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Jamaica Kincaid's compact and succinct story "Girl," the lead story in the collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), has been lauded as one of the premier works in Kincaid's corpus, particularly her discourse on the making of "woman" in postcolonial Caribbean contexts. The text is essentially a set of instructions offered by an adult (assumed to be a mother), laying out the script for the performance of womanhood in the fictional society in which the female child is expected to live and perform her gender. "Girl"'s emphasis on performative acts reiterates the inextricable link between gender and performance. Undoubtedly, this landmark Kincaid story is in dialogue with Butler's theorization of the centrality of stylized acts in the creating and crafting of gendered selves. Less well known is Oonya Kempadoo's debut novel Buxton Spice (1999). Buxton Spice chronicles the experiences of four pubescent girls in 1970s Guyana as they learn about, participate in, and challenge some gender expectations of their immediate and wider communities. The story is told from the point of view of Lula, who keenly observes the ways in which gender roles are enacted and how these roles may be re-enacted. Her observations alert the reader to the novel's preoccupation with uncovering, or perhaps reconfiguring, how gender roles might be at once imagined and played out in contemporary Caribbean societies. Both texts illustrate how the tensions and contradictions surrounding the constructions of womanhood, and in Buxton Spice, manhood, are engaged through performative acts, some of which ostensibly conform to prescribed gender roles but that actually undermine them.

"Critical examination of stories originating in everyday individual experiences of oppression as reenacted in Theater of the Oppressed and as articulated in the speech performances of participatory budgeting meetings shows how the rhetoric of oppression operates either to reproduce or to transform historically established cultural practices. The application of theories of mimesis, performance, representation, experience, and frame analysis helps explain how cultural patterns counter Theater of the Oppressed's proposals, simply providing a cathartic release, and how public participation in budgetary meetings is effective in producing social change. Um olhar crítico das experiências individuais com opressão re-encenadas no Teatro do Oprimido e articuladas nas falas de residentes nos distritos do orçamento participativo mostra como as retóricas de opressão opera para reproduzir ou transformar as práticas culturais estabelecidas históricamente. O uso de teorias de mimesis, performance, representação, experiência e analisis de ponto de referência social ajuda em compreender como os padrões culturais agem contra a proposta de transformação social no Teatro do Oprimido, providenciando nada mais que uma liberação catártica, e exemplifica como a participação pública no orçamento do governo é mais eficaz em trazer mudanças sociais."

Subjugated bodies continue to be missing from classrooms, faculty meetings, and educational structures everywhere. Where are the excluded bodies? Where is the untheorized visceral experience of everyday discrimination? Possibilities of inclusiveness must be viscerally felt, not simply disembodiedly spoken. Merely claiming to be a progressive teacher-writer isn't enough to achieve a decolonizing praxis. This claim needs to come from an embodied performance in the classroom, a place where teachers and students alike can perform the scars of oppression on their bodies. Teacher and student bodies, in-between the colonial and postcolonial experience, can then become more present in teaching and praxis.

The essays in this issue of Women: A Cultural Review all originated in a seminar series that forms one strand in a research project with which I am involved, in the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Now in its third and final year, the project has been exploring non-linear and fractured narratives in writing and performance, not just in formalistic terms, but in particular through raising questions about the relationship between these forms and some of the intercultural transformations and political changes that have occurred in the modern world.1 How far can such non-linear and multi-stranded narratives be seen as a response to the increasing interaction of different cultures that has resulted from the colonial, postcolonial and post-cold war reconfigurations of the world, and to the complex and contested societies that emerged in their wake? If we are coming to see that cultures can be understood as collections of narratives, not only stories into which we are born, as Lyotard puts it, but also stories we learn to tell, how do these fractured forms explore the competing and conflicting narratives we meet in our culturally diverse society.

The life narratives of cô Nhựt, a former communist guerilla fighter and political prisoner during the American War in Vietnam, illuminate a dynamic politics of iteration and innovation at play within each act of remembering. Cô Nhựt lives in Ho Chi Minh City and is part of a women veteran's civic association called the Former Women Political Prisoner Performance Group. She is also a national and international advocate against the use of chemical warfare and a supporter of people living with Agent Orange-related disabilities in Vietnam. Historical and contemporary political contexts in Vietnam - such as decades of colonial rule, brutal wars and communist revolution and governance - dramatically affect the shape of official history and collective memory, including cô Nhựt's narratives.

"This article examines the role of poetry in illuminating and challenging the meaning of citizenship in the border region of Gilgit-Baltistan, which is located in the north of Pakistan and is internationally considered as forming part of Pakistani Kashmir. Ali discusses how poetic performances constitute a critical public arena for protesting political dispossession and for nurturing a postsectarian, religious harmony in the region. The article also complicates our understanding of the state, as several of the poets in Gilgit work for the local government. From this overlapping position as local inhabitants and state officials, they seek to create spaces of poetic reflection that can help reshape the state as well as society in Gilgit-Baltistan."

"Justice occupies a special place in the pantheon of virtues. For the ancients, it was often conceived as the master virtue, the one that orders all the others. For Plato, justice had exactly this overarching status. A just individual, he tells us in The Republic, is one in whom the three parts of the soul-reason, spirit, appetite-and the three virtues associated with them-wisdom, courage, moderation-stand in the right relation to one another. Justice in the city is precisely analogous. In the just city, each class exercises its own distinctive virtue by performing the task suitable for its nature, and none interferes with the others. The wise and rational part does the ruling, the brave and spirited part does the soldiering, and the rest, those lacking special spirit or intelligence but capable of moderation, do the farming and the manual labouring. Justice is the harmonious balance among these constituent elements."

"The late-20th-century convergence of post-structural, postmodern and postcolonial theories has engendered a critical discourse network that privileges hybridity. These accounts contend that it (re)inscribes the agency of minority subjects, destabilizing hegemonic discourses, but, paradoxically, hybridity has become a stabilizing trope for - as well as the dominant way to read - the postcolonial novel. This essay discusses three postcolonial novels that "disidentify" with this master narrative of postcolonialism: Maryse Condé's Heremakhonon, Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night. When reread as performances enacted between the "posts", these novels suggest that hybridity can expose the systemic violence of colonial rationality."

Drawing upon recent literature on what has been called "epistemologies of ignorance" in relation to race, this paper examines an audit of a research project on equality and diversity in a UK university. It argues the audit functioned as a technology of ignorance. This paper suggests that the audit drew upon the cultural associations between white male academic masculinity with notions of quantification, detachment, and disembodied aggression. In this way, ignorance is seen as a form of labor. In particular, this paper suggests that current forms of neoliberal audit in UK universities could be understood in terms of Haraway's notion of scientific gentlemanly modest witnessing. But rather than the scientific gentlemanly masculinity, neoliberal audit legitimates a hyper-rational audit masculinity which casts women and racialized minorities as subjective, interested, and emotional and in so doing performs epistemic violence which maintains whiteness.

I begin with a simple image, that of the frame; an image to which I will return repeatedly over the following pages, as the central structural conceit of the spatial metatheory of postcoloniality I shall propose. As a visual model for the "classical" postcolonial discourse theories that have given rise to such often-cited notions as cultural hybridity, mimicry, and "writing back," 1 the notion of the frame, I argue, offers a powerful conceptual tool for negotiating the operational difficulties of such models of postcolonial criticism, for which neither their originators nor their more recent critics are able fully to account. In particular, I will suggest that what Paul Duro identifies as the frame's "tendency to invisibility" in critical discourse (1) provides us with an apparatus for locating the ever-shifting sites of agency in the complex critical operations of poststructuralism-inflected postcolonial criticism, which I shall argue has a tendency to efface its own presence even as it performs its work.

Urban centers across Canada are partitioned by racial geographies that circumvent and circumscribe the movements of aboriginal bodies. This article examines how aboriginal youth experience and engage these racisms that organize Canadian social spaces. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at a drop-in recreational centre in the inner city of Edmonton, Alberta, it documents the different ways in which indigenous youth employ hip-hop as a means to contest their subjection to these immobilizing racisms. First, it shows how these youth employ hip-hop as a technology of self-transformation through which they recreate their selves as meaningful, efficacious political actors capable of disrupting their relegation to criminogenic places. Second, it documents how the practice of a distinctly indigenous hip-hop allows these youth to innovate an aesthetic space disruptive of the historicist racisms that otherwise subject aboriginality to anachronistic spaces. Finally, this article shows that, by performing a hybridized, distinctly indigenous breakdance, these practitioners of hip-hop dramatize the physical and cultural motility of aboriginal bodies.

"Michel Foucault is not often read as a theorist of human rights. On the one hand, there is a tendency to read his works of the mid-1970s - his celebrated poststructuralist genealogies of subjectivity, of discipline, of bio-politics, and so forth - as proposing a critique of rights discourse which definitively rules out any political appeal to rights. On the other hand, somewhat curiously it has to be said, there is a tendency to read his works of the late 1970s and early 1980s - his perhaps less celebrated concern with ethics and with technologies of the self - as tacitly re-introducing a liberal humanist notion of subjectivity and, with that, an embrace of orthodox rights discourse. Beginning from this curious disjunction between the rejectionist Foucault and the liberal Foucault, this article attempts to articulate a Foucauldian politics of human rights along the lines of a critical affirmation. Neither a full embrace nor a total rejection of human rights, the Foucauldian politics of human rights developed here elaborates (and attempts to connect) several disparate figures in his thought: rights as ungrounded and illimitable, rights as the strategic instrument-effect of political struggle, and rights as a performative mechanism of community."

"The spread of Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed across the Americas and the rest of the world can be understood in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of the rhizome, whose nomadic habit of growth and propagation mirrors the power of Theater of the Oppressed to reproduce itself in more than 70 countries worldwide. The Theater of the Oppressed rhizome is now deeply rooted in academia and has sprouted in classrooms and in the streets, bringing together students, scholars, administrators, policy makers, and community activists in the pursuit of social justice and human rights. An examination of its use as a pedagogical tool calls attention to its potential for creating a world in which human rights are appreciated and protected. Its use is particularly timely today given the worldwide attention to the rights of the indigenous peoples represented by the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007."

Over the past decade, international development policy has paid increased attention to social reproduction. While this offers an improvement over past practices in which care work was all but ignored, these policy frameworks continue to fall short of feminist goals. One reason for this is the way that dominant economic representations of social reproduction continue to rest on a universalizing portrayal of the household economy and family life as mired in patriarchal tradition, which fails to capture the diversity of economic and affective arrangements in which reproductive labor takes place at the local level. In this paper, I develop an alternative conceptualization of economic and affective life that challenges dominant understandings of the distinctions between market and non-market activity, paid and unpaid labor, and work and intimacy to provide space for new feminist conceptualizations of economy and care that can capture the diversity of its sites and practices.