Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism and the West - Softcover

Eisenstein, Zillah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184277395X ISBN 13: 9781842773956

Publisher: Zed Books, 2004

Synopsis

In Against Empire, Zillah Eisenstein extends her critique of neoliberal globalization. Faced with an aggressive American empire hostage to ideological extremism and violently promoting the narrowest of interests, she looks to a global anti-war movement to counter US power. Moving beyond the distortions of mainstream history, she detects the silencing of racialized, sex/gendered and classed ways of seeing. Eisenstein 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. Plural understandings of feminisms as other-than-western are needed. Black America, India, the Islamic world and Africa envision unique conceptions of what it is to be fully, polyversally, human. Hope for a more peaceful, just and happier world lies, she believes, in the understandings and activism of women today.

About this title

About the Author

Zillah Eisenstein is Professor of Politics at Ithaca College.

Review

"This is a powerful and provocative work, at once an autobiography of an ardent and wide-ranging activist and a critical study of the workings of empire in this time. Eisenstein not only shows how feminism can and must rise to its global challenges, but how the workings of empire are systematically related to gender. She refuses the recourse to culturally imperialist notions of 'women' and the 'human' and shows how each of these terms might gain a broader, emancipatory meaning within a global framework."--Judith Butler, UC Berkeley

"One of the most lively feminist theorists of democracy. As always, Eisenstein is way ahead of the curve."--Cynthia Enloe, author of Maneuvers: the International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives

"Zillah Eisenstein writes with passion and commitment. She traces the complexity of the relationships between gender, class, race and religious oppression against women, links the global with the local, the West with the East, the personal with the political, the economic with the cultural. Despite the complexity of her subject her language remains simple, illuminating and refreshing in this dark age of war and neo-imperialism."--Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero

About this edition

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 184277395X
• ISBN 13: 9781842773956
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256