Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

WOMEN OF COLOUR: RECONTEXTUALISING ‘OTHERNESS’
Collins further examines these distortions or controlling images in her
book, Black Feminist Thought:
The controlling images applied to Black women are so uniformly negative
that they almost necessitate resistance if Black women are to have
any positive self-image. For Black women, constructed knowledge of
self emerges from the struggle to reject controlling images and integrate
knowledge deemed personally important, usually knowledge essential to
Black women’s survival. 20
Collins aptly employs the words ‘applied to Black women’ to illustrate
the external construction of these images. 21 The task facing Caribbean
women, as Collins argues, then becomes the possibility of liberating the
self from within an overwhelmingly negative enclosure of colonially produced
images. The images applied to black women to which Collins refers
are similar to those discussed by Barbara Bush: ‘The common image of the
woman slave, culled from planter and abolitionist sources alike, is a compound
of the scarlet woman, the domineering matriarch and the passive
workhorse’. 22 Planters and abolitionists imposed those controlling images
to ‘Other’ the black woman and by so doing insisted on her alterity. These
labels dehumanised the Caribbean woman as did Froude’s and Long’s
eyewitness reports. The gaze once again controls. Bush focuses on the
overwhelmingly negative consolidation of the black or Caribbean woman
within a long-lasting construct that changes with time but still delimits her
potential. 23 The stereotype changes and adapts as time progresses so that
it remains appropriate and applicable even though the exact situation has
been altered. Thus, Bush demonstrates the virtual impossibility of any easy
deconstruction of the historical enclosure around the Antillian subject.
Ultimately, and problematically, these damaging stereotypes are long
lasting and resilient. Hulme also discusses the steadfast nature of stereotypes:
Mary Wolstencraft to Jamaica Kincaid (New York, Columbia UP, 1993);
Moira Ferguson, ed. The Hart Sisters: Early African Caribbean Writers,
Evangelicals, and Radicals (Lincoln, Nebraska UP, 1993); Bell Hooks, Ain’t
I a Woman (London, Pluto, 1982), p. 85; See also: Claire Midgley, ed. Gender
and Imperialism ‘Introduction: Gender and imperialism: mapping the
connections’, pp. 1-20, and chapter 7 ‘Anti-slavery and the Root of ‘imperial
feminism’, op. cit., pp. 161-179.
20
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (London, Unwin Hyman, 1990),
p. 95.
21
See also: Senior (1992), op cit., p. 3-4; See also: Hulme (1986); Gikandi (1996);
Spurr (1993).
22
Bush (1990), op. cit., p. 5.
23
Bush (1990), op. cit., p. 13.
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Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 • HOMINES •