Women of the World
Social Education 67(1), pp. 47-50
A t the I ntersections :
A Postcolonialist Woman of Color
Considers Western Feminism
By Nina Asher
D
o you speak Spanish?” “Do you speak
English?” “But you speak perfect Eng-
lish!” “You have a British accent.” Huh?
I was bewildered when, as a newcomer to the
United States, I first encountered such questions
and comments. I do not speak Spanish, I had
always spoken English (along with other languag-
es spoken in India such as Kutchchi, Marathi,
Hindi, and Gujarati), and my accent is Indian
not British. Such encounters, over a decade ago,
as I was a beginning doctoral student in New
York City, created new layers of identity for
me. I began recognizing that, here in the United
States, based only on my appearance, I may be
variously construed as a Latina, an immigrant,
or a non-English speaker. And so, in New York
City, I began identifying myself as a “person of
color” and a “South Asian woman,” identities I
had not needed in India. Thus, I began recogniz-
ing the context-specific negotiation of my own
new identities.
Reuters/Juda Ngwenya
South African women celebrate the “Women’s Day” rally in Pretoria, August 9, 2000, in
honor of the “Women’s Day” group that marched to Union Buildings in 1956 to protest
against apartheid pass laws.
© 2003 National Council for the Social Studies
Prior to coming to the United States to pursue
doctoral studies, I had worked on educational
research and intervention projects focused on
certain marginalized groups in India. My inter-
est in working with underrepresented peoples,
combined with my emerging identification in the
United States with the Asian American popula-
tion, led me to write a dissertation in the area of
Asian American education. As my scholarship
evolved, I found myself expanding my horizons,
drawing on critical, theoretical perspectives to
write about identity, culture, representation, and
multiculturalism in education. The most recent
layer of my “scholarship identity” is reflected
There is no pure west and east. People, goods, ideas
and texts travel backwards and forwards across the
borderlands.
Chilla Bulbeck, Re-orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Postcolonial World
J a n u a r y / F e b r u a r y 2 0 0 3
47
in my writings, which bring postcolonial and
feminist perspectives to education.1 Indeed, my
identification as a “postcolonialist” is also per-
sonal. I was born in “postcolonial” India, and
yet the language I learned to think in, speak, read,
and write with the greatest ease was English. Yes,
it is ironic and it reflects the fact that processes
of decolonization are complicated by contradic-
tions. Born and raised in the “East,” I now teach
and write in the “West.” My scholarly critique
of issues related to race, class, gender, identity,
culture and so on is informed by my knowledge
and synthesis of both contexts.
I begin my article for this special issue of
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 6.
Social Education dedicated to “Teaching about
the Women of the World” with the brief sketch of
the evolution of my racial/ethnic and professional
identity in the United States for two main reasons.
First, I believe that by situating myself at the outset,
I offer the reader the opportunity to get to know
the writer—even if only slightly—behind the text.
And second, I wish to convey my experience of
various “intersections”—such as race, marginal-
ity, and geographic context, as well as intellectual
and scholarly endeavors—which I believe are sig-
nificant considerations in teaching, learning, and
writing about the “women of the [postcolonial]
world.” In the rest of the article, I “unpack” issues
related to “Western feminism” as seen through a
postcolonial, feminist lens by drawing on literature
to discuss key theoretical issues related to curricu-
lum and teaching, translating theory into practice
via my teaching of multiculturalism here, in the
“Deep South,” and considering implications for
practice at the K-12 level.
At the Intersections: Women of Color Speak
to Feminism
Movements and historical turning points—such
as the Indian independence movement, which
led to the end of British colonial rule in India in
1947, and the U.S. civil rights movement, which
brought issues of race and equity to the forefront
of national consciousness—are powerful signi-
fiers of collective efforts to end particular forms
of oppression. And although such movements are
associated with specific historical periods, the
efforts to address colonization, racial discrimi-
nation, and so on continued and evolved in the
decades that followed. Early feminist struggles,
which emerged in the United States in the wake of
the civil rights movement, focused on equal rights
for women as compared to men and, later, on
consciousness-raising. Feminism also addressed
gendered oppression based on sex and the con-
trol/exploitation of the female body. Even as
the feminist movement served to make women’s
voices and concerns audible, it came chiefly
from white, western women. Western women of
color and women from other parts of the world
remained marginalized. Their particular voices,
stories, and perspectives were missing.2
Over the past two decades, the writings of
women of color (such as Gloria Anzaldúa, bell
hooks, and Audre Lorde) and “third world
women” (such as Jacqui Alexander and Chandra
Mohanty) have addressed these absences. These
very widely cited writers and others like them
have contributed to the evolution of early femi-
nist discourses by speaking specifically from the
intersections of race, class, gender/sexuality, cul-
ture, and nationality. Recently, Professor Margaret
Crocco and I articulated a postcolonial feminist
framework in relation to representations of women
in social studies education. We argued that it is
necessary for curriculum and teaching practices
to reflect “the multiple, divergent, and dynamic
realities” pertaining to the lives of women of the
world.3 In this article, I draw on a postcolonial
critique of feminism to rethink curriculum and
teaching practices so that they are representative
of the diversity and difference we encounter in
present-day contexts of school and society. In
particular, I posit that educational discourses and
practices need to engage differences that students
and colleagues bring to the classroom; attend to
their particular stories; recognize that identities
and cultures are “fluid” and “hybrid” rather than
static/fixed; recognize that this is true not only of
“others” but also of the “self”; and engage in a self-
reflexive process that allows the multiple, evolving
identities, cultures, and representations to emerge
as a critical aspect of the educational process.
One of the key issues that postcolonialist
feminist writings raise is that women from dif-
ferent races, cultures, class backgrounds, and
communities cannot assume that their particular
struggles and privileges apply universally to all
women. Rather, they underscore that it is impor-
tant to recognize that the stories and struggles of
different women are shaped by their particular
social, historical, geographic, and cultural con-
texts. For instance, Audre Lorde, writing as a
black, lesbian feminist, critiques Mary Daly’s
book Gyn/Ecology in her essay4 “An Open Letter
to Mary Daly.” Lorde writes:
[I]t was obvious that you were dealing
with noneuropean women, but only as
victims and preyers upon each other. I
began to feel my history and my mythic
background distorted by the absence of
any images of my foremothers in power. .
. . To imply, however, that all women suf-
fer the same oppression simply because
we are women is to lose sight of the many
varied tools of patriarchy.5
Lorde’s incisive critique points out that
just as patriarchal discourses relegated women’s
voices to the margins, so have feminist writings by
white, western women excluded the perspectives
of women of color and non-European women.
Lorde suggests that by learning about the histo-
ries and listening to the stories of those who are
different from them, women can “develop tools
for using human difference as a springboard for
creative change.”6
Indeed, by encouraging students to share
their own stories and engage with the stories of
different others, teachers can foster dialog and
self-reflection in the classroom. This would
allow them to locate the multiple perspectives
that emerge at the “center” of the curriculum,
rather than as mere “add-ons” at the “margins.”
For instance, writing about third world women
and the politics of feminism, Chandra Mohanty
argues for “storytelling or autobiography (the
practice of writing) as a discourse of opposi-
tional consciousness and agency.”7 Further-
more, Mohanty adds that, in order to transform
oppressive discourses and practices effectively, it
is not enough to have stories of women of color
in circulation; it is also important to consider
how they are read, narrated, and heard. In her
1984 book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to  community norms,” she was called “Miss White
Center, bell hooks draws on her experiences as a
black woman scholar to address this issue in terms
of both feminism and curriculum:
When I entered my first women’s stud-
ies class at Stanford University in the
early 1970s, white women were reveling
S o c i a l E d u c a t i o n
48
in the joy of being together—to them it
was an important, momentous occasion.
I had not known a life where women had
not been together, where women had
not helped, protected, and loved one
another deeply. I had not known white
women who were ignorant of the impact
of race and class on their social status and
consciousness (Southern white women
often have a more realistic perspective
on racism and classism than women in
other areas of the United States.) I did
not feel sympathetic to white peers who
maintained that I could not expect them
to have knowledge of or understand the
life experiences of black women. Despite
my background (living in racially segre-
gated communities) I knew about the
lives of white women, and certainly no
white women lived in our neighborhood,
attended our schools, or worked in our
homes.8
Here, hooks echoes Lorde’s experience of
feeling the absence of her own history in the eyes
of white women who view their gendered reali-
ties as the “norm” for feminist discourse. Hooks
offers a nuanced analysis of feminism that takes
into consideration race, class, gender, and even
region. We learn that, for her, growing up as a black
woman in the segregated South, women expe-
riencing community and supporting each other
were the norm. Furthermore, we learn that, in
hooks’s experience, white women from the South
had a greater consciousness of the intersections
of race and class than did her peers at an elite
educational institution. Thus, we also learn that,
unlike her white peers, hooks was not able to relate
to the feminist discourse she encountered in the
university classroom, that this discourse did not
reflect her realities, and also that white women
themselves had different perspectives depending
on class and geographic context.
Even as hooks calls on white/western femi-
nism to break out of its Eurocentric frame, she
also says communities of color must engage in
self-reflexive critique. She recommends that
those who are “at the margins” be open to dif-
ferences within and without their community
and not lock themselves into stereotyping. For
instance, she notes that when she herself deviated
from the status quo, “from our segregated black
Girl.”9 Indeed, she suggests that the struggle for
deconstructing oppression “may begin within
one’s segregated, colonized community and
family.”10 Thus, we recognize that the work of
transforming oppressive social structures is both
external and internal. That is, even as those who
are at the “margins” critique the exclusionary per-
spectives of those who are at the “center,” they
also need to examine their own practices.
Such self-reflection is key to recognizing
that identities and cultures are complex, varied,
and fluid rather than uniform and static; indeed,
that differences exist not only across cultures
but also within a particular culture. For instance,
within the United States, being white and from the
Northeast is generally considered rather different
from being white and from the South in terms
of culture, speech, and race relations. In other
words, there is not a uniform culture of “white-
ness.” Indeed, as anthropologist Kirin Narayan
has written:
Given the multiplex nature of identity,
there will inevitably be certain facets of
self that join us up with the people we
study, other facets that emphasize our
difference. . . we [anthropologists] are
all incipiently bi- (or multi-) cultural in
that we belong to worlds both personal
and professional, whether in the field or
at home. While people with third world
allegiances, minorities, or women may
experience the tensions of this dual iden-
tity the most strongly, it is a condition
of everyone, even of that conglomerate
category termed “white men.”11
I believe that Narayan’s insightful analyses
are as relevant to educators as they are to anthro-
pologists. It is important for all educators—white
and “of color”—to recognize that they live “at the
intersections” of race, class, culture, and gender,
in dynamic contexts. By recognizing our own
multiple identities and roles in relation to our
diverse personal and professional contexts, we
can begin seeing and drawing on the differences
we encounter in our own lives.
Perhaps, then, the most important consid-
eration that postcolonialism offers to feminist
discourses is that hybrid, fluid identities and
cultures, and multiple perspectives, are not just
about “them,” the “other,” or “there/elsewhere.”
They are also about “us,” the “self,” and “here/at
home.” As Chilla Bulbeck writes in her book Re-
orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diver-
sity in a Postcolonial World, “The project is not
only about ‘them’ but also about ‘us,’ how we can
see ourselves differently by comparing our taken-
for-granted feminist precepts with the writing by
women from beyond the Anglophone west.”12
Bulbeck argues that upon closer examination, we
find that, while East and West are distinct from
each other by dint of their differences, they are
also linked by commonalities. For instance, she
points out that “Eastern” and “Western” women
are connected by struggles related to economic
inequalities and cultural representations. Fur-
thermore, she notes, “Within the west, both
indigenous women and diaspora women from
Asian and other so-called third world countries
have conducted a critique of the ‘whiteness’ of
western feminism. These women often produce
writing from the borderlands, work which reflects
their home in two cultures.”13 This, of course,
reflects the truth in the opening quote—there is
no pure west and east.
Indeed, according to Chicana writer Gloria
Anzaldúa, encounters with differences across cul-
tures and the struggles to negotiate them lead to a
mestiza consciousness—a consciousness of the
borderlands.14 Anzaldúa says it is through this
process of negotiating differences that we can get
past such binaries as East and West, female and
male, oppressor and oppressed, see ourselves
“on both shores at once” and, from there, move
toward new, hybrid spaces and identities.15 As my
brief autobiographical narrative at the beginning
of this article reveals, I can certainly relate. Of
course, today, I also recognize that I, like others
from former colonies, was located in, and identi-
fying and struggling with, two (or more) cultures in
my “home” country. The “West” was in me even
before I entered elementary school in Bombay.
Indeed, it was in the generations preceding me,
perhaps even more so. After all, they were the
ones schooled when the British still ruled India.
Perhaps we can learn the most if we recognize
that border crossings are both post- and pre-
modern.
In the next section I discuss how I address
issues of race, class, gender, culture, and geogra-
phy in terms of both self and other in the multi-
cultural education courses I teach.
Teaching Difference, Bringing It Home
Postcolonial feminism. And, the Deep South.
How can the twain intersect in productive ways?
That is the key question I have asked myself as
a postcolonialist feminist educator who teaches
courses in multiculturalism to future teachers in
Louisiana. I begin with the basic premise that
difference is not just “out there,” but rather, it is
also “right here.” And that in order to know and
understand the multiple “others,” we first need to
know and understand the multiple “selves.”
At the outset, I have my students research
their own stories and generate autobiographies
through a multicultural lens. Inevitably, students
find themselves discovering and tuning in to the
stories of difference and commonality that their
peers bring to the classroom. In one class discus-
sion about an article on Ebonics, some students
who were insisting on the importance of teaching
J a n u a r y / F e b r u a r y 2 0 0 3
49
only “standard” English paused when we talked
about the prejudice directed against “Southern”
accents in other parts of the country. The impor-
tance of understanding and accepting “difference”
came closer to home as the students recognized
that, in addition to race, geographic and cultural
contexts also influence how we speak and how
we perceive the speech of others. The analyses
became further nuanced when a student who was
originally from North Louisiana pointed out that
her speech differed from that of her peers who
were from South Louisiana.
In other instances, students discovered
differences in attitudes toward race across gen-
erations within their families; they also heard the
stories of peers who had Jewish ancestry (given
the overwhelmingly “Christian” context of the
South) or gay relatives. Once, several months
after the course had ended, I ran into one of my
undergraduate students, “Lisa,” at a local cof-
fee shop. As we talked about the class, Lisa told
me that she had struggled during the session on
how to address lesbian and gay issues in school.
Indeed, Lisa said that she remained troubled by
this matter given her religious beliefs, and yet,
as a professional, she wanted to care for all of
her students equally. Of course, I was delighted
that a student remained engaged with the class
months after it had ended and that she felt com-
fortable enough to speak openly with me about
her struggle. I told her so. I reminded Lisa that
during that particular session, an older student,
who was typically quiet, had bravely spoken up
about her own process of accepting her son’s
homosexuality. We discussed how sexuality is
not just a theoretical issue, but that it may well
affect the lives of one or more students or col-
leagues in very real ways. Finally, I pointed out to
Lisa that, by continuing to reflect on the issue, she
was attempting to “stay on both shores at once,”
as Anzaldúa would recommend. By struggling to
reconcile her personal and professional beliefs,
Lisa was trying to arrive at a resolution that would
work for her particular pedagogical practice at
the same time she was developing her skills as a
reflective practitioner.
In encouraging my students to see themselves
as emerging reflective practitioners, I inevitably
provide them with examples of others who have
had the courage to rethink their own practice.
For instance, the students write brief journal
responses to the vignettes in Vivian Paley’s book
White Teacher.16 I believe that Paley’s candid
confrontation of her struggles with issues of race,
class, and culture as a classroom teacher serves as
a model for students as they take their first self-
reflexive steps in that direction.
 Overall, I work to construct a dialogical
pedagogy through which future teachers develop
their ability to engage with the narratives of both
self and other. This process allows teachers to
gain insight into the rich resources offered by
the multiple perspectives, hybrid cultures, and
fluid identities that they and their students bring
to the classroom. It is through such a critical,
self-reflexive approach that teachers are able to
engage differences in productive ways in the oft-
bewildering, global context of school and society
today. G
Notes
1. See, for instance, Nina Asher, “Beyond ‘Cool’
and ‘Hip’: Engaging the Question of Research and
Writing as Academic Self-Woman of Color Other,”
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in
Education 14 (2001): 1-12; and Nina Asher and
Margaret Smith Crocco, “(En)gendering Multicul-
tural Identities and Representations in Education,”
Theory and Research in Social Education 29
(2001): 129-151.
2. See Chilla Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Femi-
nisms: Women’s Diversity in a Postcolonial World
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
and Chris Weedon, Feminism, Theory, and the
Politics of Difference (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell,
1999) for detailed, thought-provoking discussions
on these issues.
3. Asher and Crocco, 132.
4. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom, Calif.: at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.
Crossing Press, 1984), 66-71. Audre Lorde origi- Her research interests include the areas of
nally wrote the letter to Mary Daly in 1979. After multiculturalism, postcolonial and feminist
waiting four months for a reply, she made the letter perspectives, and Asian American education.
public. She can be reached via e-mail at nasher1@
5. Ibid., 67. lsu.edu.
6. Ibid., 115.
7. Chandra Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle:
Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,”
in Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Tor-
res, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991): 39.
8. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Cen-
ter (Boston, Mass.: South End, 1984), 11.
9. Ibid., 20.
10. Ibid., 151.
11. Kirin Narayan, “How Native Is a “Native” Anthro-
pologist?,” American Anthropologist 95 (1993):
671-686.
12. Bulbeck, 2.
13. Ibid., 2.
14. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The
New Mestiza (San Francisco, Calif.: Aunt Lute,
1987).
15. Ibid., 78.
16. Vivian Paley, White Teacher (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard, 1979).
Nina Asher is assistant professor in the
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
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