An excerpt from Feminism Without Borders, a new book by Professor of Women's Studies Chandra Talpade Mohanty, was featured in the April 11 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
"Growing up in India, I was Indian; teaching high school in Nigeria, I was a foreigner (still Indian), albeit a familiar one. As a graduate student in Illinois, I was first a "Third World" foreign student, and then a person of color. Doing research in London, I was black. As a professor at an American university, I am an Asian woman -- although South Asian racial profiles fit uneasily into the "Asian" category -- and, because I choose to identify myself as such, an antiracist feminist of color. In North America I was also a "resident alien" with an Indian passport -- I am now a U.S. citizen whose racialization has shifted dramatically (and negatively) since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
"Of course through all these journeys into and across the borders of countries, educational institutions, and social movements, I was and am a feminist. But along with the changing labels and self-identifications came new questions and contradictions which I needed to understand. Paying attention to the processes of my own racialization, for instance, transformed my understandings of the meaning of feminist praxis. Was being a feminist in India the same as being a feminist in the United States? In terms of personal integrity, everyday political and personal practices, and the advocacy of justice, equity, and autonomy for women, yes. But in terms of seeing myself as a woman of color (not just Indian, but of Indian origin) and being treated as one, there are vast differences in how I engage in feminist praxis. ...
"This means untangling whiteness, Americanness, as well as blackness in the United States, in trying to understand my own story of racialization. So the theoretical insights I find useful in thinking about the challenges posed by a radical multiculturalism in the United States -- as well as, in different ways, early 21st-century India -- are the need to think relationally about questions of power, equality, and justice; the need to be inclusive in our thinking; and the need for our thinking and organizing to be contextual, deeply rooted in questions of history and experience. The challenge of race and multiculturalism now lies in understanding a color line that is global -- not contained anymore within the geography of the United States, if it ever was.
