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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 323.1
EAN: 9780822336457
ISBN: 0822336456
Label: Duke University Press
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 424
Publication Date: 2005
Publisher: Duke University Press
Studio: Duke University Press

M. Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience and the meaning of sacred subjectivity.

In these meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory, historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book, Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Truly Revolutionary Book
Review: Not since the early 1980s has there been a book that literally takes one's breath away. Prof. Alexander's new volume is profoundly spiritual at the same time it's grounded in a unique materialist feminism. Its signifiance also lies in the book's manifestations of a real hope. Being alive and politically conscious in the first decade of the 21st century is to be easily seduced by despair, it is also to be absolutely at odds with terrible, counter revolutionary, antifeminist cultures. Not for Alexander glib, soggy liberalism but a spirit that is courageous and awe-inspiring. In the book's third section, Alexander writes of 'returning' to the magnificent anthology, 'This Bridge Called My Back' and, following this essay, the book's most thrilling chapter, in which the writer conjures a new life force, one thoroughly rooted in both spiritual and secular lifeworlds. As if this adjectival 'heap' of praise were not enough, Alexander's book render obsolete the common periodization of feminisms by 'wave'. It would not be innacurate to say that 'Pedagogies of Crossing' is a epistemic rupture, demanding its readers to again grapple with feminist legacies from an entirely new standpoint. If you've not heard Prof. Alexander speak, I suggest you do so as soon as possible. The impact of her spoken word 'appearances' powerful. Her lectures constitute an epistemological rupture, filling one with true hope.

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