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its virulent colour prejudice, moral decadence, illicit affairs, neigh-
bourly envy, and thriving gossip, both portray clear imperialisti-
cally imposed hegemony of white over coloured, and both feature
sudden and untimely death of main characters. Most significantly,
both these stories are focused on the relationship of white men with
coloured women, and through these relationships Jenkins explores
issues that are clearly pertinent to postcolonial as well as feminist
discourse. Although the two relationships have altogether different
resolutions, their sexual and psychological dynamics are clearly
symbolic of relations between East and West, or between colony
and Empire. While an obvious parallel is established between the
white man’s coloured mistress and the native as subjected to the
power of Empire, these two inter-racial affairs also demonstrate the
power of patriarchal dominance which feminist theorists have long
sought to eradicate.
2. Postcolonialism,
feminism and the coloured mistress
Several critics have argued for the relationship of feminism and
postcolonialism. In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and
Tiffin point out the parallels between women and colonized people,
and the shared features of feminist and postcolonial discourse:
[women] share with colonized races and peoples an intimate experience of
the politics of oppression and repression, and like them they have been
forced to articulate their experiences in the language of their oppressors.
Women, like post-colonial peoples, have had to construct a language of
their own when their only available “tools” are those of the “colonizer.”
[…]
Feminist and post-colonial discourses both seek to reinstate the mar-
ginalized in the face of the dominant, and early feminist theory, like early
nationalist post-colonial criticism, sought to invert the structures of
domination, substituting, for instance, a female tradition or traditions in
place of a male-dominated canon. (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 174–175)
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