Summary
Mohanty begins with a summary of the central arguments of an earlier piece of work, “Under Western Eyes,” contextualizing them in intellectual, political, and institutional terms. Basing her account on this discussion, she describes ways the essay has been read and situated in a number of different, often overlapping, scholarly discourses. Mohanty engages with some useful responses to the essay in an attempt to further clarify the various meanings of the West, Third World, and so on, to reengage questions of the relation of the universal and the particular in feminist theory, and to make visible some of the theses left obscure or ambiguous in her earlier writing.
