Sneja Marina Gunew (15 December 1946 – 8 January 2024), FRSC, was an Australian-Canadian literary theorist whose focus lay on feminism, postcolonial studies and multiculturalism.
From 1995 to her retirement in 2014 she was Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver.
These interests converged in her much reprinted article, ”Migrant Women Writers: Who's on Whose Margins?”(originally published in Meanjin, 42.1, March 1982-83, pp.
[4] In 1984, she was a panelist with Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak at an early landmark postcolonial conference, “Europe and its Others,”[5] at the University of Essex.
[10] Her positioning begins with the idea of the “cultural hybridity of all nation-states” that leads to a “productive opening up into difference.”[11] For her, the ostensibly all-inclusive “liberal pluralist notion of cultural diversity” cannot recognize or discuss “incommensurable differences,” which leads to the inability to interrogate any eruption of right-wing “politics of exclusion.”[11] She turns to psychoanalysis to remind readers that “we do have an unconscious, whose mysterious workings are not fully available to our conscious minds, and that our unsound impulses cannot simply be vacuumed with a morally attuned feminist Hoover”[12] At Deakin University, she set up the first library collection of ethnic minority writings in Australia.
[13] Her first book, Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (1994)[14] was an attempt to find theoretical frameworks and concepts for interpreting these texts—a mix of postmodernist and psychoanalytic criticism.
[7] Her final word on how to navigate literary-critical problems is “Hurrah for anything that puts into question certain familiar hegemonic monocultural assumptions.”[4] Gunew was married to the British-Canadian artist Terence Greer (24 September 1929 – 5 July 2020).