Dialogue and Difference Feminisms Challenge Globalization

Contemporary feminists face the labor of moving beyond the dominant paradigms of knowledge and communication that drive corporate globalization. Dialogue and Difference , a new collection edited by Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos, provides students with groundbreaking essays by an international group of feminist scholars and activists who stress the need to put different approaches to reality and to scholarship into relation in order to build coalitions across the usual North/South, East/West divides. Modeling ways to weave these connections, the authors take difference, rather than isomorphic similarity, to be the basis for effective anti-imperial feminist theory and practice. These dialogues among women's movements bridge profound differences in historical, economic, and political circumstance, language, culture, and fundamental "cosmovision." Such differences are welcomed by contributors as practical resources, rather than as obstacles, in feminist challenges to corporate globalization. Dialogue and Difference is an essential collection for professors and students interested in globalization, development, gender studies, and activism.

Marguerite Waller is Professor of Women's Studies and Comparative Literature, University of California, Riverside. Sylvia Marcos is Visiting Professor, Drew University, and Director of the Center for Psychoethnological Research, Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Preface--Chandra Talpade Mohanty * Introduction--Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos * Part I: Encounters * Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounter or "When" Does a "Chinese" Woman Become a "Feminist"?--Shu-mei Shih * Making Sense in Chinese "Feminism"/Women's Studies--Yenna Wu * International Conferences as Sites for Transnational Feminist Struggles: The Case of the First International Conference on Women in Africa and the African Diaspora (WAAD)--Obioma Nnaemeka * Part II: Dialogues * The Borders Within: The Indigenous Women's Movement and Feminism in Mexico--Sylvia Marcos * One Voice Kills Both Our Voices: "First World" Feminism and Transcultural Feminist Engagement--Marguerite R. Waller * Conversation on "Feminist Imperialism and the Politics of Difference"--Shu-mei Shih, Sylvia Marcos, Obioma Nnaemeka, and Marguerite R. Waller * Part III: Reconceiving Rights * South Wind: Towards a New Political Imaginary--Corinne Kumar * Accidental Crossings: Tourism, Sex Work, and Women's Rights in the Dominican Republic--Amalia Cabezas * Feminism and Human Rights at a Crossroads in Africa: Reconciling Universalism and Cultural Relativism--Joy Ngozi Ezeilo
Preface--Chandra Talpade Mohanty * Introduction--Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos * Part I: Encounters * Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounter or "When" Does a "Chinese" Woman Become a "Feminist"?--Shu-mei Shih * Making Sense in Chinese "Feminism"/Women's Studies--Yenna Wu * International Conferences as Sites for Transnational Feminist Struggles: The Case of the First International Conference on Women in Africa and the African Diaspora (WAAD)--Obioma Nnaemeka * Part II: Dialogues * The Borders Within: The Indigenous Women's Movement and Feminism in Mexico--Sylvia Marcos * One Voice Kills Both Our Voices: "First World" Feminism and Transcultural Feminist Engagement--Marguerite R. Waller * Conversation on "Feminist Imperialism and the Politics of Difference"--Shu-mei Shih, Sylvia Marcos, Obioma Nnaemeka, and Marguerite R. Waller * Part III: Reconceiving Rights * South Wind: Towards a New Political Imaginary--Corinne Kumar * Accidental Crossings: Tourism, Sex Work, and Women's Rights in the Dominican Republic--Amalia Cabezas * Feminism and Human Rights at a Crossroads in Africa: Reconciling Universalism and Cultural Relativism--Joy Ngozi Ezeilo