points out that a nomadic position is available to only an elite few: "The literal aspect of nomadism -- the ease and the right to mobility-is reserved for women with strong passports. Women with weak passports are normally confined within their borders" (82). Her portrait of indigenous societies as creators of their identities, albeit within an oppressor culture, is also valuable in that it locates agency and adaptability within these communities. Mohanram's book reveals that West and East; settler and native; white male body and female black body are implicated with each other in ways that complicate and undo simple difference, as well as simplistic notions of place.

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