E3W Literature | University of Texas

Ketu Katrak

The Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World

Rutgers University Press, 2006

291 pages

$25.95

Reviewed by Naminata Diabate

Ketu Katrak’s goals are clear from the opening pages of her monograph, The Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World. She writes, “My project is to name sexuality as the arena where patriarchal control is exerted most distinctively over the female body” and ar­gues that despite tragic and negative conclusions—madness, death, suicide, other forms of social exclusion and un-be­longing—in women’s texts, it is important to recognize the strategic use of those same female bodies, often the only available avenue for resistance. Although I agree with the au­thor’s reading of the duality around the female body, I take issue with the second rationale for the book, that existing scholarship approaches female sexuality and the body from sociological and anthropological perspectives, disregarding third world women’s primary texts. As an Africanist, I point to studies such as the edited collection Body, Sexuality, and Gender: Versions and Subversions in African Literatures, Volume 1 (2001), and Florence Stratton’s Contemporary African Lit­erature and the Politics of Gender (1994) that attempt to ana­lyze female sexuality and the body from literary perspectives.

The Politics of the Female Body is notable for its comparative scope and its postcolonial reading strategies. With regard to its comparative nature, the book explores the works of fe­male writers and activists from English-speaking spaces such as parts of Africa, India, and the Caribbean. As the author ar­gues, the experience of colonialism resulted in creating simi­lar material realities for the colonized inhabiting seemingly unrelated geographical spaces. Katrak gives as an example the exiling effect of English education on the postcolonial female body—whether it be from Africa, India, or the Caribbean.

The book’s second significant contribution concerns the deployment, as a methodological framework, of what the author terms “participatory research.” Using Gayatri Spivak’s warning against the museumization of native cultures, Katrak adequately critiques the problematic di­vorce between postcolonial studies as practiced in the US academy and the material realities of third world writ­ers and peoples. To bridge the gap between activism on the ground and theorizing in the academy, the author en­gages in inter-articulating grassroots activities in the post­colonial spaces and the theories in libraries. To further ground her methodology, Katrak cites Barbara Harlow’s suggestion “of theory as strategy, to make academic theoriz­ing relevant for social change issues in third world areas.”

Katrak attempts to expand the parameters of what is con­sidered “literary,” such as novels, short stories, plays, and essays, to include oral and expressive materials. The oral and expressive materials she brings into play are as diverse as activist pamphlets, street theatre materials, songs, oral testimonies, occasional publications, and magazines. The inclusion of non-traditional literary materials constitutes an obvious political intervention against the reification of rigid boundaries between the literary and the non-literary.

The five chapters of The Politics of the Female Body pay “attention to the small acts of subversion and resistance that women undertake from within circumscribed spa­tial boundaries” to account for their subject formation. In other words, Katrak describes what she terms “passive agency,” a phrase borrowed from Eve Sedgwick. The study explores works of writers such as Kamala Das, Anita De­sai, Tsitsi Dangaremba, Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, Erna Brodber, Merle Hodge, and Buchi Emecheta among others.

The first chapter, “Theorizing a Politics of the Female Body: Language and Resistance,” insightfully makes the case for theorizing a politics of the body, which Katrak defines as the demystification of censored expressions of female so­cial roles (daughter, wife, mother) that “reinforce control over women’s bodies.” The section conceptualizes what Katrak frames as the “internalized exile” of the postcolo­nial female body. Katrak argues that colonialism and in­digenous patriarchy led colonial and postcolonial female bodies to be disconnected and estranged from themselves. The disconnection finds an expression in women’s col­laboration and consent in their subjugation. I will prob­lematize Katrak’s statement by arguing that to consider the exiling successful may be to ignore women’s resilience and their “passive agency,” which she argued before.

However, the internalized exile paradigm later serves Katrak to explicate in chapter three, the most interesting chapter, the ways in which English education wrongly affected fe­male bodies. “English Education Socializing the Female Body: Cultural Alienations within the Parameters of Race, Class, and Color” demonstrates that colonialist education with its attendant racial and cultural superiority ideol­ogy alienates women from their native languages, cultural roles, and physicality. Yet as Katrak writes, “English educa­tion provides particularly contradictory empowerments for women—both benefiting them and rendering them outsid­ers from their bodies, families, and communities.” English education, though alienating, provides women with means of economic independence from their husbands and families.

The second chapter, “Indigenous Third World Female Tradi­tions of Resistance: A Recuperation of Herstories,” excavates historical examples of pre-colonial and colonial women’s use of the body (voice, silence, reproductive activities, and mili­tancy) to resist domination and British colonial practices such as taxation. Frantz Fanon, Chandra Mohanty, and Jac­qui Alexander provide the author with theoretical grounds to engage in recuperating the past. The section lists women like the warrior-woman Ni of the Caribbean, Rani de Jhansi of India, and the spirit-medium Nehanda of Zimbabwe among others and practices such as “sitting on a man,” in Ig­boland. In addition to the use of historical examples, Katrak examines how contemporary women activists and scholars recuperate the past to advance their current agendas. This section discusses the effects of English colonial educational policies on women’s participation in the decolonizing and nationalist aspirations of Africa, India, and the Caribbean.

Chapter four, “Cultural ‘Traditions’ Exiling the Female Body,” explores how the concept of tradition, colonial and local, contributes to further exiling women from their bod­ies. The author relates the notion of the “invention of tra­dition” by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger to that of the “imagined community” by Benedict Anderson to argue the constructedness of traditions for nationalist agendas. According to Katrak, the framing of tradition as timeless, ahistorical, and fixed helps indigenous social reformers to account for practices such as sati, the controversial widow-burning, dowry-murder recently on the rise in India, and marriage. Katrak contends that these traditions “deify” and “glorify” women in order to further subjugate and reject lesbian, divorced, and other non-traditional single women. The last chapter, “Motherhood Demystified,” demystifies the most valorized “tradition” associated with women in postcolonial societies: motherhood. Through texts by Jamai­can Lorna Goodison, Nigerian Emecheta, Ghanaian Aidoo, and South African Head, the author exposes the conflation of motherhood and womanhood, the suffering associated with raising children, as well as the alienation which sterile women and women who choose to remain childless suffer.

The Politics of the Female Body’s purported intention to draw attention to the “covert means [of resistance] and not to be too quick to assume powerlessness when a woman ‘con­forms’ to traditional roles” fails to engage in questions of the means and their efficacy. In other words, who has the power to define what passes as resistance, the observer or the agent? What are the complexities associated with using the body as a site of resistance? To what extent can postcolonial women use the body without reinforcing imperialist readings of them as pathological and licentious? Spivak’s theory of the impossibility of reading the subaltern woman when she uses her body to write resistance might provide a useful point of analysis of the dialectic of resistance through the body.

Though seasoned scholars of postcolonial women’s writing and theories may find Katrak’s monograph encyclopedic at times, graduate students and advanced undergraduates will benefit tremendously from its scope. A monograph that analyses and uses an impressive array of scholars and theorists from Michel Foucault to Eve Sedgwick to Wole Soyinka will make an excellent acquisition for a young scholar’s library.