Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis

Continuing Conversations: CRITICAL TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST PRAXIS CONTRIBUTORS

206 Continuing Conversations CRITICAL TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST PRAXIS CONTRIBUTORS As a nontraditional “ending” to this volume, we present a set of reflections authored by the contributors in partnership with Piya Chatterjee, who was invited by SUNY Press to serve as a reviewer for our manuscript. Coincidentally, Piya had been invited and planned to participate in the workshop, Towards a Transnational Feminist Praxis, in September 2006 but was unable to attend. As part of her evaluation for SUNY Press, Piya wrote a set of comments that sparked critical conversations among the contributors and resulted in our invitation to Piya to join us as a coauthor of this final chapter. This commentary served as a basis for subsequent written reflections by several contributors on our participation in this project, while initiating further conversation about authors’ engagement with questions of agency and processes of institutionalization in our work. These written reflections of Danielle Bouchard, Piya Chatterjee, Jigna Desai, Karen de Souza, Diane Detournay, Richa Nagar, Linda Peake, Rachel Silvey, Amanda Lock Swarr, and Hui Niu Wilcox (listed alphabetically) were interwoven by Amanda and Richa and then circulated to the whole group for further comments and revision. What follows here is a product of this dialogue. Our goal here is not to present a balanced overview or assessment of all of the chapters in the volume. Rather, this dialogue represents some contributors’ attempts to return to the task of asking difficult questions about goals, agendas, and visions of transnational solidarities as facilitated and constrained by specific institutional spaces and practices. Knowledges, Locations, and Solidarities In the past decade and a half, “transnational feminisms” have become increasingly legitimated within feminist academic writing and research in the global North. This legitimation and institutionalization is embedded within, Continuing Conversations 207 and informed by, the larger social/structural shifts compelled by globalization and its imperial histories and geographies. As such, the concept of the “transnational” and its coupling with “feminisms” can lose the specificities of its production and its politics within particular spaces and sites—not the least of which is the northern academy. The transnational becomes a wide net that catches all, and, in so doing, can lose the traction that is so important in understanding or illuminating the various investments, contradictions, and relations of power embedded in diverse feminist projects to which it is so intimately linked. In that light, the transnational is in danger of becoming an empty metaphor for academic feminist theories—signifying everything and nothing. The authors of Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis grapple with the genealogy of the transnational and its usage in two decades of feminist knowledge production in the global North. For instance, the volume discusses two canonical texts (Nagar and Swarr); the deployment of the transnational in curricular content in U.S. and Canadian women’s/gender studies such that the transnational is either placed elsewhere or positioned Eurocentrically or within the U.S. as theoretically normative (Alexander and Mohanty); the manner in which transnational feminisms feed into the still-problematic construction of “difference” in the neoliberal academy (Desai, Bouchard, and Detournay); the simultaneity of historically and geographically specific transnationalisms (Pratt et al.); and the grounded geopolitics located between theorizing in the North and the involvement of women in the global South (Peake and de Souza). In different ways, all of the essays in this volume engage the now familiar methodologies and theorizing offered by feminist writers around issues of positionality, selfreflexivity , and accountability—but they parse these almost totemic modes of feminist inquiry against the fault lines of a heteronormative, patriarchal, and capitalist geopolitics and everyday “sites” of transnational feminist knowledge production. In so doing, they help to advance the critical project outlined by Alexander and Mohanty in this volume—to destabilize the “cartographic rules” that draw rigid boundaries around neoliberal academies and construct the “community” as a hyper-racialized homogeneous space, while also normalizing the spatial location of the northern academy as the epitome of knowledge production. Such destabilization necessarily requires acute attentiveness to connectivities among multiple, though unequally organized, geographies, temporalities, and interests so that we do not lose sight of the key political questions that reside at the heart of this project (Alexander and Mohanty, this volume): What are the relationships between 208 Continuing Conversations the politics of location and the politics of knowledge production? And how can transnational feminist solidarities shift the dominant rules about who is legitimized to make sustainable claims...