Practicing transnational feminist recovery today

Both feminist scholarship and modernist studies have changed dramatically since the heyday of feminist literary recovery work in the 1980s and 1990s. Contemporary feminist scholarship more often addresses the gender dynamics and feminist dimensions of particular texts, both male and female authored, than the development of a separate canon of women writers or the kind of “gynocritics” advocated by those like Elaine Showalter in the 1980s. Modernist Studies has moved from focus on a specified set of Euro-American aesthetic practices clustered in works from a restricted few decades – defined in various national literatures or disciplines as beginning in 1857, 1870, or 1900 and ending in 1930 or 1945 – to concern with a broader global variety of aesthetic responses to modernity as practiced within the nineteenthand twentieth-centuries. Neither of these developments in scholarship necessarily excludes the recovery of out-of-print or lesserknown writers especially from a feminist perspective, but in practice, the work of finding and recovering writing by women or other marginalized figures has often been pushed to the wayside in favor of research into new locations or temporalities for modernist practice. Scholars might perceive recovery work to be dated, conceptually uninteresting, or invested in essentialist categories of analysis that have often been exclusionary or simply secondary rather than integral to these new domains of scholarly interest. Indeed, much early feminist scholarship is rightly criticized for having reified a notion of “woman” as white, Western, straight, and able-bodied. Feminist recovery is unpopular – again – or still? – and is not likely to land many scholars top jobs. Yet, as I will argue in this essay, feminist recovery certainly still matters and is especially valuable to our efforts to practice modernist literary scholarship from a global, transnational, or planetary perspective. The importance of “provincializing Europe,” in Dipesh Chakravorty’s famous phrase, or of erasing center–periphery distinctions, should also and at the same time be applied to the domain of gender. I would argue, the very impulse to question the dominance of an unmarked yet valorized, central position owes much to longtime feminist theoretical efforts to dethrone the perspective of the universal (Western, white, straight, able) male. Decades of feminist work call attention to the othering effects of this unmarked universal and silently bolster much contemporary postcolonial or transnational theorizing. Further, to my mind, one cannot debunk the universal, metropolitan West, without also explicitly debunking the universal (white, straight, able) male that undergirds the universal, metropolitan West. In other words, practicing transnational, or planetary scholarship, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has long maintained, also demands practicing feminist scholarship. This holds true for modernist