Bury the Corpse of Colonialism by Elisabeth B. Armstrong

Author:Elisabeth B. Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520390904
Publisher: University of California Press

This conference has a historic significance. It is the first time in the history of the women’s movement that the representatives of progressive organizations of fourteen Asian countries have met in conference to exchange their experiences and discuss effective means of intensifying the women’s struggle for national independence and for the improvement of their children’s living conditions. This has become possible as a result of the development of the national liberation in the colonial and dependent countries, and primarily thanks to the victory of the democratic forces in China. The victory of the Chinese people is the source of inspiration for millions of enslaved men and women in the colonial and dependent countries in their struggle for liberation from the imperialist yoke.22

The official appeal from the conference extended that inspiration more widely across Asia: “The women of China and Mongolia, of North Korea and the liberated areas of Viet Nam have obtained equal political and economic rights. The women are playing an important role in the life of these countries. They are looking toward the future with calm confidence. From these examples, we the women of Asia, are convinced that only when people are masters of their destiny can real emancipation for women be realized.”23

The geopolitics of capitalism bifurcated its strategy into two main parts: women’s activism outside imperial centers, and women’s activism inside those centers—as accomplices in struggle, activism in these political locations were coordinated, but not identical. However, the struggles and demands shaped by colonized women led in both locations of activism. In rural and urban colonial territories, the erasure of older forms of women’s rights and community power were a necessary kindling for colonialism. The suppression of women’s rights fueled, and then congealed, colonial control over occupied territories. Women’s rights had to be at the heart of the anti-colonial project of systemically loosening the grip of imperialism on the world, if that project was to succeed. At its best, internationalist feminism as women’s regional anticolonial solidarity across the Third World could dig the grave for colonialism. Western women’s staunch rejection of their own nations’ imperialism could help bury it for good.

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