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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520291980 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2016 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
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The Twilight of Cutting
African Activism and Life After NGOs
By Saida Hodzic
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-29199-7
CHAPTER 1
Colonial Reason, Sensibility, and the Ethnographic Style
Colonialism is not a history that arrives on a ship, as Ortner puts it (1984), determining historical agency sui generis. Nor is cutting an initially immutable or stable practice that colonialism suddenly transformed. The history of practices of cutting is plural, discontinuous, and fragmented; it is a history of ongoing regulation, change, and intervention. Significant transformations have been documented by scholars analyzing the twentieth century. Migrant groups, such as the West African Zabarma, who migrated to the Sudan more than a century ago, have had to contend with social pressures to alter the kind of cutting they practice (Gruenbaum 2001); meanwhile some Sudanese adopted the British-propagated "intermediate operation," which the Sudanese now refer to as "government circumcision" (Boddy 2007: 196); and in the Chad, girls from nonpracticing groups adopted cutting on their own, acting on desires to "experiment with modernity" (Leonard 2009: 93). However, practices of cutting, interventions aimed at eliminating them, and larger historical forces have been intertwined for much longer.
Take the passages from the hadith (the sayings of the prophet Muhammad) that are much talked about in scholarly and political debates: "Um Atiyyat al-Ansariyyah said: A woman used to perform circumcision in Medina. The Prophet (pbuh) said to her: Do not cut too severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband." This saying is frequently cited in debates about whether Islam requires cutting (Fluehr-Lobban 2013: 97; Gruenbaum 1996) and in efforts to understand when and where cutting began; the passage is taken as evidence that Muslims practiced cutting in the seventh century and that it arrived in Africa from Saudi Arabia (see Gruenbaum 2001: 45). I turn to this saying to highlight something of an entirely different order, which is that as early as the seventh century, cutting existed simultaneously with attempts to regulate it. In this case a religious authority was trying to modify and reduce the extent of the cut. We should assume that this was neither the first nor the last time before colonialism that authoritative historical figures weighed in on whether or how cutting should be practiced. That little is known about how cutting was lived and regulated between the seventh and late nineteenth centuries is a reflection of disciplinary formations and omissions rather than the stability of an unregulated set of practices.
My turn to colonial history as the precursor of contemporary interventions is motivated by their intertwined logics and the durable traces colonialism left on the present. My aim is to analyze and expand existing understandings of what exactly these traces are. I will suggest that they are surprising and not at all as obvious as existing feminist and postcolonial scholarship suggests they are. My goal is to point to the limits of what has become a taken-for-granted analytics in prevalent critiques of neocolonialism and to suggest that they unwittingly extend colonial reason and sensibility into the present.
"Imperialism is a will to dominate that haunts us even today," writes Nnaemeka (2005b: 7). That is true, but this definition sheds light on only the more obvious forms of imperialism in Western anticutting discourses and campaigns such as the Clitoraid campaign titled "Adopt a Clitoris" sponsored by the Raelian Church. Clitoraid was raising funds for clitoris reconstruction surgeries at a "pleasure hospital" the Raelians wanted to build in Burkina Faso by offering African women's clitorises for metaphorical adoption (see preface). To critics of efforts to save Africa, be they scholars, activists, and/or subjects of feminist and humanitarian interventions, the campaign mobilized in the name of saving African women was obviously neocolonial. Critics started a countercampaign and questioned the exploitative and racist sensationalism that objectified and commodified African women's genitals and offered them for figurative ownership. Kamau-Rutenberg's emerged as one of the critical scholarly voices in the African and diasporic blogosphere and public culture that question the premises of humanitarian interventions and the terms under which Africa becomes an object of Western attention (Wainaina 2005; George 2013). The Raelians' adoption strategy was particularly jarring; although common in humanitarian organizations (Bornstein 2001), it crossed the threshold of acceptability when it was applied to the genitals of African women. Kamau-Rutenberg writes:
Nobody's genitalia should be talked about in the way that Clitoraid is talking about African women's genitalia. In fact, no part of anyone's body should be up for adoption in this way that reminds us too much of the slave trade (Oh no, I went there!). Seriously, what does it mean to "adopt a clitoris"? Does that mean you own said clitoris or are you just fostering it for a little bit? Do you get to name it? What are the implications for the person whose clitoris is being adopted?
Both ownership and objectification of women's (and men's) genitals were precursors of colonialism in the era of scientific racism and constitutive of it. Colonial officials and ethnographers stationed in what is today northern Ghana did not write much about genitals, given their commonly expressed disdain for nudity, but the pictures they took and bodily drawings they made reveal their fascination with and objectification of local subjects. The governmental ethnographer Captain R. S. Rattray took pictures "showing the method of tying the penis" and a nude reclining woman (Hawkins 2002: 77, 247), while the National Archives in Accra are replete with drawings of bodily and facial scarification. And if we accept that colonial rule has itself been predicated on blackness as genitality, the colonial conquest had both land and genitals as its targets (Fanon 1967). There is much to be said for a symbolic analysis of the colonial order and its conceptualization of Africa as a virgin territory. Anne McClintock (1995) has shown that female genitals make their appearance in colonial maps. The same symbolism is mobilized in anticolonial movements, such as in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between (1965), which depicts the struggle over female circumcision between the Gikuyu and Scottish missionaries; on the book's cover the shape of the ridge divided by the struggle is also vaginal.
Ghanaian campaigns against cutting evince less obvious forms of imperial debris, and my intention is to examine their surfacing in governmental practices (see Taylor 2005). To do so I need to retool postcolonial feminist analysis and question the stability of the alliance of theory and a form of critique we might call critique from a distance. Anticutting campaigns are often understood through the critical lens of Gayatri Spivak's famous indictment of the colonial paradigm of white men saving brown women from brown men. It is well known that in India and elsewhere, the British turned women's liberation from tradition into an excuse for colonial rule (Mani 1998: 2), thus turning the "woman question" into a justification for their colonial civilizing mission (Chatterjee 1989). Scholars apply this critical lens to contemporary anticutting campaigns and understand them as neocolonial instantiations of the "white mans burden medicalized" (Morsy 1991), as well as, in broader terms, the saving of African women from African men by Westerners — including by white and African American women (Nnaemeka 2005c). This scholarship rightly points to the racialized neocolonialism inherent in Western feminist preoccupations with saving African women's genitals; campaigns are replete with patronizing, narrow concerns void of larger analyses of African gender relations and subjectivities, geopolitical inequalities, imperial formations, and feminism's own imbrications in them. As Nnaemeka writes, "The problem with this circumcision business is that many Westerners who plunge into it do so thoughtlessly" (2005a: 37). However, an unintended effect of this theorizing and its focus on Western discourses is that entire areas of critical inquiry have been cordoned off, leading to misconceptions of power relations that have structured both colonial and contemporary anti-cutting campaigns. Among other things, it prevents us from understanding that imperialism entailed opposition from within, such as the anti-interventionist logic of regional officers stationed in what is today northern Ghana, a logic that was shaped by a white man's burden to protect the natives from other white men and women.
The widespread reception of Spivak's critical phrase as a platform for feminist analysis gives an illusion of completeness of inquiry into histories of the postcolonial present. Certainly, white men and women were central to anti-cutting debates and interventions during colonialism: missionaries posted to Kenya tried to ban it (L. Thomas 2003; Kanogo 2005), British parliamentarians debated criminalization across the empire, and two British nurses trained Sudanese midwives in alternative forms of the operation (Boddy 2007). But the postcolonial present is more complicated, and the cast of characters has multiplied many times. In addition to imperial feminists, colonial officials and missionaries, and anthropologists, anticutting campaigns now include African feminists, both diasporic and continental; other activists who are women of color; and regional governmental reformers. As I stressed earlier, recent advocacy against cutting is also an African-European-American collaboration; the Swedish NGO worker Margareta Linnander cofounded the Inter-African Committee on Harmful Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children (IAC), and in Ghana, IAC members such as the wife of the Dutch ambassador lobbied for the Ghana Association for Women's Welfare (GAWW) to receive funding from the Dutch Embassy. The Ghanaian advocacy is also internally fractured, as middle- and upper-class Ghanaian women and men, often from the South, as well as northerners who have migrated south, have been the main advocates against cutting. Similarly, urban NGO workers are trying to save rural northern women from cutting, which also means from themselves.
In this chapter I want to show that the presence of white people is an insufficient basis for analyzing imperial formations, and I will highlight instead the continuing reverberations of a colonial logic — in both interventions and critical opposition to them. I agree with Ann Stoler's assessment that the field of contemporary postcolonial studies is "overconfident in its analytics and its conceptual vocabulary, too assured of what we presume to know about the principles and practices of empire that remain in the active register" (2008: 192). I strongly suspect that Spivak would agree that what she originally wrote about colonial rule in 1820s India cannot be uniformly applied to the 1930s Gold Coast or to postcolonial Ghana. I will provide some specific examples of continuities, building on Lata Mani's work (1998), but my purpose is to question what we really know about colonial campaigns against cutting and their contemporary afterlives. Feminist criticism has rarely availed itself of existing historical analyses (L. Thomas 2003; Kanogo 2005; Boddy 2007), and this situation is compounded by the limits of analytical imagination. Too often scholars fail to differentiate between debates and practices, whether colonial or postcolonial. As Stoler writes,
Academic debates about the lessons of empire ... have been contained and constrained by the framing of issues and arguments against which critique has been posed. In the rush to account for the nature of imperial practices today and their similarities or differences from earlier European and U.S. imperial interventions, a very particular vocabulary has seized hold of our intellectual and political space. (2008: 192)
How do we make space for new arrangements of anthropological and historical study and critical analysis? The charge is to revisit the question of how colonialism informs contemporary governance and political and analytical sensibilities. By portraying complexities of colonial rule, my purpose is to set the stage for analyzing enduring forms of power-knowledge and sensibility that live on in present governmental campaigns and scholarly analytics. This requires questioning the assumption that colonial political debates seamlessly led to or accurately reflected policies and practices of rule, as well as paying attention to the less perceptible residues of imperial formations that structure both anticutting interventions and the work of their opponents. I want to account for the forms of knowledge, affect, ordering of the world, and desires to change it that stretch from colonialism to the present. This chapter will first shed light on specific logics of colonial power in anticutting campaigns of the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then called, and point to their complex afterlives.
At the heart of British colonial debates about cutting was a tension between two opposing camps: the humanitarian-feminist camp, which wanted to criminalize cutting and thereby liberate African women from the custom perceived as detrimental to Africans' reproduction and population growth, and the administrative-ethnographic camp, which opposed imperial reformist zeal and argued that African women did not need that form of liberation. These camps were gendered, classed, and ordered by the hierarchies of imperial rule. The first included British parliamentarians, among them aristocratic and middle-class women and men based in London (Pedersen 1991), and the second included British male administrators posted to Africa such as those governing the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast; these men often had military backgrounds. They positioned themselves differently with respect to cutting, the woman question, and the very purpose of colonial governance.
The critical paradigm of white men saving brown women from brown men cannot explain why British women at the center of the empire wanted to save African women from African men and from themselves, whereas British men posted to the Gold Coast were trying to save local societies from the British women and men at the imperial center. The imperial will to dominate was opposed from within, using a specific logic. By labeling the first position feminist and the second ethnographic, I want to draw attention to the afterlives of this colonial situation in contemporary campaigns and scholarly analyses, both anthropological and feminist.
COLONIAL INQUIRIES: THE DESIRE FOR FACTS
The first colonial interventions to end cutting in what is today northern Ghana were not couched in such terms. In concert with the minimal, rather than the biopolitical or welfare, logics of colonial rule of this region, the British did not sponsor widespread campaigns against cutting. They, did, however, inquire into Ghanaian practices. The terrain of the colonial debate was knowledge about cutting and arguments about the feasibility of legislative and other efforts. The imperial quest for knowledge was thought of as a precursor of potential campaigns but ultimately constituted the extent of the campaign itself.
In the spring of 1930 British concern about what they termed "circumcision," reached the Gold Coast by way of a circular letter titled "Native Customs Calculated to Impair the Health and Progress of the less Civilised Population in Certain parts of the Empire." Preceded by missionary and governmental experiments with regulating circumcision in Kenya, these concerns had traveled to London before landing on the shores of the Gold Coast. In late 1929 London-based members of Parliament, including the "nation's most strenuous defender of women's rights," Eleanor Rathbone, who was "determined to improve the status of women in the empire" (Pedersen 1991: 657), and a newly minted humanitarian, the Duchess of Atholl, formed the Committee for the Protection of Coloured Women in the Crown Colonies. At the time the governing Labour Party embraced the pursuit of native rights and racial equality, and these women demanded that the British government "be held responsible not merely for equal rights between races but also for guaranteeing equal rights between Black women and Black men and for 'protecting' women from 'barbaric' practices" (656). I must note how this endeavor was circumscribed, given that the campaigns for British and colonized women did not proceed along the same tracks: Rathbone and other members of Parliament advocated for social welfare such as family allowances in Britain but not for women in the colonies. Rather, Rathbone and her colleagues made African female circumcision a political priority and campaigned for its prohibition.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Twilight of Cutting by Saida Hodzic. Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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