Uma Narayan

Works

• 1997Dislocating Cultures

  Identities, traditions and Third-World feminism: against the idea that feminism is a Western import and that “culture” explains the lives of Indian women.

Position

“Dislocating Cultures” argues against the picture, shared by Western observers and Third-World nationalists, in which “culture” explains the lives of women in India. Nationalists defend practices such as dowry or sati as tradition, forgetting that these are often colonial-era constructions; Western feminists treat “death by culture” as the fate of Indian women while explaining domestic violence at home sociologically. Narayan points out that feminism in India arose from Indian women’s own experience, not as a Western import, and that charges of “Westernisation” are used to silence them. She argues for a feminism that takes material and political conditions, rather than culture, as its starting point.

Life & context

Uma Narayan (born 1958) grew up in Bombay, studied philosophy at Bombay University and Poona and took her doctorate at Rutgers University in 1990. She has taught at Vassar College since then, where she is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities. With Sandra Harding she co-edited “Decentering the Center”, a collection on feminist philosophy from a postcolonial and multicultural perspective, and she has written on cultural relativism, human rights and the ethics of care.

Further main works

• Decentering the Center (ed. with Sandra Harding, 2000)