Emergent Voices of Southeast Asian Women Novelists

Influential historiographics of anti-colonial nationalism suggest that women's cultural identities-laid out in codes by which they belonh to their kin group and sharein its collective future-are determined by the male elite's conterntious relationship with imperialist modernity. The implication of such studies is that the new women's investment in her people's goals of gaining freedom from racialmasculinist domination and building independent nations inhibits her ability to self-actualize and intervene in patriatchal national history. Many feminist post-colonial scholars explore ways to theorize women's agency in nationalist contexts. They also avoid Western postmodernists liberalist faith in individual agency, and the allied binary model in which feminist subjectivity is "synthesized from fusions of outsider identitie" positioned on the utopian margins of masculinist-racist regimes. Instead, post-colonial feminists explore how knowledge/power work pervasively and invisibly in capitalist modernities, constituting and "enabling" every subject position dominant subordinate oppositional.