Wednesday, March 12, 2003

During Prager's second hour, he conducted an interview with feminist Professor of Arabic Literature Miriam Cooke of Duke University. Professor Cooke was quoted in a March 8, 2003 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece entitled Liberation's Limits by Kay S. Hymowitz. Here is the relevant paragraph in which she is quoted. (I have bolded the part that quotes her:)


Postcolonial, or multicultural, feminists who tend to congregate in the universities have a different reason than gender feminists for not wanting to speak up about the oppression of women in the Muslim world. For them, the guilty legacy of imperialism has made any judgment of formerly colonized peoples an immoral expression of "orientalism" and a corrupt attempt to brand "the other." If Muslim men could be said to oppress their women, it is in any case the fault of Western imperialists, or more specifically, Western men. "When men are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women," says Miriam Cooke, a Duke professor and head of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies. The postcolonial feminist condemns not just war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but any instances of what Columbia professor Gayatri Spivak calls "white men saving brown women from brown men."

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