Synopses & Reviews
Bringing together classic and new writings of the trailblazing feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
Feminism without Borders addresses some of the most pressing and complex issues facing contemporary feminism. Forging vital links between daily life and collective action and between theory and pedagogy, Mohanty has been at the vanguard of Third World and international feminist thought and activism for nearly two decades. This collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anticapitalist struggles.
Feminism without Borders opens with Mohanty's influential critique of western feminism ("Under Western Eyes") and closes with a reconsideration of that piece based on her latest thinking regarding the ways that gender matters in the racial, class, and national formations of globalization. In between these essays, Mohanty meditates on the lives of women workers at different ends of the global assembly line (in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States); feminist writing on experience, identity, and community; dominant conceptions of multiculturalism and citizenship; and the corporatization of the North American academy. She considers the evolution of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and Race and Ethnic Studies; pedagogies of accommodation and dissent; and transnational women's movements for grassroots ecological solutions and consumer, health, and reproductive rights. Mohanty's probing and provocative analyses of key concepts in feminist thought—"home," "sisterhood," "experience," "community"—lead the way toward a feminism without borders, a feminism fully engaged with the realities of a transnational world.
Review
"Chandra Talpade Mohanty is unequivocally one of the most important feminist theorists and scholars writing and publishing today. In this collection, her essays take on new meaning to play important parts in what is both a dynamic full-scale analysis of the complex histories of the exploitation of women within neocolonial capitalism and an elaboration of antiracist pedagogies and anticapitalist solidarity practices."—Lisa Lowe, author of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics
Review
”The juxtaposition of these essays brings into sharp focus the theoretical framework Chandra Talpade Mohanty has developed and makes visible the enormity, the force, and the uniqueness of her contribution.”—Ruth Frankenberg, editor of Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism
Review
“Over the last two decades, Chandra Talpade Mohanty has produced an extraordinary body of writings on transnational feminism, radically changing the way we think about such categories as ‘third world women,’ ‘women of color’ and ‘globalization.’ This volume combines her now classic essays with new writings that accentuate the centrality of anticapitalist feminist theories and practices to the most expansive and forward-looking version of women's studies today.”—Angela Y. Davis
Review
“Chandra Talpade Mohanty's illuminating analyses take up some of the most urgent questions facing a transnational feminist practice today. She provides resources for feminist engagements with difference, identity politics, the commodification of knowledge, and globalization and its effects. Shifts in the global political and economic landscape as well as Mohanty's own shifting location enable her to identify exhilarating new directions for feminist theory and practice.”—Sandra Harding, coeditor of
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and SocietySynopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. [275]-294) and index.
Synopsis
Essays by a pioneering theorist of feminism, multiculturalism, and antiracism.
About the Author
“Chandra Talpade Mohanty's illuminating analyses take up some of the most urgent questions facing a transnational feminist practice today. She provides resources for feminist engagements with difference, identity politics, the commodification of knowledge, and globalization and its effects. Shifts in the global political and economic landscape as well as Mohanty's own shifting location enable her to identify exhilarating new directions for feminist theory and practice.”—Sandra Harding, coeditor of
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society“Over the last two decades, Chandra Talpade Mohanty has produced an extraordinary body of writings on transnational feminism, radically changing the way we think about such categories as ‘third world women,’ ‘women of color’ and ‘globalization.’ This volume combines her now classic essays with new writings that accentuate the centrality of anticapitalist feminist theories and practices to the most expansive and forward-looking version of women's studies today.”—Angela Y. Davis"Chandra Talpade Mohanty is unequivocally one of the most important feminist theorists and scholars writing and publishing today. In this collection, her essays take on new meaning to play important parts in what is both a dynamic full-scale analysis of the complex histories of the exploitation of women within neocolonial capitalism and an elaboration of antiracist pedagogies and anticapitalist solidarity practices."—Lisa Lowe, author of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics”The juxtaposition of these essays brings into sharp focus the theoretical framework Chandra Talpade Mohanty has developed and makes visible the enormity, the force, and the uniqueness of her contribution.”—Ruth Frankenberg, editor of Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism
Table of Contents
Introduction : decolonization, anticapitalist critique, and feminist commitments -- Decolonizing feminism. Under Western eyes : feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Cartographies of struggle : Third World women and the politics of feminism. What's home got to do with it? (with Biddy Martin). Sisterhood, coalition, and the politics of experience. Genealogies of community, home, and nation -- Demystifying capitalism. Women workers and the politics of solidarity. Privatized citizenship, corporate academies, and feminist projects. Race, multiculturalism, and pedagogies of dissent -- Reorienting feminism. "Under Western eyes" revisited : feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles.