Th e Transnational Rural in Alicia Little’s My Diary in a Chinese Farm 153
Said’s notion of ‘worldliness’ advocates the discursive formation in a global
as opposed to a purely local setting. He challenges the tendency to remain cat-
egorically fi xed within a single geopolitical location.^42 Little relates her dwelling
abroad to her notion of a British rural idyll at home. She writes: ‘Th e air was so
fresh, and the scene in its wildness so reminded me of Cumberland Moors I won-
dered why one complained of the Summer here’.^43 Th e way of life in China during
Little’s visit rests on imperial trade and ‘coolies’ (Chinese labourers), which has
increased hostility toward foreigners in Chongqing. Little here matches abroad
with her home. She sees that ‘what assures the domestic tranquility [at home]
and attractive harmony of one is the productivity and regulated discipline of the
other’.^44 A geopolitical reading of Little’s account enables the self-fashioning of
home abroad as dependent upon the existence of home.^45 For instance, it allows
Little to look abroad for the imprint of her home. It also redefi nes geography’s
engagement with globalization by relating perspectives on space in order to
remake the rural under globalization.^46 My purpose, here, is to draw up a ‘global
countryside’^47 and to break the binary of global and local which enables readers
to see how the global is present in the local or the local is present in the global.
Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan theorize a transnational feminism to
deconstruct any dominant hierarchy, which I have expanded here to incorporate
urban–rural and global–local hierarchies, and a hegemonic use of gender. Part-
ing ways with global feminism’s vision of a united world of women, Grewal and
Kaplan examine transnational feminism by relating gender to ‘scattered hegem-
onies’ throughout the global.^48 Th e authors recognize the multidimensional
patterns of division everywhere and insist on the agency of people of all loca-
tions. Th eir study focuses on a transnational feminism that looks for the linkage
and complicities in the global frame. Th ey propose that the transnational ought
to suggest local knowledge of the global. Th us, the global is present within the
local and the local is present within the global. Grewal argues that contact zones
are everywhere.^49 Th e contacts occur in a discursive space which controls the
accounts of encounters with diff erence. People adapt to their own domestic cul-
ture with what they fi nd abroad or in travel discourses about places abroad.^50
Within the Western Empire, Grewal suggests that culture within national
boundaries can be ‘located within a transnational frame that is not reduced to a
narrative of centre and periphery or of globalization’.^51 She recognizes that any
site can serve as a site for the transformation of cultural formations from home
and abroad.^52 Her argument considers the scattered hegemonies produced by
multidirectional fl ows of people and space, as well as transnational division. For
Grewal, the politics of location explicates a ‘new space’ for the Western femi-
nist questioning of geopolitics. Her work questions the concept of home that is
nothing but stable and depicts home as a site of oppression, marginalization and
resistance for women.