Imalah ’s Reviews > Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption > Status Update

"White colonizers manufactured similar moral panic in response to the practice of “sati,” or as Europeans called it, widow-immolation. (In Sanskrit, “sati” refers to the woman who dies, not the ritual, but because I am primarily referring to European accounts I will use “sati” to mean the ritual.) The rite—which was not strictly a religious practice—involves a Brahmin widow casting herself on her husband’s funeral py

"The HRW definition does not prescribe that honor killing is specific to people of color. That is an implicit white assumption. A label of honor killing would never be attached to any of the thousands of white-on-white cases of intimate-partner violence. It is the presence of a Black or Brown male perpetrator that fosters the idea that a crime is determined by the cultural or religious identity of those involved."

"If my husband, who is of Pakistani origin but had spent his entire life in the United States, were to have killed me, it would automatically have been called an act of “honor killing,” because both of us were Muslim."

Åsne Seierstad, for example, author of the bestselling The Bookseller of Kabul, freely admits that she capitalized on the Afghan cultural formality of offering hospitality and moved into a family’s house to get material for her book, and that she “never mastered Dari,” 29 but it seems she felt completely entitled to represent the innermost thoughts of the women of the family who spoke only that language.