Self (En)Gendered in Ideology: Pratibha Parmar's Bhangra Jig and Sari Red

It is by now perhaps a truism to state that psychoanalytic and postcolonial critiques are unlikely bedfellows. We have only to glance at the bulk of post-colonial scholarship to note the near absence of psychoanalysis as a theoretical tool that would enable a postcolonialist to unloosen the bindings of colonial and neocolonial history.1 The grand récit of the Freudian family romance, compelling enough on its own terms when confined in the life of the ego to its relations among the family socius, reads differently in another, thoroughly ideologically inflected register. According to the materialist, historically specific ideology critique that characterizes most current post-colonial scholarship in the fields of English and cultural studies, psychoanalysis seems suspiciously universalist, dehistoricized, and Western-imperialist in its production of a truth and a subject that can seem to evade the reach of ideology, history, empire, and nation. Admittedly, this line of thinking tends toward reductionism. Still, one must call attention to the striking absence, in psychoanalysis, of a full or even adequate study of the gendered subaltern and her role in the class struggle for autonomy and self-determination in the margins of the narratives of nation and self.2 It is the absence of such a materialist analysis that causes Ania Loomba to critique the universalizing tendencies in the feminist psychoanalytic theories espoused by, among others, Julia Kristeva. As she puts it,

so much of linguistic and semiotic theory brushes, often via psychoanalysis, perilously close to universalist assumptions about the nature of subversion and thereby about the repressed and rebellious subject. The specific inputs into protest need not be examined, hence woman becomes a category that need admit of little differentiation….

[T]he neglect of histories surrounding native insubordination either devalues or romanticizes the latter, or worse, tends to read coloni