Handmaids Tale 1 Survival and Neo Colonialism Lecture

Handmaid’s. Tale (1) Survival and Neo Colonialism

Lecture Map • ‘The Great Canadian Victim Complex’: White settlers as colonised? • Feminism and Neo-Colonialism – a new model? • Nature AND Society 2

“Canadian Graffiti” (The Simpsons) 3

Canada 4

Atwood’s 1972 publications • Surfacing • Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature 5

• ‘[W]e are all immigrants to this place, even if we were born here: the country is too big for anyone to inhabit completely, and in the parts unknown to us we move in fear, exiles and invaders’ [Margaret Atwood, ‘Afterword’, The Journals of Susannah Moodie (Toronto: OUP, 1970), p. 62]. 6

• ‘What a lost person needs is a map of the territory …. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the produce of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive’ (Atwood, Survival, pp. 18 -19). 7

• ‘At the beginning of the 21 st century, Surfacing and Survival may be assessed as the products of 1970 s English-Canadian cultural nationalism, taking their place in the history of continuing debates about postcolonialism in Canada’ [Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 37]. 8

Quebec 9

Ontario 10

Nunavut 11

‘The HT once again prioritises gender over racial oppression in its displacement of the political discourse of African-American emancipation onto that of white women’s resistance to patriarchy…’ (182). Maria Lauret 12

However, Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson points out, ‘Atwood is far from the only woman writer to equate women with slaves. In fact comparisons between women and slaves in the texts of British and American women were most common in the nineteenth century (Winter 2). That a Canadian woman should revive the comparison and further embed it in her very mode of address suggests that the similarity has not yet died. 13

However, one is not obligated to condemn Atwood for her appropriation, for The Handmaid’s Tale represents an ironic use of this equation. Africans and African-Americans were not enslaved through their complacency or their wide-spread complicity. Atwood suggests that this is where the comparison between women and slaves ends. Women collude in their own captivity, she implies, by remaining invisible, by subscribing to restrictive fashions, by renouncing power and by accepting victimhood. ’ (189) 14

Intersectionality feminism 15

#blacklivesmatter But the hegemony persists: http: //www. theguardian. com/worl d/commentisfree/2016/may/22/bl ack-lives-matter-islamophobiabeyonce-cultural-appropriation 16

Cultural Imperialism • Imperialism (empire building) at a cultural level (not necessarily accompanied by physical imperialism/invasion) • Cultural hegemony: one culture dominating another. 17

• ‘[I]t is increasingly obvious to some writers that man is now more destructive towards Nature than Nature can be towards man; and, furthermore, that the destruction of Nature is equivalent to self-destruction on the part of man’ (Survival, p. 60). 18

Corporate Control • http: //www. monsanto. com/pages/default. asp x • http: //foodfirst. org/the-us-food-aid-industryfood-for-peace-or-food-for-profit/ 19

Neo-colonialism • Neocolonialism, neo-colonialism or neoimperialism is the geopolitical practice of using capitalism, business globalization, and cultural imperialism to influence a country, in lieu of either direct military control (imperialism) or indirect political control (hegemony). 20

Thai Union • http: //www. greenpeace. org/usa/news/green peace-calls-on-thai-union-to-lead-on-humanrights-in-response-to-global-trafficking-inpersons-report/ 21

Jason W. Moore provides the imperative for a complete theoretical reworking and synthesis of Marxist, environmental, and feminist thought by asserting: “I think many of us understand intuitively – even if our analytical frames lag behind – that capitalism is more than an “economic” system, and even more than a social system. Capitalism is a way of organizing nature. ” https: //viewpointmag. com/2015/09/28/capitalism-in-the-web-of-life-aninterview-with-jason-moore/ 22

• Haraway’s work is grounded in the history of science and biology. In Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, she focuses on the metaphors and narratives that direct the science of primatology. She asserts that there is a tendency to masculinize the stories about "reproductive competition and sex between aggressive males and receptive females [that] facilitate some and preclude other types of conclusions" 23

• ‘[W]hat I’m really into in that book is the great Canadian victim complex. If you define yourself as innocent then nothing is ever your fault – it is always somebody else doing it to you, and until you stop defining yourself as a victim that will always be true. 24

• . It will always be somebody else’s fault, and you will always be the object of that rather than somebody who has any choice or takes responsibility for their life. And this is not only the Canadian stance towards their world, but the usual female one [WRITING IN 70 S]. 25

• “Look what a mess I am and it’s all their fault. ” And Canadians do that too. Look at poor innocent us, we are morally better than they. We do not burn people in Vietnam, and those bastards and coming in and taking away our country. ” Well the real truth of the matter is that Canadians are selling it. ’ 26