Minimally Incommensurable, or Feminist Appropriation?

As Natalie Melas argues in her study on postcolonial comparison (2006), an approach that pays attention to incommensurability is essential to locating an adequate “ground for comparison,” that which justifies a comparison, which is not necessarily a “basis of equivalence” (31). Melas proposes:

... a minimal form of incommensurability, which produces a generative dislocation without silencing discourse or marking the limit of knowledge. The minimal incommensurability instead opens up the possibility of an intelligible relation at the limits of comparison. (31)

Melas also evokes Glissantian opacity in a way that is helpful here. Not only does problematizing “equivalence” help to avoid hierarchical “measurements” that categorize one discourse or practice as greater than or prior to another, it also avoids the reductive collapsing of coexisting discourses into assumptions of mutual intelligibility.

Rethinking methods for comparison in Caribbean feminism is made urgent by those comparisons that overemphasize equivalences instead of identifying dislocation. One such text, “Why Must All Girls Want to be Flag Women?” (2010) by Samantha Pinto, comparatively analyzes Indo- and Afro-Caribbean feminisms in Carnival but ultimately argues that Indian feminism in Carnival is detrimental to black feminism and subverts a broader feminist unity. Reading Drupatee Ramgoonai’s performances of chutney-soca—perhaps the most common and representative object of analysis for Indo-Caribbean feminism in Carnival thus far—as the articulation of grievance at domestic violence before the state, Pinto faults the singer for appropriating black women’s cultural forms, opting selectively for the political cum national visibility that black women’s bodies afford, then retreating to safety in the conservative cultural invisibility of Indian femininity “that the state cannot export to awaiting audiences in the diasporic and national cultural circulation of black women’s sexuality” (Pinto 2010, 152).

Pinto argues that feminism through chutney-soca exploits black femininity, “trade[s] on Afro women as performers” (Pinto 2010, 156), but fails to forge a productive alliance with black feminism.

By framing her analysis of Drupatee’s performances as “appropriation,” Pinto problematically reads chutney soca as signaling blackness, rather than as a creolizing form that brings Indo-Caribbean women’s practices such as matikor and chutney together with the also already cre- olized calypso and soca. She thus resurrects purist racial categorizations of culture, relying on the dangerous logic of Indian cultural saturation and repressing a complex history of Indian creolization (Munasinghe 1997, 2001). In the meantime, while she critiques patriarchal Indian figures’ use of racialized language to “Africanize” then disavow Drupatee by reading Afro-Creole bodies as “vulgar,” she herself relies on the logic of this censoring move when she reduces the transgressive possibility of chutney soca to an appropriation of the contestatory idiom of black women’s bodies. While patriarchal and racist disavowals of Drupatee’s body sought to negate the feminist act in the singer’s performances, Pinto’s argument does no less when she dismisses its authenticity. Pinto does not see that the state’s inability to “use” Indian women’s sexuality for export—in the way that she sees Indian women “using” black women’s sexuality—is symptomatic of Indian women’s sexuality being systematically negated, as is the existence of any Indo-Caribbean feminism historically: to the state and in national ideology, Indian women have long been rendered invisible. Not acknowledging the long history of Indo-Caribbean feminism results in the language of exchange: the “use” of black women’s embodied activism is the only way for Indian feminism to be legible; Indian feminism thus becomes secondary to Afro-Caribbean feminisms. This approach assumes the measurability of feminism and feminist discourses, erecting equivalences that categorize and hierarchize women’s grievances as well as contestation.

Such an analysis ultimately undermines the feminist possibilities of both Indian and African expression. Reducing black feminism to the circulation of black women’s bodies re-inscribes the neoliberal state’s inscription of meaning onto those bodies, leaving little room to attend to how black women give meaning to their own bodies through masquerade. Simultaneously, Indian feminism is reduced to a punctual insurgency within Carnival and represented as opportunistic. Pinto’s article inadvertently re-inscribes the delegitimation or occlusion of both black and Indian women’s actions and voices, delinking them from any exercise of agency or resistance. Their actions are read only through the systems of domination that react to and attempt to control the visibility they seek.

Indo-Caribbean women’s desires and concerns can be understood in ways similar to Afro-Caribbean women’s expression in Carnival, but doing so requires recognition of feminist frameworks that are at once distinct— sometimes mutually opaque—but also kindred and intersecting. If Melas’ reliance on dislocation in comparative work appears to stand against a unifying approach to Caribbean feminist analysis, it is precisely because hasty unification often takes the form of assimilation and erasure, in this case assimilating marginal Indo-Caribbean feminism into the more recognizable global model of black feminism which is then made to stand in for all radical non-Western theories of gender and ultimately erasing the crucial specificities that made a distinct Indo-Caribbean feminist thought necessary in the first place. Such assimilative gestures, inadvertent or otherwise, imply epistemological hierarchies that are unacceptable to the radical and transformative goals of Caribbean feminism. Instead, by establishing radical feminist thought as the ground for comparison of feminist praxes through minimal incommensurability, a generative relation can be found.

I have written elsewhere (Singh 2012) about the productive possibilities of a translative perspective on not just language, but categories, identities, and ideologies in Caribbean thought. Translation takes as given that the coexistence of mutually unintelligible systems for knowing and creating knowledge require mediation. Yet translation, in practice, is also the constant enactment of impossibility in the direct transfer of meaning, contenting itself with an ethics of approximation rather than equivalence. Thus, as an addendum to Melas’ suggestion to start with incommensurability, I here frame the relation between black and Indian feminisms as translative, a practice of reading that presumes a degree of opacity.

I will bring Pamela Franco and Judith Bettelheim’s feminist analysis of historical resistance by black women in masquerade to bear on the Carnival participation of two Indo-Caribbean women. Certainly, such participation is not reducible to existing black feminist analyses (nor should such approximation be read automatically as appropriation); yet they can be illustrative of shared desires specific to Caribbean modernity, but with different historical trajectories. This comparison is one of discourses and critical approaches in Caribbean feminism, an investigation of the concepts that help broaden our analyses of the sometimes “disperse” feminism of today’s women, “those who may not ever avow feminism but in their daily lives and actions are eminent practitioners” (Mohammed 2003, 5).

To borrow again Patricia Mohammed’s words, this scholarship is meant to be “quietly subversive within the university curricula, disputing existing epistemologies ... inviting critical thought ... reconstructing androcentric knowledge” (Mohammed 2003, 14).