CIAO DATE: 11/2008
November 2006
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Alina Sajed is working on her doctorate in Political Science and is a Graduate Research Scholar at the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition for 2006-2007. In this working paper, she poses the question of how to read "between East and West." After situating herself as sitting on the boundary between East and West, she explores primarily women post-colonial writers in examining the notions of orality as a methodology and the ambiguity around the terms "East" and "West." She assesses the possibilities and impossibilities offered by this binary, the politics upon which it rests, and the questions that it raises for further exploration. She then returns to orality and looks at the power relations and politics involved in storytelling, both for the narrator and the listeners. She concludes by reflecting a little more generally on these questions and argues that the political context, particularly the history of colonialism in a given setting, must be considered in any of these readings and stories.
In drawing this conclusion, Alina Sajed reinforces similar conclusions drawn in different ways by Heike Härting in her Research Article, “Global Civil War and Post-colonial Studies” (http://www.globalautonomy.ca/global1/article.jsp?index=RA_Harting_GlobalCivilWar.xml). These conclusions are important in globalization studies because they help this field of research to move beyond the early tendencies in the literature to proclaim a new world and a fundamental break in history. In problematizing the concepts of “East” and “West,” this paper also contributes to the decentering and the ontological work needed in the field, highlighted by Arif Dirlik in his IGHC Working Paper, “Globalization as the End and the Beginning of History: The Contradictory Implications of a New Paradigm” (http://globalization.mcmaster.ca/wps/dirlik.PDF). Finally, in reviewing women writers in particular in this paper, Sajed adds to the much needed research in the field on gender and globalization.
Resource link: Empire Writes Back: Between Dreams of Trespass and Fantasies of Resistance [PDF] - 471K