Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?

We began working on this project after visiting our respective “homes” in Lynchburg, Virginia and Bombay, India in the fall of 1984—visits fraught with conflict, loss, memories, and desires we both considered to be of central importance in thinking about our relationship to feminist politics. In spite of significant differences in our personal histories and academic backgrounds, and the displacements we both experience, the political and intellectual positions we share made it possible for us to work on, indeed to write, this essay together. Our separate readings of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s autobiographical narrative entitled “Identity: Skin Blood Heart” became the occasion for thinking through and developing more precisely some of the ideas about feminist theory and politics that have occupied us. We are interested in the configuration of home, identity, and community; more specifically, in the power and appeal of “home” as a concept and a desire, its occurrence as metaphor in feminist writings, and its challenging presence in the rhetoric of the New Right.

Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique

This essay grows out of a presentation on a panel called “Lost in Translation” at the Critical Race Studies conference in 2010. It is a reflection on the neoliberal knowledge economy, the traffic in antiracist feminist theory, and the way my work has been read (lost or found in translation) and has crossed geopolitical and racial/cultural borders. The essay comments as well on the development of my intellectual project in relation to my location in the US academy and the intellectual and political communities that have made the work possible. The larger frame I seek to examine using responses to my work in three sites—Sweden, Mexico, and Palestine—is the way feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist theory emerges from a particular geopolitical, intellectual space; the way it enacts crossings; and the way it is trafficked, consumed, and understood in different geographies. Given the global and domestic shifts in social movements and transnational feminist scholarly projects over the past three decades, my major concern pertains to the depoliticization of antiracist feminist/women-of-color/transnational feminist intellectual projects in neoliberal, national-security-driven geopolitical landscapes.

US Empire and the Project of Women's Studies: Stories of citizenship, complicity and dissent

This essay charts some of the most urgent challenges feminists confront in relation to imperialism, militarization, and corporate globalization in the USA. It insists on the necessity of feminist anti-imperialist praxis, specifically in the context of the academic and non-academic projects engendered by Womens Studies scholarship and teaching in North America. An analysis of the Abu Ghraib events illustrates the deeply gendered, racial, and sexualized national practices of US military culture and the Bush/Cheney war state. The essay calls for feminist engagement with a US imperial (not just democratic in promissory terms) state by connecting domestic with foreign policy issues. Suggesting that the US academy is profoundly implicated in the current project of empire, the essay further analyzes the place of Womens Studies and its history of contested citizenship projects as a crucial site of feminist anti-imperialist praxis. It seeks to make an important distinction between feminist practice that is complicit in the project of empire, and radical, anti-imperialist feminisms anchored in a politics of dissent. El Imperio Americano y el Proyecto de Estudios de Mujeres: Sobre las políticas de complicidad y disidente Este artículo traza algunos de los desafíos más urgentes que se confrontan feministas en cuenta al imperialismo, militarización, y globalización corporativa en los Estados Unidos. Se insita en la necesidad de una praxis feminista antiimperialista, específicamente in el contexto de los proyectos académicos y no académicos que se engendran por la erudición y la instrucción de Estudios de Mujeres en Norte América. Una análisis de los eventos de Abu Ghraib ilustra que los prácticos de la militaría Americana y del estado guerrero de Bush/Cheney son hondamente racializado, sexualizado, y generificado. Este artículo llama para un debate feminista con el estado Americano imperial (no solo democrático en termas promisorio) que se conecta los problemas domésticos e internacionales de políticas. Sugiriéndose que la academia Americana es profundamente implicado en el proyecto actual del Imperio, este artículo analice, además, que el lugar de Estudios de Mujeres y su historia de proyectos contra-hegemónicos de ciudadanías como sitios cruciales para la praxis feminista antiimperialista. Este artículo trata de hacer una distinción importante entre la practica feminista, lo que es involucrado en el proyecto del Imperio, y las feminismas radicales, antiimperialistas que se fondean en una política de disidente.

Follow-up Studies: Are They Worth The Trouble?

is hard to disagree with. However, it is apparent that few institutions of any kind systematically follow up their graduates unless they are required to do so by an external agent in much the same way that the NCATE standards have stimulated follow-up studies. It is the rare school, at any level, which has follow-up data on its graduates at hand. In spite of the pressure applied by NCATE on teacher education programs, violation of the standard calling for follow-up studies was cited as a weakness in 58% of the programs reviewed during 1979-a rate second only to the violation of the governance standards (Wheeler, 1980, p. 125). What might account for this apparent reluctance to study the outcomes of one’s own efforts? One possible explanation is that the anticipated effort, cost, and time requirements are too discouraging. Perhaps an expectation that the data will yield little that can be used in program planning is also a factor. Also, those responsible for programs might be apprehensive about the results such studies might yield.

Towards an Anti-Imperialist Politics: Reflections of a desi feminist

This essay weaves various elements of US citizenship into a meditation about my own emotional and political cartography as a ‘desi’ feminist, clarifying questions of identity, displacement, home, and the struggle for a just world. It moves on to a discussion of the conceptual and political implications of citizenship crafted thus, and sketches the outlines of a feminist anti-imperialist praxis post-11 September 2001. The essay concludes with suggestions for pedagogic strategies directly related to confronting the US as the new empire.