Kanneh verses Cixous

As a black feminist woman she is perfectly placed to realise that the suggestion of Cixous to meld all woman into a seamless whole unjustly shows disregard for the identity of those who have been subjected to imperialist endeavour. elieves that the female body has been subjected to oppression and propaganda from male dominated institutions and social practices. Kanneh, noting how Cixous insists that the woman's body, her "feminine essence", instructs her language maintains that this runs counter to Lacan's thinking of language being a symbolic system (Magezis. Voicing her objection Kanneh argues that Cixous validates her use of colonialist and black metaphor by asserting that the personal history of the individual woman blends into the history of all womankind and, importantly, with womankind's national and world history. And black women, she concludes, are not in a position to cast off the factors of race and class despite how the maintaining of these might be seen, under Cixous' view, to hinder the feminist struggle.

To do this Kanneh offers, as accepted knowledge, that "racial oppression has always led to the creation of the body from obsessive fantasies of biology and environment" (p296) .

She uses this point to argue that Cixous attempts to build a female history, something Mary Daley might term "Herstory", which is free from any implication of colonialism. Her body being so projected then becomes purely her own voice which exceeds the limitations of masculine constructed discourse. Kanneh highlights that as a child, Pecola enters into the discourse of social norms through the children's books. The child sees that via her books, Fathers are white, big and strong, mothers are white and happy and the houses in which they live are green and white.

By examining the evidence in Love, Mourning and Metaphor, I can draw some very clear and distinct notions about Kanneh's political position in relation to other feminist theorists. She sees Cixous as forwarding the idea that any divisions between class, race and nation should be disregarded to unify women in a "post historical Utopian home" (K&S p296).

Taking the term in context, we see that term is used to signify a general ability to have influence on the decision making across the whole social spectrum, from home to government. Kanneh argues that in the post colonial it is this type of contrast that makes up black women's realities

Kanneh's Position.