154 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
Little’s ability to travel from her home and the movement within the home
abroad elide the distinction between nation and state. Th is produces tension
between the global and local, which highlights the importance of the trans-
national. Little embodies the ethnocentrism of the West. She, of course, does
not erase the diff erences among women in the service of a false unitary world
of women. Th is potentially obscures the structure of power relations between
diff erent groups of women at home and abroad. Her account reiterates a Euro-
centrism that inhibits the full development of the geopolitical ‘worldliness’ that
Said speaks for. Nonetheless, her work provides a foundation for those who go
beyond it. She has not only taken issue with the binary terms that oppose the
imperial West against colonization and resistance, but also informed the notion
of ‘interconnectedness’ that is captured in the term ‘glocalization’, in which
there is no purely local culture but the local is ‘an aspect of globalization’ from
which global forces are at work in shaping the local.^53 In the context of Little’s
account and geopolitical thinking, glocalization deconstructs the equalizations
of ‘global feminism’ by homogenizing the position of Th ird World women.
Th e other vision of the rural idyll shows rurality as a part of hybridity, which
discounts global distinctions depending on conventional oppositions between
West and non-West, urban and rural, as well as global and local. Here, Little
rewrites her home using the context of abroad. Her issue of accountability is not
only between First World and Th ird World women, but also between women
within the Th ird World.
Little’s stay with the farmer points to the need for greater attention to be
paid to intercultural contact performed through travel. Th is expands Grewal’s
implication that contact zones are everywhere, including the home abroad. I am
suggesting the possibility of adding to the geopolitical aspect in and among the
rural family, home and domesticity in a global frame. Little here draws attention
to the diff erences among women and points out the power relations between
diff erent groups of women at home and abroad. It is essential to draw on trans-
national geopolitical thinking to suggest a ‘new space’ or ‘third scenario’ for
Th ird World women without falling into ‘militant and nationalist pretentions
of certainty’.^54 In short, Little here refuses to position herself as searching for
certainty. She may be explaining the multiplicity of positions and allegiances
that characterize the marginal subject. Within the context of multiple positions,
‘writing is travelling from one position to another, thinking one’s way from one
position to another’.^55 So how are geopolitics imprinted in Little’s work trans-
nationally and globally? In leaving British soil, does Little lose her right to be
read in her own national context? How do we read Little’s account through the
distinctive lenses of gender and race?