Th e Transnational Rural in Alicia Little’s My Diary in a Chinese Farm 157
its connections with cultural formations and identities. Second, there is a need
to trace the infl uence of spatialized power relations by understanding that the
circuits of power fl ow in multidirectional ways. Simply put, Little questions the
formation of global feminism where gender oppression links women everywhere
in a common sisterhood. She expresses the need to remove self-consciousness
from ‘national self-praise’.^63 She regards women as potential pioneers for build-
ing national identity. She argues that it is essential to preserve national identity
by homogenizing culture to support domestic and foreign policies. Her account
also provides detailed description of interactions of gender in an alternative sys-
tem of division within a national context.
British imperialism, to echo Said, pervades Little’s account of women in
rural China. Little attacks and reinforces Western imperialism: she pulls apart
the binary analysis implicit in the category of Western imperialism, but this
results in an over-reliance on the models of centre/periphery and self/other,
which oft en deny the agency of multiple others. Th is chapter questions the read-
ing of Little’s account as a critique of Empire, or those who critique Little as a
participant in imperialism. As an English writer born at the height of the British
Empire, the Empire is clearly the central, but not the whole, geopolitical story
for Little. It is suggested that the signifi cance of Said’s work lies in the notion of
‘uncanny ability’.^64 Said’s work ‘show[s] us that at the heart of what we take to be
familiar, native, at home – where we think we can fi nd our center – lurk what is
unfamiliar, strange and uncanny’.^65 Here, familiar and natural belonging is oft en
associated with home and abroad. Th e rurality is anti-global and the imagined
home is a symbolic resource for shoring up national identity. Little’s My Diary in
a Chinese Farm stages the urban/rural dichotomy as a site of ambivalence show-
ing that producing a rural idyll depends on others.
Th ird, there is a need to make visible the global woven into the local, and
the urban woven into the rural as an eff ect of globalization. Little discloses a
discourse of interpenetration between home and abroad. She deconstructs the
binary of an anthropologist as viewing subjects travelling to study the static
other. Th e intercultural encounters infl uence the other. Studying the other
using national and transnational concepts makes possible an ethnography that
examines the interaction of the dwelling and travel. Despite the foreign setting,
Little’s account revises the stereotypical Victorian gender plot. It also echoes
transnational glocalization in identifying geopolitical dimensions of gender and
class relations. For the space of dwelling , Chinese women are assumed as sta-
tionary; in the space of travel, Little is a fi gure of motion, moving in and out of
the domestic space and having access to the inner and outer space unavailable
to Chinese women. Th is supports the idea that home–abroad, urban–rural or
global–local are interpenetrating categories.