Betty Joseph, Rice University
Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring 2002), 67-83

This essay unravels the time lag between modern Euro-American capitalism and non-North Atlantic nations, hence also between the feminist model of the female subject within metropolitan capitalism and the belated Other, often a migratory working woman. Focusing on an interview with a conservative politician in India and on Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, the essay details two responses to regional failures perceived by otherwise triumphalist globalists: the first, a nationalist-culturalist one, which, understanding culture merely as the eroding of religious and social values, inevitably finds itself leaning toward the moral and sexual  policing of women; the second, an alternative narrativization of the time lag, may allow feminists to conceptualize alternatives to the universalist categories that are becoming hegemonic (timeless) under globalization.