What's the ‘Trans’ and Where's the ‘National’ in Transnational Feminist Practice? – a Response

In my response to these two papers, I want to step back a little and consider some of the broader questions that might be raised by thinking these two pieces together. I would like to do that in a somewhat unorthodox way, by bringing the work of three important thinkers into this conversation. The first of these is Stuart Hall, whose work has influenced me and, I suspect, many of the readers of this issue in profound ways. I am going to frame my response by putting a somewhat oblique spin on the title of an old Stuart Hall essay that, as I am sure many of you will agree, remains remarkably relevant decades after its initial publication.

In his seminal essay, ‘When was the “post-colonial”? Thinking at the Limit’ (1996), Hall queried the historical and political temporality of a term that many scholars and activists took for granted then as well as now. In doing so, he sought not to undermine either the salience of the histories of the anti-colonial movements or the emancipation struggles that brought independence to numerous sites of imperial domination. Nor was his intention to question the political aspirations of scholars and activists who opposed the logic of Empire as part of a diligent practice of plotting a concrete vision of what Hazel Carby has called, ‘a future beyond empire’. Rather, his intervention was of a different kind; namely to force a form of critical reflection that calls us to account for the social and political implications of our own critical discourse.

I want to ask a related question with regard to these papers and the conference more broadly in an effort to provoke a similar form of critical reflection: What is the ‘trans’ in transnational feminist practice, and what is the work of the nation or the national therein? Each of these papers addresses these questions in distinct ways and with important implications.

Ann Genovese's paper engages the question of what the frame of rights allows the jurisgenerative community in Australia to do and, conversely, not to do. Focusing on the political and intellectual antecedents that engendered this formation, she asks what constructs the possibilities for minority and gendered rights. More explicitly, she queries whether what she calls a ‘transnational representative’ feminist dialogue is possible if we deny the particularities of the contradictions of law, and the very local narratives that sustain them at the national level. Genovese points out a central contradiction in the Australian context in the areas of family and marriage law and indigenous rights: a contradiction between an embrace of progressive values internationally and a vociferous resistance to minority rights at the domestic level. The paradox of this twinning of a commitment to human rights abroad with a reluctance to transcribe this commitment at the domestic level is a striking example of what Genovese describes as the difficulty of translating a language of rights from other national experiences, or the enduring salience of what she terms ‘national containers’. More specifically, she links this paradox to a similar, if not more pronounced, challenge for feminist rights projects whose invocation of the language of rights compromised them domestically, at precisely the same moment the Australian state proved receptive to similar discourses of rights internationally.

In contrast, Gabrielle Hosein's critical examination of her own feminist pedagogy takes up a related set of questions, although with a very different point of departure. Analysing student responses both on campus and in the classroom to a ‘popular action assignment’, Hosein works through some of the on-the-ground tensions of transnational feminist pedagogy through her attempts to assess both the stakes of her own investment in an activist classroom, and the translatability of North American academic feminist debates on the constraints and promises of activist feminist pedagogy. Hosein reads the arguments for and against activist teaching of a series of North American feminist scholars through the lens of her own classroom experiences. Reflecting on the limits, promises and pitfalls of her own pedagogical method, her paper provides a ground-up view of both the potential losses and gains of such an approach. In this context, the problem of transnational feminist practice her paper poses is which literatures and discourses of feminist teaching and movement-building translate to the specificities of the Anglophone Caribbean context; which do not; and why.

Here I want to reinsert the question with which I began: What is the ‘trans’ in transnational feminist practice, and what is the work of the national therein? More specifically, what is the difference between the transnational and the international, or are we simply updating our syntax by substituting a more contemporary vocabulary?

Many would argue that the significance of these prefixes lies in the difference between the reciprocity of exchange signified in the prefix inter – (between), as opposed to the shift of location implied in the inflection of trans – (across). Here the transnational highlights movement or mobility – of capital, of labour, indeed, of ideology itself – in other words, the mobility that marks the hegemony of global capitalism. But transnational feminist theorists have taken a critical view of this emphasis on mobility, setting their sights instead on the alternative forms of cross-cultural mobilization that these new configurations and consolidations of power require in the age of neo-liberalism and globalization.

In the introduction to their influential volume, Scattered Hegemonies, Inderpal Grewal and Kaplan (1994) articulate the ‘transnational’ as points where common solidarities can become sites of mobilization against oppression: ‘in calling for transnational alliances, our purpose is to acknowledge the different forms that feminisms take and the different practices that can be seen as feminist movements’ (2001: 20). Yet in their 2001 follow-up essay, ‘Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Sexual Subjectivities’, Grewal and Kaplan (2001) criticize a more recent tendency to simplify the transnational and use it as a shorthand descriptor for a broad spectrum of phenomena that range from contemporary migration writ large, to the demise or irrelevance of the nation state, to neo-colonialism, diaspora or the NGO-ization of social movements. Grewal and Kaplan call instead for a more rigorous theorization of transnational relations that conceptualizes the transnational as quite explicitly a set of power relations that are productive both of new subjects and of forms of resistance.

For Grewal and Kaplan, a feminist analysis of transnational relations:

Investigates the empowering practices of consumption produced by new forms of globalized labour and engagements, and explores how such practices themselves create potentially new subjects that trouble existing models of rights and citizenship.

I invoke Kaplan and Grewal's concept of feminist transnational practice because I think it shifts our focus towards an emphasis on what the transnational does or might do, rather than allowing us the complacency of thinking of it as an object or set of relations we can identify as already present and awaiting discovery.

So what might it mean to use this term to think through some of the tensions of transnational feminist practice and pedagogy raised in these two papers? What might it mean to theorize the relations between feminist activism, rights discourse and pedagogy through this lens? Here again, I believe that returning to Stuart Hall's essay offers an important frame for articulating these two papers’ contribution to precisely the kind of robust and complex conception of the transnational that Kaplan and Grewal are proposing.

For those of you who remember Hall's extraordinary article, it begins by posing a series of penetrating questions: When was ‘the post-colonial’? What should be included and excluded from its frame? Where is the invisible line between it and its ‘others’ – colonialism, neo-colonialism, Third World, imperialism? Synthesizing some of the most noteworthy debates around this term, Hall sums up their critiques by asking:

Whether the ‘post-colonial’ names a temporal ‘after’, in other words, the end, aftermath or afterlife of the colonial.

But he also turns these critiques on their heads by focusing instead on what this concept helps us to do: namely, to describe the shift in global relations that marks the necessarily uneven transition from an age of Empires to a post-independence or post-decolonization moment, and to identify the new relations and dispositions of power that emerge in this conjuncture. Most importantly, it also helps us to recognize the ways in which the post-colonial is what he terms, ‘properly universalizing’. In other words, it helps us to recognize a general process of decolonization that has marked both colonized and colonizing societies by directing our attention to the fact that colonization was always mutually constitutive of both colony and imperial metropole.

While he recognizes the need for differentiation and specificity, Hall also insists on the importance of attending to the equally over-determining effects of a formation like colonization. Here he urges us to keep in play the tensions of both specificity and over-determination as a form of ‘double inscription’ that a term like the post-colonial necessarily and productively invokes. Here I propose that we apply Hall's ever-lucid analysis of the dynamics of the post-colonial analogously, if (again) obliquely, to understanding the perplexity of the transnational and its vexed relation to the national as, similarly, both properly universalizing and a double inscription that is at once specific and over-determined.

The two papers on this panel offer quite cogent interrogations of this problematic. Each asks us to think about the limitations of conceptualizing the trans– in transnationality as a seamless or uncomplicated flow of ideas or ideologies across different geographic spaces and temporalities. Genovese and Hosein, respectively, ask us to consider instead the gaps in translation that characterize the movement of ideas enabled by the contemporary purchase of international rights discourses, or the uneven circulation of ideas from privileged sites of knowledge production like US academic feminism. I also read their papers as offering us new ways of thinking about these circulations. Rather than a naïve conceptualization of these transnational circuits, they present them as complex moments of consumption. Indeed, each paper challenges us to think about which discourses – be they discourses of feminist pedagogy or human rights – get consumed where, and to what effect; which discourses cross boundaries; what forms of power enable their passage, and perhaps most importantly, when, where and in what ways those passages fail.

Here, the problem of translation is at the heart of both pieces in ways that return us to the second part of the question of what constitutes the transnational: the necessity of specifying its value as an analytic and political framework, and the utility of recognizing its ‘proper universalization’ of a broader set of relations. In each paper, the question of translation is inextricable from the nation as both specific and over-determined. Rather than being that which the transnational displaces, supplants or dissolves, it is and remains constituent of this category. The imbrication of international rights discourse and the ‘national containers’ of domestic marriage and family law that Genovese analyses, and the Trinidadian inflections of gender Hosein's students confront are both specific and over-determined; they cannot be engaged by merely translating transnational feminist analyses, nor can they be ‘contained’ or addressed solely at the specific level of the local or the national. The contradiction each of these papers outlines requires engagement at the level of the national and particular, but those national idioms are mutually constitutive of the transnational as a site of potential mobilization and alliance.

I will conclude by inviting the readers of this issue to ponder the question of what constitutes the transnational as an open and ongoing project, both in relation to the two papers discussed in this essay, and more broadly, in relation to the tensions of feminist theory and activism this issue seeks to address. It is an open question that challenges us to continually define the terms of our critical discourse, as well as our political activism both within the academy and beyond it.