Gender and the “postcolonial exotic”

Abstract

This article questions the distinction between what qualifies as “marginal” (i.e., Lusophone) and “central” (i.e., Anglophone) theorizations of the postcolonial. I argue that Lusophone postcolonialism will carve far more pertinent solutions to the legacies of colonial power by carefully examining the coincidences, and not solely the differences, between Anglo-Saxon and Lusophone postcolonial theories. Current theorizations from each side in fact overlap in their negligence of gender and sexual difference variables when discussing how marginality is valued and affected by local and global markets (i.e., how it is commodified). This article deals with the political significance of such theoretical-imposed silence, in the light of two Anglophone and Lusophone key theory texts: respectively, Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins and Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ “Between Prospero and Caliban”.

Since the 1980s, postcolonialism has attempted to analyse relations of domination and subordination rooted in the history of European colonialism. ¹ It has done so by providing a language and a political interpretation that aim at giving prominence to non-Western interests. Critics have since denounced the fact that this language and politics are often grounded in the central reality of British colonialism. Whilst the founding reality of postcolonialism is indeed British colonialism, its central trope of colonized/colonizer has been appropriated by a lineage of irreverent thinkers, from the Brazilian modernists to writers from the Caribbean and Africa (Ferreira, 2012). These writers have embraced Shakespeare’s Caliban as a symbol of the affirmative “talking back” of the colonized against the colonizer. A notable contribution to this transnational genealogy of anti-colonial Calibans is that of the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, with his version of a Portuguese “Calibanised Prospero”, famously developed in “Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism and Inter-identity” (2002). ² Santos’ important attempt to show the methodological inadequacy of applying Anglo-Saxon theory indiscriminately to “marginal” Lusophone realities is based on his emphasis on a Portuguese colonial and postcolonial “specificity”.

The present essay seeks to discuss postcolonialism from a new angle, by questioning the distinction ― underlying Santos’ theoretical endeavours ― between what qualify as “marginal” and “central” theorizations of the postcolonial. I argue that Lusophone postcolonialism will carve far more pertinent solutions to the legacies of colonial power by carefully examining the coincidences, and not solely the differences, between Anglo-Saxon and Lusophone postcolonial theories. Current theorizations from each side in fact overlap in their neglect of gender and sexual difference variables when discussing how marginality is valued and affected by local and global markets (in other words, how it is commodified). ³ Here, I shall deal with the political significance of such theory-imposed silence.

This silence will be discussed in the light of two Anglophone and Lusophone key theory texts: respectively, Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001), ⁴ and Santos’ “Between Prospero and Caliban”. Each of these texts describes specific literary (“strategic exoticism”) and cultural/identitarian (Portuguese “inter-identity”) “limbo” positions out of which theory is carved. They correspond to distinct searches for material (Huggan) and identitarian (Santos) middle ground from which to produce theory in-between the self and the other, resistance and the market. By taking Huggan’s concept of the dilemma of the “postcolonial exotic” as the theoretical cornerstone for the ensuing discussion, I argue that Huggan’s and Santos’ theoretical responses to this dilemma are insufficient to engage productively with the work of postcolonial authors whose gender concerns not only inform their literary production, but also influence their reception.

In what follows, I will contextualize Huggan’s and Santos’ work within earlier critiques of the field, develop the main ideas put forward by the critics, and connect their occlusion of gender issues with a real lacuna in the Lusophone academy in terms of postcolonial theories of feminism. By rendering visible what a lack of comparative studies has kept out of sight, I hope to contribute to developing more complex paradigms for postcolonial research.

The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing a centre

Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic is a groundbreaking materialist assessment of the field of postcolonial studies. The reason why it is such an important study in this area is because it acknowledges, in a nuanced and thought-provoking style, the intersections between postcolonial literature and capitalism. The complicity of postcolonial scholarship with global capitalism has been the object of scrutiny by several critics. This critical orientation was developed mainly according to the Marxist formulations of Ella Shohat (1992), Arif Dirlik (1994), Aijaz Ahmad (1995), and Benita Parry (2004), among others, who denounced the silence surrounding the links between the discourse of postcolonialism and contemporary capitalism. In The Postcolonial Exotic, Huggan argues that, in the age of global commodity culture, such critiques of postcolonialism’s prematurely celebratory tone (McClintock, 1992), ahistorical and universalizing deployments (Shohat, 1992), and transhistorical nature (Ahmad, 1995) are, in a word, fashionable. The critic takes these materialist challenges to the field one step further, by acknowledging their own commodity function within the “industry” of postcolonial studies. His book presents a reading of postcolonial cultural production in the light of its own “regimes of value” (Appadurai, 1986) and asks how the postcolonial (including critiques to it) has come to acquire an increasingly commodified status. ⁵ This is the key distinguishing feature of Huggan’s market-driven approach to conceptions of both oppositional thinking/theorizing and creative writing. By offering a provocative analysis of the global commodification of difference within postcolonial discourse and its institutions, he describes the threat of incorporation which always hangs over resisting postcolonial texts, theories and discourses. Huggan focuses on canonical postcolonial fiction in English, demonstrating how literary value is dependent on the writers’ commodification and strategic exoticization of concepts such as “marginality”, “resistance”, and “authenticity”.

As pointed out by Peter Morey and James Procter (2003), one of the strengths of Huggan’s book is the way in which it seeks to develop rather than dismiss earlier critiques of the field, “notably in [its] illuminating account of the distinction between postcolonialism as a form of localized resistance and postcoloniality as a form of global commodity exchange” (Morey and Procter, 2003: 46). In The Postcolonial Exotic, Huggan sets out to define each term, namely in relation to “postmodernism” and “postmodernity”. The fleshing out of the pair’s inextricable interconnection reveals that postcoloniality is by and large a function of postmodernity, pertaining to a system of symbolic as well as material cross-cultural exchange of goods, ideas, and people. Postcolonialism, on the other hand, does not share postmodernism’s Eurocentric frame of reference. Instead, it is related to localized agencies of resistance, oppositional practices and anti-colonial intellectualism. Huggan’s account of the distinction between postcolonialism and postcoloniality is intended to show how oppositional intellectual projects are, in one way or another, “bound up with postcoloniality” (Huggan, 2001: 6). To admit as much “is not to ‘sell out’ to pernicious capitalist causes”, but rather, “to interrogate and strategize one’s own position within the institutional parameters of the postcolonial field” (Huggan, 2001: 9). Maintaining that postcoloniality is in constant tension with postcolonialism, Huggan asserts that the contradiction between both terms is what constitutes the dilemma of the “postcolonial exotic”:

The postcolonial exotic can be either a contradiction in terms (for postcolonialism) or a tautology (for postcoloniality). It is many different things at once: a mechanism of cultural translation for the English-speaking mainstream and a vehicle for the estrangement of metropolitan mainstream views; a semiotic circuit in which the signs of oppositionality are continually recoded, circulating alternately as commodities within a late-capitalist, neo-imperialist symbolic economy and as markers of anti-imperialist resistance in an age of “adversarial internationalization”. (Huggan, 2001: 32)

When asking what postcolonial writers/thinkers can do about the postcolonial exotic, the critic outlines three alternative responses to the dilemma: the other can disclaim, opt out of, or work within ― while seeking to challenge ― dominant systems of representation. The third hypothesis corresponds to what Huggan terms “strategic exoticism”: “the means by which postcolonial writers/thinkers, working from within exoticist codes of representation, either manage to subvert those codes […], or succeed in redeploying them for the purpose of uncovering differential relations of power” (Huggan, 2001: 32).

The Postcolonial Exotic is the major influence on my thinking about the production, regulation, and consumption of cultural difference in the postcolonial context at large. Nevertheless, two sets of problems have arisen in the course of my engagement with Huggan’s work. Briefly, these have to do with the critic’s lack of attention to gender and sexual difference and with the Anglophone bias present in the readings put forward in his book. I shall start with the latter set.

In the preface to the book, the critic makes a claim for the general nature of his argument: “the book is ultimately less interested in exploring the specific geopolitics of exoticism than in examining the general mechanics of exoticist representation/consumption within an increasingly globalized culture industry […] and a transnationally conceived academic field” (Huggan, 2001: x). The focus on the general mechanics of exoticist representation and consumption depends on the assumption that the capacity to generalize is not the preserve of Western writers or thinkers, but that non-Western writers can also work (exoticist representations) above cultural particularisms. But underneath the claim of generality lies an attention to the particular circumstances of textual production and consumption in the Anglophone context. For example, as a regime of value closely tied to the global market capitalizing on the circulation of “othered” or marginal goods, ideas, and people, postcoloniality is generally used by Huggan to refer to the Anglophone metropolitan demand for “otherness” affecting which “marginalities” are produced and valued and how they are consumed in the global market today. Hence, the constitutive tension of this dilemma, central to the postcolonial field, is defined by using “metropolitan mainstream cultural codes” and “English-speaking” interchangeably. This erasure of other experiences arguably enhances a reluctance to go beyond Anglophone institutionalized markets and their corresponding resisting “others”. In Huggan’s work resistance is, to a certain extent, co-opted by Anglophone postcolonial theory. He neglects the existence of resisting practices that may (or may not) be enmeshed in imperial epistemologies other than English (other “postcolonialisms”), and of non-Anglophone markets that capitalize on the global circulation of “othered” products, ideas, and individuals (other “postcolonialities”).

This perception of the postcolonial exotic as an Anglophone dilemma has gone largely unchallenged as far as critiques of The Postcolonial Exotic are concerned. The most thought-provoking critique of Huggan’s Anglo-biased theoretical endeavours I encountered may be found in Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial Writers in the Global Marketplace (2007).

Brouillette’s critique is aimed at Huggan’s formulation of the figure of a supposedly unsophisticated global market reader who is arguably made aware, re-oriented, and re-educated by the strategic use of exoticism of postcolonial writers: “In Huggan’s critique of postcoloniality, somebody somewhere is engaged in consuming postcolonial texts in ways that are meant to concern an academic reading audience” (Brouillette, 2007: 26). Furthermore, Brouillette also points out that Huggan’s category of readers is “largely unspecified, but of a predictable class and metropolitan location” (Brouillette, 2007: 16). In fact, one real problem with Huggan’s model of the global market reader (and, to a certain extent, also with the figure of the postcolonial writer) is that it is used to support a general claim about the postcolonial world at large, and the only constraint slimming down this general definition ― that it mainly concerns male writing and theorizing in the Anglophone postcolonial world ― is one that Huggan fails to recognize as a specifying detail. Herein lies the problem with Huggan’s definition of a global reader.

This may turn out to be a problem with its own advantages. Stressing the way in which the postcolonial shifts across different locations has empowered, and will continue to empower, Lusophone (as well as Anglophone) studies. But this critical choice also brings with it the danger of having specificity accounted for with recourse to contextualizations ad infinitum, or even with reference to discourses of the “authentic” and the “exceptional”, particularly in what the Lusophone is concerned. Thus, while I wish to acknowledge the validity of Brouillette’s problematization of the notion of the “global market reader”, this acknowledgement does not prevent me from posing the question of the price that the field of Lusophone postcolonial studies is willing to pay for its engagement with the urgency to grasp its own specificities. Peter Hallward may be right when he notes that “the mere insistence on particularity […] cannot resolve any theoretical question whatsoever” (Hallward, 2001: 39). Huggan is, after all, the first to acknowledge the problem with his notion of the global market reader. He argues that defining a single reading public is, in fact, an impossibility because “readers of postcolonial works are part of an increasingly diasporized, transnational, English-speaking culture, but most of all because literary/cultural audiences all over the world are by their very nature plural and heterogeneous” (Huggan, 2001: 30). So, there is something to be learned from Huggan’s crafting of a master reading narrative. As an effective tool to address a particular theoretical question, Huggan’s model of the “global market reader” lends coherence and closure to his thesis and effectively helps the critic to get things done. However, as much as I wish to underscore the persistent hegemonies that allow for Western domination of non-Europeans and the so called “Third World”, I also aim to resist monolithic discourse and theory that uniformly build up the other as the other of an Anglophone male self. The crafting of an essentialized global market reader effectively denies the marginal writer considerable agency over the supposed commodification of his or her writing, because it neglects writers’ strategic ways of turning their often multiple marginal identities to their own advantage in situated contexts. I argue, therefore, for a more heterogeneous conception of readers/producers of strategic exoticism. Across different cultural, geographical, and historical sites, strategic exoticism reveals itself as a tool that is complicated by narratives of gendered, as well as national and racial, differences.

Brouillette’s reading of Huggan’s work productively questions, to my mind, the mythical figure and unspecified agency of the global market reader ― after all specifically male and “Anglo-American in location and orientation” (Brouillette, 2007: 4) ― as the basis upon which much of Huggan’s analysis depends. However, her discussion of postcolonial writing in the global literary market place fails to engage fully with the particular layers of difference which are also left out in Huggan’s study. While some issues are taken into consideration, such as the value of authenticity in the global literary marketplace, others, such as the role of gender and sexual difference in the representation of ambivalence and marginality, are swept aside.

Gender: The ghostly variable in The Postcolonial Exotic

This leads us to the first set of problems which has arisen in the course of my engagement with Huggan’s work: the critic’s lack of attention to gender and sexual difference. To a large extent, The Postcolonial Exotic keeps women writers out of the discussion around questions of literary profit and success, and around local negotiations of subversion and consumption, denying them the possibility of subversive agency on a theoretical level. The only chapter explicity dedicated to gender issues in his study addresses the question of ethnic autobiographical writing and authenticity. Here, the constitutive tension of the postcolonial exotic is analysed by drawing on rival conceptions of cultural authenticity played out in the paratextual apparatuses that surround Australian Aboriginal women’s life narratives, such as glossaries, blurbs, and epigraphs. Huggan’s argument indicates that there is a tension between what the texts say and what their various promoters say, but one would welcome more insight into the narratives’ role in creating that tension, so as to balance Huggan’s favouring of the editorial role, played usually by white male transcribers and intermediaries. Although it is true that these paratextual features are sometimes the responsibility of the writers as well as of other promoters, the point here is that the main body of the text is, in Huggan’s study, tendentiously ignored in favour of secondary sources of information when it is produced by women. Indeed, when women’s writing is on the table, intention prevails over agency. This is not the case when the authors being discussed are, for example, Rushdie, Naipaul, Achebe, or Ouloguem. In their cases, Huggan delves deep into their texts in order to explore, say, how they strategically engage with the contradictions embedded within anthropological ways of reading, or how they deal with the commercial implications of Orientalism for metropolitan mass-market tastes.

This imbalance across the gender divide suggests that Huggan’s analysis is not, in fact, gender-neutral. When dealing with women’s writing, the emphasis tendentiously falls on the packaging (e.g., paratextual elements), and not on the content of books. Throughout The Postcolonial Exotic, the strategic responses to global modes of consumption discussed are, more often than not, the strategic responses of men, rather than of women. This suggests a reluctance to account for a female capacity to strategize and mediate, something which works as a barrier to a deeper understanding of the specific ways in which marginal writers use gender and sexual difference strategically to counter, in situated contexts, global as well as local patterns of commodification of cultural difference.

Gender and the Lusophone postcolonial field: Are we there yet?

It is fair to say that Huggan’s negligence of gender issues in The Postcolonial Exotic corresponds to a real lacuna in the Lusophone academy in terms of postcolonial theories of feminism. ⁶ As Hilary Owen and Phillip Rothwell point out (2004), there is still a lot to be done:

Scholars of Portugal’s colonial experiment in Africa, apologists and critics alike, have long sought to define it in terms of its difference from British imperial rule […] Rather less attention has been paid, however, to the role that sexual difference has played in the representation of those differences, real or imagined, which have mapped out the colonial and post-colonial experiences, we define as Portuguese. (Owen and Rothwell, 2004: v)

More recently, Anna Klobucka (2009) argues that one of the greatest challenges feminists working within Lusophone literary studies face today is the accusation of critical and theoretical anachronism when dealing with the concept of gender. Klobucka draws on Susan Stanford Friedman (1998), so as to exemplify how the sufficiency of gender as the determinant of identity is currently being unsettled. To Friedman, gynocritical projects ― projects that privilege gender by focusing solely on women writers ― have the effect of marginalizing other aspects of the writer’s identity: “The new geography of identity insists that we think about women writers in relation to a fluid matrix instead of a fixed binary of male/female or masculine/feminine” (1998: 26–7). Nevertheless, as the critic quickly adds:

[T]he word beyond [beyond gynocriticism] flirts dangerously with a regressive discourse of post-feminism, suggesting that the political advocacy implicit in categories such as woman, women, or feminine is no longer necessary, that such terms reflect a naïve historical stage through which we have already passed en route to ever-greater sophistication. (Friedman, 1998: 32)

As attested by Huggan’s theorization of the commodification of cultural difference in the global market, we may be “en route to ever-greater sophistication”, but we are not there yet. Patriarchal formations remain visible in materialistic critiques of the postcolonial field. To a large extent, The Postcolonial Exotic keeps women writers out of the discussion around questions of literary profit and success, and around local negotiations of subversion and consumption, denying them the possibility of subversive agency on a theoretical level.

Marketing Lusophone oppositional thinking

Little has been done to discern the extent to which oppositional intellectual work in Lusophone postcolonial studies relates to “postcoloniality” ― understood here via Huggan, that is, as a function of postmodernity. The concern with the institutionalization of sexist rules in Portuguese colonial settings forms the basis of Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ theoretical work on Lusophone postcolonialism. In “Between Prospero and Caliban”, Santos effectively grounds Lusophone oppositional thinking on a discussion of gender difference and feminism:

What is important is to understand the sexist rules of sexuality that usually allow the white man to sleep with the black woman, but not the white woman with the black man. In other words, Portuguese colonialism calls for a strong articulation with the question of sexual discrimination and feminism. (Santos, 2002: 17)

However, the theoretical terms in which marginal women and the Portuguese private sphere have been made to perform the function of “symbols” of a given Lusophone difference are yet to be adequately addressed. How does the representation of the feminine as the mediator of a supposed Lusophone specificity add to the currency of Lusophone postcolonial discourse? In this section, I shall argue that the ostensibly oppositional writing of Santos is, to a certain extent, commercially viable because it mystifies Portuguese cultural difference along gender lines, while trying to account for gender difference and feminism. It is, for this reason, vulnerable to recuperation, something which limits its potential for anti-colonial resistance.

In “Between Prospero and Caliban”, Santos’ argument unfolds around the deficit of Portuguese colonialism, which arguably led to the creation of a reluctant, incompetent, calibanized, ambivalent Portuguese Prospero. Here, Santos re-states his working hypothesis about Portuguese semiperipherality, which was initially formulated in Pela Mão de Alice: O Social e o Político na Pós-Modernidade (Santos, 2002a: 49–67; 119–37). He argues that Portugal’s complex semiperipheral condition reproduced itself on the basis of the colonial system and “has continued to reproduce itself in the way in which Portugal has become part of the European Union” (Santos, 2002: 9). Santos’ essay takes as the basis for a situated postcolonialism the difference or specificity of Portuguese colonization. As a “weak” colonizer from the seventeenth century on, it was ascribed a subaltern status vis-à-vis hegemonic colonialism, that is, vis-à-vis British colonialism, “in relation to which the contours of Portuguese colonialism get defined as a subaltern colonialism” (Santos, 2002: 11). According to Santos, the dividing line between colonizer and colonized was dislocated, leaving Caliban and Prospero to conflate. Being a subaltern colonizer is, nonetheless, thought of by Santos as an empowering condition: “[b]eing neither an emancipatory nor an emancipated identity, he [the Portuguese Prospero] oscillated between Prospero and Caliban as if in search of Guimarães Rosa’s third margin of the river. As such, it was impossible to consolidate essentialisms” (Santos, 2002: 36).

What needs to be stressed here is that those necessarily excluded from Huggan’s theoretical postulate have been recurrently inscribed into that same master discourse by Lusophone postcolonial theory itself, which arguably privileges non-Portuguese imperial epistemologies. The postcoloniality in which Santos’ oppositional work circulates is subaltern in the sense that it intends to “talk back” to the master colonizer. As such, it is not intrinsically different from the one discussed by Huggan. On the contrary, it partakes of Huggan’s Anglophone partiality as far as resistance to master discourses of commodification is concerned. This has created an environment where the conflictive ground delineated by Huggan (between postcolonialism and postcoloniality) is significantly decentred so as to accommodate Lusophone postcolonialism directed at the postcoloniality of Anglophone theory. For as long as the constitutive tension of the postcolonial privileges non-Portuguese imperial epistemologies ― Portugal acting as a sort of special “colonized” of English imperialism ― value will be regulated by placing subversion (postcolonialism) on the Portuguese side, relegating the ex-colonized to the position of the native informant. In “Between Prospero and Caliban” the language of resistance of the formerly colonized has indeed been manipulated to account for Portugal’s “special” condition: “The question here is to determine whether the colonised by a subaltern colonialism are under-colonised or over-colonised” (Santos, 2002: 11).

Santos’ argument around the deficit of colonialism which putatively gave rise to a reluctant Portuguese Prospero significantly influences mainstream criticism undertaken from abroad (outside Portugal) that aims to chart a postcolonial map of the Lusophone world to displace the indiscriminate application of Anglophone theoretical perspectives. “Between Prospero and Caliban” emerges as one of the most cited works in the Lusophone academic field. For instance, Paulo de Medeiros rightly describes the article in question as a “turning point in its own” (Medeiros, 2007: 2), and as a text that “signalled a decisive shift in the way in which lusophone postcoloniality was approached” (2007: 2). Santos’ essay is then cited in seven of the volume’s thirteen chapters.

Notwithstanding, the extent to which critical work on the difference of Portuguese colonialism is directed at, and against, Anglo-Saxon colonialism, is not naively reproduced across the board. One important critical voice is that of Ana Paula Ferreira, whose analysis of the intertextual dimension of Santos’ essay sheds light not only on the Lusotropical “raceless” trap into which postcolonial emancipatory thought falls, but also on the poetic tradition of colonial and anti-colonial expression not always referenced in Santos’ essay (Ferreira, 2007; 2012). Ferreira argues that Santos’ critical writing on the “difference” of Portuguese colonialism coincides not only with Anglo-Saxon theoretical codes but also with a specific flow of oppositionality that stems from “the epistemic privilege of Spanish-America” (Ferreira, 2007: 24). ⁷ Ferreira describes the effects of the epistemological dominance of European thought by drawing on Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel’s critique of modernity (1995). She traces the ways in which an instrumental and economicist understanding of postcolonialism kept Portugal and Spain out of the discussion because these countries did not assimilate the rationality of the Enlightenment which emerged in the eighteenth century and constituted Occidental Europe as the centre of imperial culture and civilization: “As a concept of time-space, it [a universally construed European modernity] excludes all those to the south, colonizers and colonized alike, branding them backward or primitive” (Ferreira, 2007: 23). Ferreira’s call onto the scene of a critique of modernity introduced by Latin America serves to show not only the erasure of Portugal and Spain from European discussions related to postcolonialism but also “the near erasure of the Portuguese empire”, which is the norm “in the alternative postcolonial thinking advanced by Latin Americanists” (Ferreira, 2007: 24).

One of Ferreira’s key arguments here is that geographically and culturally distant voices marginalized by European modernity, such as Latin American and Portuguese voices, actually converge in their alternative postcolonial arguments. This oppositional “confluence” with Latin Americanists (such as Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo) shows how Santos’ oppositional ideas tend to move with a particular flow of opposition, not always referenced in the critic’s texts. So, what is striking about Santos’ theoretical output is that, while we are told about Portugal’s long-time “otherness” in Anglo-Saxon imperial terms (using Shakespeare’s 1623 play The Tempest to describe colonizers [“Prospero”] and colonized [“Caliban”]), we are also given the ideological location from which Santos’ oppositional discourse flows, which corresponds to the alternative thinking advanced by Spanish-America. In this scenario, Lusophone postcolonialism is paradoxically located according to a double displacement: one that links it to discourses of colonialism produced in the global north, while also rooting it in discourses of resistance springing from the global south. Santos’ argument is structured according to this theoretical flexibility: between the postcoloniality of the core and the postcolonialism of the periphery. This flexibility arguably reveals Portugal’s anxiety of location as a semiperipheral country on a theoretical level. Santos’ success within and beyond Portugal owes to the skill with which he manipulates this duality in his politicization of the struggle over the value of cultural difference.

One reason for concern is that, in the process of crafting an apparently highly flexible theoretical model that works also as a metaphor for Luso-difference, marginal women are simultaneously appropriated as symbolic reifications of that very difference. A key concern in Hilary Owen’s approach to Mozambican women writers is precisely to unsettle Santos’ grounding of the difference of Portuguese postcolonialism in the reified notion of difference (the physical experience of miscegenation) which arguably ties marginal women to physical (not metaphorical) hybridity: “As hybridity’s passive victims, they thus embody a material, national embodiment of ‘Portuguese postcolonial theory’ per se” (Owen, 2007: 31). As pointed out by Owen, Santos’ dissection of the Portuguese alternative narrative of colonialism productively interrogates Bhabha’s theorizations of hybridity and ambivalence in Anglophone postcolonial theory (Owen, 2007: 28–31). One problem with Bhabha’s affirmation of multiple differences is that it does not acknowledge “the specific role played by gendered power relations in historically male-protagonized negotiations of cultural and political authority” (Owen, 2007: 29). As such, a major point of contention for Santos’ attempt to map out an alternative narrative of colonialism in Portuguese is “[t]he persistence of an unacknowledged sexual hierarchy behind Bhabha’s affirmation of multiple differences” (Owen, 2007: 30). More than claiming hybridity, its abstractly subversive nature must be questioned in a colonial context where hybridity has been more physical than abstract. In the process, however, Santos also locks women inside their bodies-turned-chalk-boards onto which postcolonial theory is written. In other words, Santos’ critique of Bhabha’s notion of hybridity is responsible, in Owen’s opinion, not only for the transformation of feminism into a “boundary marker that can demarcate postcolonial Portugueseness in historical, material terms” (Owen, 2007: 31), but also for the transformation of the native female body into a material function from which opposition should be engendered.

Something similar could be said of the theoretical terms in which Santos instrumentalizes the Portuguese private sphere. Typically a domestic and feminine space, the private sphere is perceived by Santos as a repository of the advantage (or difference) of the Portuguese society in relation to other European countries. This appropriation is most visible in his development of the term, Portuguese “pre-post-modernity” (Santos, 2002a). The term corresponds to a specific paradigm of post-modernity in Portugal understood as the product of a reinvention of features that, in the eyes of most European and world central countries, are said to be archaic and traditional: family technologies (namely, family agriculture), “old” political practices (in other words, representative democracy) and interpretation monopolies (of the Church, the State, and the family). It is noteworthy that Santos defines “pre-post-modernity” by figuring the contradiction in the temporal representation (“pre-post”) according to a focus on the local, which corresponds to the gendered space of the private sphere.

The double movement of displacing (geographically and epistemologically) Lusophone postcolonial discourse is thus followed by an attempt to pin its difference down to the feminine. This makes Luso-difference increasingly harder to define, but also easier to sell (to both the global north and global south). Santos’ theoretical endeavours produce an oppositional discourse that is malleable enough to be strategically complicit not only with the “postcolonialities” of the north and the “postcolonialisms” of the south, but also with discourses of the exotic, which are gender inflected. As we have seen, the marginal, racialized feminine is “always already” figured as exotic, and the female body has been historically commodified as a literal performance of the exotic. The logic of this double displacement is, in fact, very marketable.

Clearly, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with being marketable. As argued by Huggan, “to see the commodity culture as necessarily compromising and/or imperialistic would be as absurd as to see all postcolonial writers/thinkers as heroic agents of liberation” (Huggan, 2001: 7). By stating that Santos’ ostensibly oppositional writing is commercially viable, I am not making a moral judgement about his work, but simply noting the extent to which it exoticizes, as well as politicizes, Portuguese colonial and Lusophone postcolonial difference in terms that dangerously reconfirm gendered exoticized perspectives directed at Lusophone postcolonial realities. This is why existing Lusophone oppositional thinking may come at the expense of knowledge. It may be useful to recall the constitutive paradox of exoticism, succinctly formulated by Tzvetan Todorov: “Knowledge is incompatible with exoticism, but lack of knowledge is in turn irreconcilable with praise of others; yet praise without knowledge is exactly what exoticism aspires to be” (Todorov, 1993: 265).

Conclusion

Gender: The third margin of a river called “global alterity industry”

Is it possible, then, to use strategic exoticism productively without dropping the struggle against traditional male authority, and without neglecting more subtle market-mediated processes of subordination? In order to tackle the possibilities opened up by strategic exoticism, I argue that a more complex view of the dual conflict underlying it ― between postcolonialism and postcoloniality ― is needed. By this I mean a view that explicitly acknowledges the workings of the gender and sexual difference variable, which is kept relatively hidden in Huggan’s account. As mentioned above, Huggan defines the dilemma of the postcolonial exotic as marking the intersection between contending regimes of value: postcolonialism and postcoloniality. Huggan’s definition of the pair is motivated by Ella Shohat’s provocative suggestion that “the relationships between ‘post-colonial’, ‘post-coloniality’ and ‘post-colonialism’ have yet to be addressed more rigorously” (Shohat, 1992: 112). Shohat’s emphasis on “relationship” is developed by Huggan, who argues that these do not correspond to entirely stable and opposite terms. The story is not simply about a two-sided conflict ambiguously played out by a handful of marginal authors adhering to strategic exoticism, but about a more complex conflict, “in which these two apparently conflicting regimes of value are mutually entangled” (Huggan, 2001: 6). This implies that a regime of value positing itself as “resistance” does not always “interrogate the institutional processes by which value is acquired, exchanged and transmitted” (Huggan, 2001: 28). To recognize that postcolonialism and postcoloniality are ambiguously tangled up, as Huggan does, is to accept the possibility that postcolonialism need not be in dire conflict with postcoloniality for resistance to emerge as a commodified vehicle of symbolic power. In a nutshell, the possibility of commodification is embedded within resistance itself.

Much is to be gained by feminism from spelling out the ambivalences at the heart of the conflict between resistance and the global market. ⁸ But in order for the dilemma of the postcolonial exotic to be theoretically promising for feminists, it is necessary to investigate how it tracks the contours and meanings associated with gender and sexual difference ― the ghostly variables in Huggan’s study ― in situated contexts. While it is true that gender and sexuality are “always already there” in The Postcolonial Exotic, the fact that Huggan does not directly address them contributes to leaving the notion of exoticism relatively undisputed.

The challenge, therefore, lies in the ability to produce theory that is able to map the collision between resistance and the global market by making visible the gendered subject caught in the middle of the collision. Gender cuts across the collision of postcolonialism and postcoloniality, working as a mediating agent between the two primary regimes of value. As the third element at work in the dilemma of the postcolonial exotic, it locates and historicizes the third margin of the river called “global alterity industry” where the combat between resistance and the market is fought. One way in which attention to gender will lend substance to Huggan’s concept of strategic exoticism is by locating the discussion of how marginality is valued and affected by global and local markets in situated contexts. This emphasis on location will lead to the realization that the impossibility of speaking outside of the global circulation of power may not be uniform across the gender divide. This is not to suggest that attention to gender and sexual difference is the way out of the dilemma of the postcolonial exotic. As the work of Santos exemplifies, gender and sexuality are not spaces of resistance outside systems of power and authority. They are indeed complicit with given circuits of resistance and with situated systems of consumption of cultural difference. So the question here is not whether it is possible to escape global markets and circuits of power, which I believe it is not. Rather, I am interested in asking how marginal women writers inhabit the literary marketplace and postcolonial literary studies, and whether invisible hierarchies of value are maintained and even imposed by existing theories’ treatment of gender and sexual difference variables. Engaging fully with this type of critique will support the conclusion that many set patterns of difference ― and set patterns of reading difference ― between metropolitan locations and their peripheral others are in fact the result of a process of silencing.