Literature review example

This is twice as long as you need, but it is from my thesis… Which also means that it is a level of articulation that I am not expecting, but you will be able to glean from it the structure and content expected.  I have no other readily available example that is not from sciences.

Literature review
22 Jan. 2010
English 392: World Literature
Word count: 1208

Current critical theories and the heterogeneity of women’s lived experiences

In stating that “acknowledging the impact of empire on the British women’s movement is one of the most urgent projects of late twentieth-century Western feminism” (137), Antoinette Burton, in “The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and ‘The Indian Woman,’ 1865-1915” (1992), reveals the current academic interest in the conjunction of feminist, colonial discourse, and post-colonial theoretical positions.  Judith Newman, in “The Untold and the Retold Story: Intertextuality in Post-Colonial Women’s Writing” (1991), argues that the indigenous voices of ex-colonial societies have been silenced or appropriated by the colonisers, and post-colonial authors are now engaging in “self-conscious project[s] to revise the ideological assumptions created by a Euro-centric domination of their culture, and to undermine and delegitimise the centrality of that of the West” (24).  Such claims parallel feminist arguments that women are constantly silenced through our culture’s predominately male expression of female reality.  Modern critics are increasingly aware of the interconnections between feminism and imperialism, and ceaselessly attempt to work through the inconsistencies in many female authors’ literary messages.  But, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty articulates in “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse” (1993), the current, often aggressive, critical debate between “white western feminists” and “feminist women of colour” (197), rather than formulating a basis of greater understanding among heterogeneous groups of modern women, often replicates the very contradictions these critics seek to expose.

Because, as Edward Said points out in Orientalism (1978), “no one has ever devised a method of detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life or from his involvement with [ideology]” (10), representation is necessarily influenced (however consciously or unconsciously) by the representative; representations of any position other than one’s own thereby risks the charges of mis-representation and racism levelled by many feminist critics.  Sara Suleri, in “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition” (1993), agrees with bell hooks’s concern that even the “third-world” feminist, “unwittingly assuming the role of mediator … re-inscribes a colonial paradigm” (qtd. in Suleri, “Woman” 251), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985), posits that “the emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism” (262).  In “Overworlding the ‘Third World’” (1993), Ania Loomba exposes what she sees as the danger of colonial discourse analysis (when practised by a white western female) in her observation that while “there is no doubt that the concerns of current discussions of colonialism in Western academies … remain that of dismantling not only imperialist and colonialist versions of history but also their contemporary effects”, due to the very nature of their critical activity, western academics’ “own interrogation is both an example of, and is necessarily concerned with, the agency, voice, subjectivity of individual and collective colonized subjects; hence colonial discourse theories (like others) participate in the very process they seek to analyse” (306).  Thus, one of the central concerns of many feminist critics today (of varying ethnicities) becomes the representation of third-world women by white first-world female critics, many of whom are accused of assuming a globally homogeneous definition of Woman, much as Victorian feminists are accused of having done.

The related question of authorial authenticity (modern and historic) has similarly generated two opposing and seemingly irreconcilable critical positions.  While some critics claim that no one can speak outside of her own subject position, other critics demand an attempt to comprehend silenced women’s situations, which can only be achieved through some form of articulation on their behalf.  On the one side, critics such as Mohanty argue that the presupposition of Woman as a category that can “be applied universally and cross-culturally” has resulted in a “homogeneous notion of the oppression of women as a group … which, in turn, produces the image of an ‘average third-world woman’” (199-200).  Mohanty identifies the problem as the critical reduction of multitudinous, heterogeneous forms of female oppression to those experienced by white western women.  In support of this opinion, Caroline Ramazanoglu, in Feminism and the Contradictions of Oppression (1989), is adamant that “new wave feminism” is a cause of, rather than a cure for, the “bitter divisions between women on the issue of racial and ethnic difference” (136); in “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-colonialism’” (1993), Anne McClintock declares that “the singular category ‘Woman’ has been discredited as a bogus universal for feminism, incapable of distinguishing between the varied histories and imbalances in power among women” (293); and Firdous Azim, in The Colonial Rise of the Novel (1993), recognises the importance of questioning “the homogeneity and authenticity of the subject that early feminism took for granted” (27).  Following these lines of argument, Jenny Sharpe sees “the demand on contemporary feminism” as a need “to disrupt the taken-for-grantedness of such categories through an excavation of the histories that produce racial and sexual difference” (222).  Sharpe herself attempts this archeological exercise in Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (1993), but her strong focus on male authors’ writing ultimately inhibits a comprehensive expression of the female authors’ subversion of the patriarchally-defined “figure of woman” her “colonial texts” present.  Burton is more successful in exposing women’s historic production of homogeneous images of womanhood, revealing as she does the discursive strategies the Victorian feminist press employed in its representations of Indian women.

While such investigations are valid and useful, their demand for authorial authenticity—their focus on representations of “others” as exclusively oppressive—means (in the words of Dennis Porter in “Orientalism and Its Problems” [1993]) that “Orientalism [that is, cultural mis-representation] in one form or another is not only what we have but all that we can ever have” (151).  Sara Suleri equally believes that

“[t]he claim to authenticity—only a black can speak for a black; only a postcolonial subcontinental feminist can adequately represent the lived experience of that culture—points to the great difficulty posited by the ‘authenticity’ of female racial voices in the great game that claims to be the first narrative of what the ethnically constructed woman is deemed to want.”  (247)

And Adrienne Rich expressed in “Disloyal to Civilization” as early as 1978 that “more ‘political’ white feminists still often [felt] vulnerable to the charge that ‘white middle-class women’ or ‘bourgeois feminists’ are despicable creatures of privilege whose oppression is meaningless beside the oppression of black, Third World, or working class women and men”, and admonishes against this “ludicrous and fruitless game of ‘hierarchies of oppression,’ which has the savour of medieval theology” (289).  One of the few critics who successfully avoids the ideological quagmire which threatens white female critics addressing issues of racism, Vron Ware, author of Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (1992), positions her investigation of white women’s involvement with black women’s issues from an explicitly white, western, perspective despite—or perhaps because of—her awareness of other feminists’ “great hostility towards any woman who tried to speak about a condition or identity of which she did not have direct experience” (20).  Again, the hostility Ware detects complicates issues of representation: “feminist women of colour” seem to be demanding that white, western, feminist academics focus on issues of racism (but without a white perspective) and, at the same time, that these same white, western, feminist academics not speak from outside their own subject positions.

Works Cited

Azim, Firdous.  The Colonial Rise of the Novel.  London: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Burton, Antoinette M.  “The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and ‘The Indian Woman,’ 1865-1915.”  Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance.  Ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel.  Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1992.  137-57. Print.

Loomba, Ania.  “Overworlding the ‘Third World’.”  Williams and Chrisman 305-39. Print.

McClintock, Anne.  “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-colonialism’.” Williams and Chrisman 291-304. Print.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade.  “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse.” Williams and Chrisman 193-95. Print.

Newman, Judie.  “The Untold Story and the Retold Story: Intertextuality in Post-Colonial Women’s Writing.”  Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia.  Ed. Susheila Nasta.  London: Women’s, 1991.  24-42. Print.

Porter, Dennis.  “Orientalism and Its Problems.” Williams and Chrisman 150-61. Print.

Ramazanoglu, Caroline.  Feminism and the Contradictions of Oppression.  London, New York: Routledge, 1989. Print.

Rich, Adrienne.  “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia (1978).”  On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978.  1979.  London: Virago, 1986.  275-310. Print.

Said, Edward.  Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient.  1978.  London: Penguin, 1991. Print.

Sharpe, Jenny.  Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text.  Minneapolis, MI: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty.  “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.”  Social Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 262-80. Print.

Suleri, Sara.  “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition.” Williams and Chrisman 221-43.

Ware, Vron.  Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History.  London & New York: Verso, 1992.  Print.

Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, eds.  Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Hemel Hampstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.  Print.