Beside the West : postcolonial women writers , the nation , and the globalised world ; Elleke Boehmer Transnationalism for women

Feminist postcolonial studies have widely recognised that postcolonial women writers from Africa, India and elsewhere in the (Third) world, intent upon speaking their identity through narrative, have been hard-pressed to write a space for themselves either within or even on the margins of the postcolonial nation. However, by engaging with their condition as women vis-à-vis that nation, or in relation to a nationally circumscribed space, these writers have succeeded even so in addressing issues of belonging that have both national and trans-local resonances, on occasion establishing cross-border affiliations as they proceed. With this in mind, I want to spend the first part of this essay looking more closely at feminist postcolonial understandings of the cross-national or translocal, before moving on to discuss the inflections of these terms in the work of the contemporary writers Yvonne Vera, from Zimbabwe, and Arundhati Roy. (The terms are less obviously tied to significations of ‘the global’ and the operations of ‘multinational’ corporations than is ‘transnational’; ‘international’ of course denotes an important Marxist legacy of internationalist organisation which has historically, however, often sidelined women’s issues.) In what ways have feminist critics of women’s writing found in the cross-national and diasporic a hospitable axis on which to place their reading of this work? To attempt this question should give a perspective on the hegemony of the transnational in postcolonial criticism; those ways in which the postcolonial novel today, defined as diasporic and multilingual, yet often Eurocentric in reference, is seen in contradistinction to the 1960s novel of decolonisation based in the nation. By way of bringing these queries round full circle: is it the case that the nation’s exclusion of women has contributed (along with