Overview
M. Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of trans-national 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 neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up trans-national frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the hetero-normative 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 trans-generational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-colour 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 mould alternative futures. M. Jacqui Alexander is Professor of Women's Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She is a co-author of Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray! Feminist Visions for a Just World and co-editor of Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures.
Full Product Details
Author: M. Jacqui Alexander
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Weight: 0.721kg
ISBN: 9780822336075
ISBN 10: 0822336073
Pages: 424
Publication Date: 18 January 2006
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Pedagogies of Crossing is a tour de force. M. Jacqui Alexander addresses the conditions that make multiculturalism possible and powerfully shows us that those conditions are ultimately ethical and spiritual. Beautifully written and deeply moving, this book shows us how we need an ethic of translation if we are to be able to engage in classroom teaching so that both students and teachers can grapple with the politics of our complex, globalized world. Pedagogies of Crossing is a must read for anyone in women's studies, anthropology, political science, English, comparative literature, or sociology. -Drucilla Cornell, author of Defending Ideals: War, Democracy, and Political Struggles In Pedagogies of Crossing, M. Jacqui Alexander ventures an archaeology of the heart to cross over to the 'other side' of knowing, returning the sacred to the classroom. Here the 'altar of the secular gods of postmodernity' is finally dismantled and we are urged the freedom to think before and beyond them. I am indebted to this sister-scholar-in-arms. -Cherrie Moraga, coeditor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color [A] comprehensive, extensive exploration of Alexander's journey through migration stories (including her own), through academe, the academy and teaching, and through African and Caribbean colonized identities and sexualized politics. Her collection contributes a great deal to the feminist examination of the need to remember, to communicate the experiences of women of colour, including the spiritual survival of women of colour by finding room for the inclusion the Sacred and sacred experiences, as she steps away from the secularized view of experience and power that post-modernism has brought about. -- Laure E. Lafrance Atlantis
I am blown away by its radical critique of empire and hegemony, but also its feminist commitments - all done in wonderfully lucid language. Laleh Khalili, Times Higher Education, 16th July 2009 In deft prose, the author addresses a poetical cacophony of topics... [A] take-no prisoners assault on interconnected systems of power and gender hierarchy... [O]ffers spiritual solutions to international dilemmas. [Alexander] illustrates a fluid facility with language, subject, and genre. Tara Lake, Girlfriends
I am blown away by its radical critique of empire and hegemony, but also its feminist commitments - all done in wonderfully lucid language. Laleh Khalili, Times Higher Education, 16th July 2009 In deft prose, the author addresses a poetical cacophony of topics... [A] take-no prisoners assault on interconnected systems of power and gender hierarchy... [O]ffers spiritual solutions to international dilemmas. [Alexander] illustrates a fluid facility with language, subject, and genre. Tara Lake, Girlfriends
""I am blown away by its radical critique of empire and hegemony, but also its feminist commitments - all done in wonderfully lucid language."" Laleh Khalili, Times Higher Education, 16th July 2009 ""In deft prose, the author addresses a poetical cacophony of topics... [A] take-no prisoners assault on interconnected systems of power and gender hierarchy... [O]ffers spiritual solutions to international dilemmas. [Alexander] illustrates a fluid facility with language, subject, and genre."" Tara Lake, ""Girlfriends""
Author Information
M. Jacqui Alexander is Professor of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She is a coeditor of Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray! Feminist Visions for a Just World and Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures.
