Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses

Scholars from a wide range of fields, many of them African but all working in the US, do not repeat their previous condemnation of female circumcision nor dwell on its nature, history, and practice. Rather they speak to the complexity of the imperialist project by identifying the problem as emanating from the West, and exposing how condescension towards Africans by women of color from the US and Asia mimics the imperial arrogance of white explorers, imperialists, and colonizers. The hierarchy upon which the imperial project rests, they say, is not bipolar, but multilayered and complex; many of their essays scrutinize the unsolicited interventions by two feminists of color, Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmer. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR