Author: Neloufer de Mel
Several Contributors/
Translator(s)/ Edito: Neloufer de Mel/Selvy Thiruchandran
Publisher: Kali/Women Unlimited
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8188965375
Description
Activist, feminist, labour historian and theoretician, Kumari Jayawardena is one of the most significant political thinkers in South Asia today. Her academic and political work has inspired generations of South Asian scholars and activists over the last few decades, and the essays in this volume, contributed by scholars eminent in their particular areas of interest, address many of her concerns.
A critical engagement with nationalism and its linkages with gender, class and ethnicity has animated much of Jayawardena’s work. Her pioneering book on Third world feminism and nationalism showed that feminism was not a western import and that its existence and growth in emerging postcolonial nation states was distinctly related to their modernizing impulses. Importantly she paved the way for an understanding of Third world feminisms as varied and rooted in regional, historical and cultural specificities.
Many of the essays in this volume are in dialogue with this initial postcolonial feminist phase, and take it as a point of departure to explore several issues that animate current feminist activism and scholarship. There is a concern with second-wave feminism’s stress on a politics of difference e and recognition that challenges the premises of universal human rights standards and the potential and pitfalls of feminism’s third, transnational phase. There is an exploration of the relationality of gender to the state, historiography, multiculturalism and feminist methodology.
Providing perspectives from South Asia, the Middle East, ‘Euro-America’ and Australia, the essays highlight current debates in these disciplinary fields and announces future feminist work: its compulsions and challenges. As such, they locate it at the cutting edge with its promise of both abrasion and vision.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
The Personal Being Political
SELVY THIRUCHANDRAN
Introduction
Affirmations at the Cutting Edge:
Feminist Debates and Key Texts
NELOUFER DE MEL
The ‘Burdens’ of Nationalism:
Some Thoughts on South Asian Feminists
And the Nation State
UMA CHAKRAVARTI
Shaping pressures and Symbolic horizons:
The women’s Movement in India
KUMKUM SANGARI
Mapping the Feminist Imagination:
From Redistribution to Recognition
To Representation
NANCY FRASER
Feminism and Nationalism in the Middle East
VALENTINE M. MOGHADAM
Are Women’s Rights Universal? Re-engaging the Local
RADHIKA COOMARASWAMY
Constructions of Culture and Identity in
Contemporary Social Theorising
LAKSIRI JAYASURIYA
Singing of Birth and Death:
Dialogue and Identity in Lullabies and Dirges
R.S. PERINBANAYAGAM
Gender and Class in the Nascent Church
And in Early Christianity:
A Comparative Study of Two Experiments
ALOYSIUS PIERIS, S.J.
Domesticity and its Discontents
MALATHI DE ALWIS
Ponnambalam Arunachalam and Edward Carpenter:
The Ripples of a Friendship
SHEILA ROWBOTHAM
Is the Past Another Country?
ROMILA THAPAR
Imported or Indigenous Knowledges?
Feminist Ontological/Epistemological Politics
MAITHREE WICKRAMASINGHE
Contributors
Appendix