Description
Book SynopsisThis book proffers a new theory of the radical possibilities of contemporary postcolonial feminist writings from Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, and the Caribbean, against what can be described as actually-existing colonialisms. These writers include prominent and other less-known postcolonial women writers such as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Louise Erdrich, Aurora Levins Morales, Rosario Morales, Esmeralda Santiago, Raymonda Tawil, Michelle Cliff, and Rigoberta Menchú. Negotiating the contradictions among gender, nation, and globalization, postcolonial women writers construct extimate subjectivities that mark their excessive locations in the social field through the dialectical relation between the intimate and the external, the intimately or internally external, articulating these contradictions within the larger history and narratives of anti-colonial internationalist struggle for liberation and emancipation. Grounded in a commitment to the future of the postcolonial nation and the p
Trade ReviewThis is a provocative work on a timely subject. In a series of trenchant analyses of Puerto Rican writers, as well as Dangarembga, Erdrich, and Tawil, the author makes the case for 'extimate subjectivities' as a key to the interventions of postcolonial feminism. It is a fascinating account of radical possibility in contemporary postcolonial feminist writing. -- Peter Hitchcock, Professor of English, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
This is a hands-on, eloquent, and refreshingly honest kind of criticism, rooted in feminism while drawn to community organizing and its battle with the neoliberal 'feminization of poverty.' Unimpressed by the anodyne formulas of 'cosmo-theory,' Khader takes us through a series of superb close-readings from the intimacy of the domestic to the ex-timacy of the political, giving us along the way one of the best defenses anywhere of internationalism as an ethos, an aesthetic, and a politics. A new kind of theory and maybe (hopefully) its future. -- Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Poetics and Politics of Displacing: The Extimate Locations of Postcolonial Feminisms Chapter One: “The Meaning of So Many Roads”: Geography, Circular Migrancy, and Decolonizing the Commonwealth in Puerto Rican Feminist Writings Chapter Two: “None of the Women are at Home”: Culture, Unhomeliness, and The Politics of Expansion in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions Chapter Three: “Escaping the Claustrophobia of Belonging”: Identity, Transracial Ontology, and Rewriting the Columbus Quincentenary in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction Chapter Four: "We Palestinians are the Jews of the Arab World": The Politics of Solidarity, the Ethics of Otherness, and Anti-Colonial Internationalism in Raymonda Tawil’s My Home, My Prison Conclusion: Did Anyone Say Revolution? Postcolonial Feminisms, Cosmopolitics, and the End of Revolutionary Politics
