Globalizing Home: Editor's Introduction

If you want to know me,
Look inside your heart.

—Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

We are living in an age when it is now more possible than it ever was to overcome barriers of language, culture, distance to communicate both to strangers and to loved ones. Information proliferates and is disseminated at light speed in a dizzying zigzag of advanced Internet and telecommunications. And yet, at the same time, the global community is perhaps more divided today than it ever was and those who suffer most are not surprisingly the poor and the dispossessed. How can we bring to bear increased access to information in the diffusion of the escalating imperialism exacted against the global South by the global North? The offerings in this volume suggest that change must occur on multiple levels, through activism as well as through ideological shifts, shifts that must occur, ironically, on the local levels before they are mapped onto the global. In many ways, what the collective works of this issue suggest to me is that substantive transformation will occur only when we begin to look into our own hearts and see there a reflection of the faces of our "others"—whether we regard those others as enemies or more banally as strangers. By looking deeply into our own natures, our own selves, we may begin to apprehend how self-change might ripple out from the local to the global and participate in the worldwide movements for social change that day by day counteract the march toward the desecration of the human spirit so well-engaged by our governments on our behalf.

In this light, the special section coordinated by Laura Roskos and Andrea L. Humphrey, "International Feminism, Human Rights and the Women's Studies Curriculum: A Conference At the Nexus of Pedagogy and Activism," which reports on the activities of the New England Women' Studies Association meeting held in March 2003 (and partially sponsored by Meridians), is à propos since both Roskos and Humphrey contend that the conference itself and the essays collected here by Barbara Schulman, Mary Bricker-Jenkins, Leslie Hill, and Andrea Smith, along with an interview with the conference keynote speaker Annanya Bhattacharjee, "grapple with the problems of holding the U.S. government accountable to international norms and standards." Roskos concludes by asserting that current feminist pedagogy and activism focused on the issue of human rights should emphasize innovations "in the direction of internationalizing women's studies . . . bound by a coherent conceptual framework that decenters the experience of U.S. women, which is still too often taken as the yardstick against which other women's movements are measured." Though most of the offerings in this section do focus on the experience of women in the United States—centering on activist organizing in the United States, the rights of the poor, AIDS-organizing but also on South African women's struggles for human rights—they do so in an attempt to claim accountability in the local in order to decipher how struggles for human rights within the United States might translate on the international scale.

This move toward transmutability is addressed in a number of contributions to this volume. For instance, the essays of Wendy Kozol, Megan Sweeney, Suchitra Samanta, Harryette Mullen, and Juliana Chang each in some way addresses how symbolic or visual representations perpetuate false notions of subjects and their others—"subjects" being those who dominate and "others," the dominated, often represented by the United States vs. those oppressed by U.S. subjectivity. In her essay "Domesticating NATO's War in Kosovo/a: (In)Visible Bodies and the Dilemma of Photojournalism," Kozol asserts that "[i]n American culture, photojournalism maintains the cultural authority to depict war and its consequences through claims of authenticity, transparency, and veracity." The pretense of objectivity in U.S. news reportage, she claims, has the effect of distorting the particulars of the victimized populations portrayed through images of war in order to satisfy a universalized notion of war and...