Decolonizing Feminisms by Laura E. Donaldson

Author:Laura E. Donaldson [Donaldson, Laura E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9781469639420
Google: QZ04DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2017-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

5

A Passage to “India”: Colonialism and Filmic Representation

Aziz: They all become exactly the same. I give any Englishman two years.

Mahmoud AH: The women are worse.

Aziz: I give them six months.

David Lean’s A Passage to India

The British Raj: the very name conjures images of romance—“beautiful families, titled friends, and lazy golden afternoons.”1 Even the creative team for Ralph Lauren’s Home Furnishings division paid homage to this association when it transformed Anglo-America’s recent nostalgia for the “colonial romance” into an extremely lucrative commodity. Their Polo Home Furnishings store on Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive reproduces the very visions of empire that have enthralled millions of spectators in such films as Out of Africa and The Jewel in the Crown in hopes of convincing buyers that if they purchase the replicated interior of a Raj family dwelling, they would also purchase its “idyllic” life.2 Like many other segments of our society, then, American consumerism not only passively ignores but also actively exploits what Edward Said has called “the evil and utter madness of imperialism.”3 However, the assumption by Polo Home Furnishings’ creative directors that “the New York store is a British men’s club in a big city, so ours [the Rodeo Drive Polo] should be a British men’s club in a more casual environment, like the colonies of the British West Indies, India and Africa,”4 ironically raises a profoundly important political issue. In addition to its stunning description of colonized cultures as “casual” environments, my attention was riveted by the characterization of Anglo-European imperialism as a “men’s club,” prompting the question of whether it is true that, in perpetuating empire, women need not apply.

One difficulty in answering this question stems from a conception of colonialist power that remains too dependent on positing direct forms of domination. While colonizing nations certainly did employ military or economic coercion to secure and maintain access to satellite markets, they also penetrated colonized societies by means of signifying practices, or the production of meaning-effects, perceptions, self-images, and subject positions necessary to sustain the colonialist enterprise.5 As Pierre Bourdieu remarks in his Outline of a Theory of Practice, such practices ensure that “domination no longer needs to be exerted in a direct, personal way when it is entailed in possession of the means (economic or cultural capital) of appropriating the mechanisms of the field of production and the field of cultural production, which tend to assure their own reproduction by their very functioning, independently of any deliberate intervention by the agents.”6 I will explore the question of empire as a fictional “men’s [or women’s] club” by analyzing how the signifying practices of empire infiltrate even the intimate psycho-biographical fields of desire—lover for beloved, self for other, Occident for Orient—in A Passage to India, David Lean’s 1984 filmic rendering of E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel. To “India,” then, we must direct our spectatorial gaze.

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