Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism, and the West

Description

Zillah Eisenstein, one of North America's most eminent and politically engaged feminist thinkers, continues her unrelenting critique of neoliberal globalization and its capture of democratic possibilities in Against Empire. She is deeply critical of President George W. Bush's headlong recourse to the use of war, the neocon embrace of American empire as something positive for humanity, and the accelerated imposition on the rest of the world of the most negative aspects of American capitalism. Zillah Eisenstein urgently asks that we build a global anti-war movement to counter US power. She believes that it is essential to see beyond the distortions inherent in mainstream presentations of history, and to detect the silencing of racialized, sex/gendered and classed ways of seeing. At the heart of her book is the insistence that the so-called West is as much fiction as reality; as much appropriation as originary; as exclusionary as it is promissory. Eisenstein contends that the sexualized black slave trade was an early form of globalization. The West and western feminisms have no monopoly of authorship; we need to pluralize the understanding of feminisms as other-than-western. The West has debts to places elsewhere, as much as places elsewhere have debts to the Enlightenment. Black America, India, the Islamic world and Africa envision unique conceptions of what it is to be fully, ‘polyversally’, human. Professor Eisenstein gives her readers 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. This book is written for all people who wish to examine more deeply what the West really is, how it is seen by the rest of the world, and the hidden histories that make up human complexity and diversity below the waterline of conventional narratives.