War has a devastating effect on women, feminist perceptions are
required to attain peaceRiley, Mohanty, and Pratt 8, FEMINISM AND
WAR: Confronting US Imperialism, Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade
Mohanty and Minnie Bruce Pratt editors, Zed Books. 2008This is the
context in which the essays in this volume examine and challenge US
imperial wars crafted as rescue missions in the name of democracy
and 'civilization.' These wars, with their disproportionate and
annihilating effect on the lives of women, with the ensuing traffic
in gendered bodies, with the manipulation of racialized discourses
of male supremacy and female helplessness as justification, raise
profoundly feminist issues, and require a complex, anti imperialist
feminist engagement. In fact, as Angela Davis suggests here, what
is required are particular feminist 'habits of perception ...
habits of the imagination' that allow us to envision and work
toward 'the world without war.' Or, as Micere Githae Mugo writes in
her poem 'In praise of Afrika's children': 'What song! shall I
sing! in praise of! our children! living in! the mass graves! of
apartheid! of capitalism! of imperialism?! What sung! shall I
sing?' Empires are masculinist; post-colonialism sidelines gender
issuesNolan 66 Postcolonial Literary Studies, Nationalism, and
Feminist Critique in Contemporary Ireland, Nolan, Emer, 1966-
Volume 42: 1&2, Earrach/Samhradh/Spring/Summer 2007, pp.
336-361 (Article), Published by Irish-American Cultural Institute,
p.336-7
The cultural analysis of empire has often been heavily
masculinist, focusing overwhelmingly on the activities of
administrators, civil servants, soldiers and settlers, explorers
and travelers, and on the involvements of male political leaders,
intellectuals, and writers in the shaping of imperial and
anti-imperial cultures. However, there is now a growing body of
feminist scholarship that attends both to the role of women as
agents of empire and as participants in anti-imperial struggles of
various kinds.1 In addition, historians and cultural critics have
begun to examine the ways that racial and sexual politics
intersected in the elaboration of colonial administrations.2 In
Ireland, the study of imperialism in the disciplines of literary
and cultural studies has been mediated primarily through the
development of what is now commonly referred to as Irish
postcolonial studies. For a variety of reasons, the reception of
post- colonial studies in Ireland has often been quite hostile.3
The most obvious lines of critique have stemmed from historical
revisionists, who have usually dismissed postcolonial studies as
simply a recoding of a cultural nationalism that revisionists
believed they had largely discredited. From a different angle,
Irish feminists, too, have been generally wary of postcolonial
studies. Most of the leading figures associated with the area are
male, and several were prominently involved with The Field Day
Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), Volumes IIII. Feminists were
angered by this anthology, on the basis that it did not give due
recognition to women writers and feminist scholarship. Other women
critics have accused postcolonial studies of reinstating the
national questionand thus sidelining issues of genderat the very
moment in the 1990s when feminist campaigns were finally beginning
to make significant progress.4
