158 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
Fourth, there is a need to examine how culture travels. As it travels, it
acquires new forms and meanings that shed new light on diff erent spaces. I have
examined the connections between racial subjects, gender and national iden-
tity in a rural farm in Chongqing. My concern here has been with the uses of
particular binaries – home–abroad, urban–rural and global–local – to examine
how cultures are redefi ned within a transnational perspective. Th e fl uid identity
off ers marginalized groups a series of estrangements or spaces of resistance. Iden-
tity politics shift from the centre, displaying the supposed cultural core from a
position of absolute authority. It does so by setting up new political frontiers,
resulting in greater distinction for the views and attitudes of others, who are
struggling to create a closed conception of national culture.^66
Th is chapter has aimed to tease out the boundary between urban and rural
as well as global and local connections. It suggests that if we resist assimilating
gendered struggles in China and Britain into an epistemic regime of race domi-
nation, we glimpse alternative political alliances and possibilities. Little adjusts
her assumptions about Chinese women with the impact of globalization, blur-
ring the boundary between home and abroad. Th is opens up opportunities for
denial and a need to embrace diff erence. To quote Julia Kristeva:
Living with the other, with the foreigner, confronts us with the possibility, or not,
of being an other. It is not simply – humanistically – a matter of being able to accept
the other but of being in his place, and this means to imagine and make oneself other
for oneself.^67By confronting the conventions of the British imperial landscape and the Victo-
rian gendered plot with Chinese women in rural China, Little reveals another
vision of the rural. By recognizing multiple others, Little pictures the possibility
of cross-cultural reciprocity between Europe and the Far East. Here, a transna-
tional feminist politics of location refers us to a model of coalition or, to borrow
a term from Said, to ‘affi liation’. He suggests that affi liation is a dynamic con-
cept which does not only mean to defi ne but also to make explicit all kinds of
connections.^68 As a practice of affi liation, a politics of location identifi es spe-
cifi c diff erences and similarities between women in diverse and symmetrical
relations, creating alternative histories, identities and possibilities for alliances.
Little concludes:
A new building site has been given us, nearly as good as the old, and thus ends all
likelihood of our ever again living in a Szechuan Farm house, the homely details of
whose doings may however have some interest for those who like to realize that great
Division of the Human Race, called Chinese, consists not only of China-men but of
real men and women, with simple wants and wishes not aft er all so unlike our own.^69