This year-long workshop is one of the requirements for the Critical Theory Emphasis.  Students will receive four units of credit for this course in the last quarter.  There will be no term papers and no letter grades.  Twenty weekly meetings of 1 1/2 hours will take place over three quarters.  Since it is structured as a reading group, direction of the workshop will be driven by the interests of its members, and the success of the course will depend on active participation of the students and faculty.

Postcolonial feminism is an intervention that changes the configurations of both postcolonial and feminist studies.  It is an exploration of and at the intersections of colonialism and neo-colonialisms with gender, nation, class, race and sexualities in the different contexts of women's lives, their subjectivities, work, sexuality, and rights.  As such it is necessarily multidisciplinary in scope and inhabits the discursive space of cultural studies.

The course will explore three main themes over three quarters.  We will begin with metropolitan postcolonial feminism, the theoretical concerns of which have mainly dealt with the issues of representation and question of location.  Works by Gayatri Spivak, Barbara Christian, and Chandra Mohanty are some of the suggested readings.  In the second quarter we will examine more dialectical and praxis-oriented theories of postcolonial feminism.  Essays from Chandra Mohantyís and M. Jacqui Alexander's Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacy, and Democratic Futures and Inderpal Grewalís and Caren Kaplan's Scattered Hegemonies will provide useful guidelines.  In the Spring Quarter we will explore postcolonial feminist studies in the Third World that are concerned predominantly with colonialism and post-colonial nation-state; nationalism and its connection to religious fundamentalisms; development and its devastating impact upon women; and engagement with Western feminism and postmodernism.  Our reading will include Lata Mani, Amartya Sen, Maria Mies, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan.  The reading list is subject to revision accommodating the interests of the group.