Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, and: Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World, and: Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (review)

Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age edited by Ella Shohat. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999, 575 pp., $49.50 hardcover.

Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World edited by Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, 330 pp., $39.95 hardcover, $16.95 paper.

Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State edited by Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000, 407 pp., $54.95 hardcover, $18.95 paper.

Academic feminism is getting better at considering issues of race, ethnicity, and nation as inseparable from issues of gender and sexuality—and indeed as constituted at least partially through each other—and it's about time. However, the extent to which this recognition is occurring varies enormously. At one end of the spectrum, feminist research and pedagogy still rely too much on a few essays and collections at the expense of recognizing a more diverse range of multicultural feminist writing; and for many U.S. scholars, transnational feminisms are still viewed as a specialized subtopic that is only approachable by the token specialist. But at the other end, diversity in its uncritical, pluralistic forms is officially a (marketable) trend, and as such, even in its more critical feminist forms, it risks within academic publishing the kinds of watering-down, tokenism, and commodification that are clearly occurring in more mainstream media. From a range of perspectives, the three edited volumes I examine here offer important contributions to scholarship that approaches issues of gender and sexuality from multicultural and transnational perspectives, and they enhance our ability to speak critically with each other and our students about these issues.

Talking Visions evolved from a 1993 symposium sponsored by the New Museum of Contemporary Art and is my favorite of these three texts because it manages, against all odds in my opinion, to finesse an enormous coverage of multicultural and feminist issues in a rich, nuanced, and theoretically sensitive set of essays, interviews, and visual art. It is sufficient for an introductory course on multicultural feminism, but also sophisticated enough to be impressive to specialists. I have to confess that I approached this book with not a little skepticism because its aims seemed so ambitious. Early in her sixty-page introduction, Ella Shohat declares her intention to discuss "debates . . . about the canon, political correctness, identity politics, and affirmative action," as well as "the move from anti-colonial to post-colonial critique, the 'racing' and 'queering' of hegemonic feminism, the commodification of difference by cultural institutions and transnational corporations; and the 'new world order' of globalization, cyber-technologies, and cross-border displacements [; to] reflect on the relationships between the diverse interdisciplinary knowledges constituting multicultural feminist inquiry [; and to] delineat[e] the very project of multicultural feminism at this historical moment" (3-4). I responded to Shohat's promise of a manifesto of multicultural feminism with a combination of excitement and trepidation.

But Ella Shohat has succeeded in accomplishing her aims. It is difficult to convey this wide-reaching text's strengths in the space available to me here. The twenty-five essays and interviews balance delivery of information with a textual richness that warrants close attention to particular argumentative moves or theoretical claims made by the authors. For teaching purposes, I particularly liked the essays that fell into three categories. The essays on the transnational body provide case studies that clearly illustrate some of the major controversies that implicate U.S. women (and in the case of M. Jacqui Alexander's essay, gay and bisexual men) in global power imbalances and challenge the assumptions that many students bring with them to women's...