Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

IAN ANTHONY BETHELL
These braids of cultural information are arguably stories and oral histories
that women continued to pass on to their children and grandchildren. This
was the only time that they assumed a voice for themselves, thereby supposing
a humanity that slavery did not allow: to have a voice meant that
one had to be human. Conceding to the Caribbean woman’s humanity
would thus undermine the enslaver’s ability to continue to cast her in the
role of chattel. 66
Silencing other stories or versions is accomplished easily by the official
discourse’s authority over the object of representation. Thus producing
a Caribbean that is subject to others. 67 The term, subject, taken at its
semantic level indicates that the West Indian woman will be subjected
by whomever is in power. As victim of subjugation, she is made into an
object, almost completely disempowered. Gikandi explains:
To be a colonial subject in the nineteenth century, then, is to exist in a
cultural cul-de-sac: you cannot speak or exist except in terms established
by the imperium; you have to speak to exist, but you can utter only what
the dominant allows you to utter; even when you speak against the culture
of the colonialism, you speak its language because it is what constitutes
what you are. 68
The double-bind in which the subject finds herself is obvious. The argument
that images of Caribbean or black women are overwhelmingly negative
would then become even more poignant. 69 Resistance to the dominant
discourse and the cultural homogenisation and supremacy that result from
it becomes a significant tool in the struggle to articulate a self or an identity
that has been negated. 70
In conjunction with this negation of the black woman’s identity is
the cultural outsider’s judgement of her using a set of values and morals
that she, as an Antillian woman, enslaved and poor, could never hope to
66
See: Bush (1990). See: Foucault’s use of the term ‘subject’. Michel Foucault,
‘The Subject and Power’, in Michele Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics ed. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, (Illinois, University
of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 212.
67
See: Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others.
68
Gikandi (1996), op. cit. p. 142.
69
See also: David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism,
Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Durham, Duke UP, 1993);
Hill Collins (1990).
70
See: Bell Hooks, ‘talking back’, and ‘marginality as site of resistance’, in Out
There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures ed. by Russell Ferguson,
Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West, (New York, The New
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), pp. 337-344.
• HOMINES • Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 309