Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism and the West
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 184277395X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Looking beyond the distortions of mainstream history, Eisenstein detects the silencing of racialized, sex/gendered and classed ways of seeing. Against Empire insists that 'the' so-called West is as much fiction as reality, while the sexualized black slave trade emerges as an early form of globalization. 'The' West and western feminisms do not monopolize authorship; there is a need for plural understandings of feminisms as other-than-western. Black America, India, the Islamic world and Africa envision unique conceptions of what it is to be fully, 'polyversally', human.
Professor Eisenstein offers a rich picture of women's activism across the globe today. If there is to be hope of a more peaceful, more just and happier world, it lies, she believes, in the understandings and activism of women today.
‘race’ and ‘gender’ and ‘slavery’ bespeak a neatness of categorization that both does and does not exist. There is no race – just colors – before it is socially constructed, and yet the globe is inhabited by different races today. As Simone de Beauvoir states, “one is not born a woman”, one becomes one; and yet the gendered construct of woman is both stable and always shifting. Race and gender are said to bespeak difference, and yet are only constituted in their differences. There is much
dynamics” of what he sees as “diaspora dispersal”.8 Local stories, in diverse languages, allow for a translocal imagination rich in a reciprocity that divulges the multiplicity of the ways humanity is expressed. The tension between sameness and difference remains while a polyversal voice for seeing is explored.9 Chaudhuri writes of this complexity while discussing the basic simplicity of food. He says that while food habits differ, food itself in its generalized form is a “constant through time”.
patriarchal silences continue to define their alternate theories of anticolonialist democracy. Bengali theorists imagine a democracy that does not fully celebrate the uniqueness of individual women. This engendering of the nation occludes the very individuality and diversity that they claim is necessary for a total inclusive oneness. The vision of the nation as “mother of us all”, is not one of diversity in unity. The unity of “mother of the nation” smashes women’s variety and re-colonizes women
‘whiteness’ prevails because it owns the earth.14 By default, Black slavery became sanitized by making the slave less than human. Slaves were written out of humanity, but DuBois writes them back in. For DuBois, slavery was inhumane, and the slave human. The slave was forced to call another, master. The slave was helpless to defend herself. Slavery required absolute subjection. Slaves were degraded and defiled. No slave could testify in court, own anything, legally marry or have a family.
of Pakistanis in Brooklyn have been detained. Families are leaving the US for Canada and elsewhere in order to avoid the constant surveillance and fear.9 Houman Mortazavi, who emigrated from Iran, says of the US: “I’ve been seriously thinking of moving somewhere civilized, where I will not be prosecuted for who I am.”10 Another Iranian says the US is plagued by a new cesspool of racial conservatism.11 There seems to be little consistency in and reason for many of the violations of civil rights.