Post Colonial Feminism

This week in class we learned about Post Colonial Feminism. This has opened a new way for me to look at non-white and non-western women. Until this discussion I looked past how there is a set generalization put on these women. This is called the danger of a single story. Chimamanda Adichie is a writer and she helps explain how when we only hear a single story about another person we tend to have a misunderstanding of a culture. Adichie is from Nigeria and when she moved to the United States she talks about the expectations put on her for being a Nigeria woman. An example she gives is when her American roommate asked if she could listen to her tribal music and she goes onto say that she put on a Mariah Carey album. These are the dangers we face believing a single story we hear. Adichie also brings up John Locke's writing about Africa being negative and therefore opening up this whole view on Africa for many people to be negative. The way to avoid these dangers is to realize that one single story does not define a culture. In this class on the first week we learned the most important topic that has personally helped guide me to better understand Gender and Communications and that was gender expectations. This is putting expectations on everything in society to be a certain. For a girl to dress a certain way and act a certain. It goes the same way with cultures and colonial feminism because we put expectations on these women to act how we have read about their culture. Last semester I took a cultural anthropology class and it talked about ethnocentrism which is the belief that your own culture has a superiority on all other cultures. The only way to relieve this ethnocentrism was to go visit the culture and live their life through their eyes instead of just reading about it from an article or someone else's point of view. That is what Adichie is asking us to do in her writings and speeches, is to not be close minded to just one story and realize that their are many stories that make up a culture.