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Reviewed by:
  • Where I Come From
  • Nima Naghibi (bio)
Vijay Agnew. Where I Come From Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 291. $24.95

Vijay Agnew's Where I Come From is published as part of Wilfrid Laurier University Press's 'Life Writing Series.' In her book, Agnew describes being solicited for this series by a publisher who wanted feminism explained in [End Page 596] lay terms to a lay audience. Agnew's own experiences within the feminist movement and her sensitivity to the complexities of feminist discourses eventually led her to the recognition that writing about her feminist politics and consciousness necessitated a discussion of class and race as well. She decided to write about her life experiences in order to demonstrate how integral race, culture, and class are to feminist analysis.

In some ways, this story can be read as a typical bildungsroman. This is the story of a young woman's journey into adulthood; it is also the story of her coming-of-age as a feminist, an anti-racist activist, an academic, a mother, a wife, and a Canadian citizen.

Among the many stories here, the most instructive ones involve Agnew's descriptions of her encounter with the 1970s feminist movement from which she felt excluded as an Indian immigrant. The exclusions she mentions are not the obvious ones of active racism within the movement, but subtle differences of culture and class that present a challenge to 'trans-cultural' feminisms. Agnew describes the 1970s feminist aesthetic and her reaction to it as follows: 'Alison and her feminist friends were rebelling against societal norms, and had taken to wearing loose-fitting T-shirts and sweaters and old, worn-out jeans. They stopped using makeup, which they regarded as male-imposed ... I felt that simple, inexpensive clothing would not signal my feminism, but rather my status as a poor immigrant.' This is one example among many that Agnew provides of the semiotics of dress, food, and architecture.

The description of her years as a graduate student and later as a struggling academic stuck in the sessional grind at York University are most enlightening. Her experiences as a graduate student at Waterloo University, and later at the University of Toronto, demonstrate how much the academy has changed in terms of its demands on both students and professors. Agnew reflects on the obstacles facing her, as someone with very little writing experience, when she wrote her Ph.D. dissertation; as a graduate student, she was not required to write any essays, since the preferred mode of evaluation was examinations. As well, she describes her professors as having a 'hands off' approach, rarely providing her with written feedback on her work. She also writes about the oddity of studying the history of India from the perspective of her white male professors in Canada, and the role of women in the Indian nationalist movement with a high-profile feminist who, ironically, did little to support Agnew's work because she was too busy promoting her career 'to spend time with students like me.'

As a sessional instructor in the history department at York, Agnew was part of a team teaching unit for a course on the 'Third World.' She describes her struggles with the ideological thrust of this course, and of the faculty members in charge of teaching the course. In light of her detailed account of her feelings of marginalization as a sessional and as a 'non-white' faculty [End Page 597] member at York, it would have been interesting to know more about the trajectory of Agnew's career from the sessional track to her now prestigious position as full professor and director of the Centre for Feminist Research.

This book raises valuable questions for consideration, and offers interesting insights on immigration patterns in Toronto over the last three decades. However, this unapologetic story of Canadian 'difference' almost compromises itself with the inclusion of a glossary at the back of the book. Glossaries that provide translations of 'foreign' words have been criticized for perpetuating the illusion that translations are seamless, and that 'third world' cultures can be packaged for the easy consumption of the West. These are assumptions that Agnew challenges throughout...

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