Rethinking the small place

This week’s readings on space and place made me recall a quote from Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place” where she laments that people in such places “cannot see themselves in a larger picture” or “part of a chain of something, anything” (52). I find that Mohanty’s and Massey’s work complicate Kincaid’s desire for Third World women workers to see themselves and their lives as part of a global world order.

Massey challenges the common conception of place as a bounded, unchanged, and largely historical location. Instead she argues that place should be understood as “constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus” (7). This means that places are made and remade by the interactions of people in various social, economic, and political contexts. Such a definition of place helps us to understand how capitalist relations can constitute place. Sometimes community – that is, a sense of security, responsibility, and linked destiny with others – is forged out of these relations, but not always. I think Mohanty tries to lay out a framework for how we can create community based on the social relations that Third World women workers all have in some form in the global capitalist world order. Nevertheless, she warns against Western feminisms that use notions of commonality to flattened out differences among women by assuming “ahistorical notions of the common experience, exploitation, or strength of Third World women or between Third and First World women” (3033 Kindle).

Seeing one’s small place as “part of a chain of something” (e.g. global capitalism) is a crucial starting point for political organization among Third World women workers. But as Mohanty warns, it is a view that must be tempered with recognition and respect for the differences in colonial history, race, class, and familial configurations among women around the world.