Looking beyond the distortions of mainstream history, Eisenstein detects the silencing of racialized, sex/gendered and classed ways of seeing. Against Empire insists that 'the' so-called West is as much fiction as reality, while the sexualized black slave trade emerges as an early form of globalization. 'The' West and western feminisms do not monopolize authorship; there is a need for plural understandings of feminisms as other-than-western. Black America, India, the Islamic world and Africa envision unique conceptions of what it is to be fully, 'polyversally', human.
Professor Eisenstein offers a rich picture of women's activism across the globe today. If there is to be hope of a more peaceful, more just and happier world, it lies, she believes, in the understandings and activism of women today.
Looking beyond the distortions of mainstream history, Eisenstein detects the silencing of racialized, sex/gendered and classed ways of seeing. Against Empire insists that 'the' so-called West is as much fiction as reality, while the sexualized black slave trade emerges as an early form of globalization. 'The' West and western feminisms do not monopolize authorship; there is a need for plural understandings of feminisms as other-than-western. Black America, India, the Islamic world and Africa envision unique conceptions of what it is to be fully, 'polyversally', human.
Professor Eisenstein offers a rich picture of women's activism across the globe today. If there is to be hope of a more peaceful, more just and happier world, it lies, she believes, in the understandings and activism of women today.
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Overview
Looking beyond the distortions of mainstream history, Eisenstein detects the silencing of racialized, sex/gendered and classed ways of seeing. Against Empire insists that 'the' so-called West is as much fiction as reality, while the sexualized black slave trade emerges as an early form of globalization. 'The' West and western feminisms do not monopolize authorship; there is a need for plural understandings of feminisms as other-than-western. Black America, India, the Islamic world and Africa envision unique conceptions of what it is to be fully, 'polyversally', human.
Professor Eisenstein offers a rich picture of women's activism across the globe today. If there is to be hope of a more peaceful, more just and happier world, it lies, she believes, in the understandings and activism of women today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848136076 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 07/18/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 572 KB |
About the Author
Zillah Eisenstein is Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York. She has written feminist theory in North America for the past twenty-five years. Her writing is an integral part of her political activism. She writes in order to share and learn with, and from, others engaged in political struggles for social justice. She writes about her work building coalitions across women's differences: the black/white divide in the U.S.; the struggles of Serb and Muslim women in the war in Bosnia; the needs of women health workers in Cuba; the commitments of environmentalists in Ghana; the relationship between socialists and feminists in union organizing; the struggles against extremist fundamentalisms in Egypt and Afghanistan; the needs of women workers in India.
Throughout her career her books have tracked the rise of neoliberalism both within the U.S. and across the globe. She has documented the demise of liberal democracy and scrutinized the growth of imperial and militarist globalization. She has also critically written about the attack on affirmative action in the U.S., the masculinist bias of law, the crisis of breast cancer and AIDS, the racism of patriarchy and the patriarchal structuring of race, the new nationalisms, and corporatist multiculturalism.
Her most recent books include:
Hatreds: Racialised and Sexualised Conflicts in the 21st Century (1996)
Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism and the Lure of Cyberfantasy (1998)
ManMade Breast Cancers (2001)
Zillah Eisenstein is one of North America's most prolific anti-racist feminist writers and activists of her time. She is well recognized for her earlier activism and writing about the rape camps in Bosnia, breast cancer activism in Cuba, the impact of globalization on women workers across the globe, the racialized gender politics of affirmative action in the US, neo-liberal assaults against feminisms of all sorts and feminist struggles in the former Soviet Union, India, Turkey and Iran. Her books include Against Empire (2004), Sexual Decoys (2007), Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. (1978), The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (1981), The Color of Gender (1994) and Hatreds, Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century,(1996). Zillah Eisenstein teaches political theory and anti-racist feminisms in the Politics Department of Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York.
Read an Excerpt
Against Empire
Feminisms, Racism, and the West
By Zillah Eisenstein
Spinifex Press and Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2004 Zillah EisensteinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-050-0
CHAPTER 1
Unilateral Empire: The United Nations of America
The US at present is not what a democracy looks like. Neither is feminism one and the same with the Bush administration's appropriation of women's rights talk on behalf of Afghan women, or women in the US military. Controversy over the meanings of democracy and feminism is hardly new. But my attempt at seeing and thinking through these issues today has a compelling newness, especially for many of us living in the United States.
Much of what makes this moment new is the unilateral stance of the US. Our leaders are so giddy with their power that they arrogantly and inadvertently reveal their imperial plot for most of the world to see. US empire building Americanizes the globe in its particularly racialized and masculinist form. The Bush administration continues to plaster its version of neoliberalism on to the rest of the globe. People I speak with 'elsewhere' think they should be able to vote in US elections given that they are expected to live according to US design.
I use the term 'elsewhere/s' to pluralize my viewings and my sitings for thinking about other-than-Western democracies. Use these places outside the US as sites to radically pluralize my viewing of humanity's complex understanding of democracies and feminisms. Radical pluralism requires a displacement of the US as the privileged site of modernity, democracy, feminism, and so on, and demands an accounting from places 'elsewhere'.
This project is risky as I span the globe historically, and comparatively. I try to avoid the East/West, traditional/modern, secular/ religious divides and know that I am only sometimes successful in doing so. I look for multiple and incomplete starts and fissures, rather than originary locations, in order to see the most innovative democratic and antiracist feminist dialogues possible. This requires a public and intellectual space large enough for all of us. Sadly, this public space is shrinking and narrowing.
The present is always shifting, yet at any given moment it is also the surrounding in which we live, so it is both history and the present, simultaneously. Thinking and seeing before the moment — its history — and after — its future possibilities — demands complex knowing.
Global Capital and Empire
My inquiry starts here: that Western democratic theory has appropriated all the experience it chooses, as its own, locating the West as the originary home of democracy. This starting point is not simply the well-known critique that Western democracies were exclusive at their core of indigenous peoples, non-propertied men, all women, and African slaves but rather that the ideas of individuality and human freedom also come from these excluded people, from their acts of resistance. The West has in part learned what democracy means from the Haitian revolution, and from women's anticolonial struggles in Egypt, Algeria, Argentina, Chiapas, and Chile. As such, Western democracy, as well as Western feminism, was never simply Western: it grew out of global struggles of resistance, at multiple sites, like the slave trade. Equality and freedom are early on envisioned by those punished by and excluded from Western notions of freedom.
The flows between 'East' and 'West' go each way; from West to East; and East to West. And, these very constructs are exactly that — constructs that are as much symbolic as real. Therefore, I use the terms while at the same time I hope to open and complexify them. Because these labels reify the very hierarchies I wish to displace, much of the historical record I seek does not exist. Silences and exclusions form the erasure. Yet, there is more than one conception of democracy and freedom, and the Western brand is not simply of the West, nor the best.
In the twenty-first century, the West means the US more than Europe, as well as the globalized forms of cultural capitalism which no longer have any one geographical location. The flows travel from global capital to sites everywhere; yet there still are flows traveling in reverse against these developments from the anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle, Washington, and Johannesburg, South Africa. Given the relations of power, flows both ways are absorbed by power-filled discourses which appropriate and silence subversive variety.
Global capitalism parades as globalization. Globalization holds out the probability of world poverty worsening along with repressive measures against those who suffer most. It also holds out the possibility of resistance against these forces. Growing criticism of global capital and its culture of domination has taken hold in places like Seattle, Paris, and Barcelona. At the same time Coke and McDonald's are known throughout the world and people line up for miles to enter a new McDonald's in Kuwait. In China the owners of Noodle King say that they have learned everything from McD's, but that they offer a "traditional menu in an untraditional setting". Yet, they wonder if they must give up the "human touch", in the end, for what is considered modernity. Being modern means downsizing labor because labor is too costly. Coke, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken represent the West, while the US is more and more dependent on other countries to do our work. Dell computers are built in Tijuana; 90 percent of the world's scanners and most computer motherboards are manufactured in Taiwan.
Bourgeois culture is seductive and captivating and it is oppressive and isolating. Monitoring is needed and, most of all, the US needs to surveil more and more of the globe in order to protect its own needs which extend well beyond its own territorial borders. So the US builds empire for itself and the globe be damned. The US votes against the Kyoto Treaty, women's rights initiatives, the banning of land mines, etcetera. Well-known capitalists like George Soros recognize that the US is the major obstacle to building international initiatives that endorse a sense of global community, responsibility, and cooperation.
In the US many progressives feel powerless and helpless. The Bush administration presses on with its "homeland security" agenda while destroying civil liberties at home, and protecting tyrannies abroad. In media and politics, language emptied of meaning has become triumphant. Terms championing the human struggles of people around the world have been recontexualized for a global economy that is diverse and plural, but not equal nor equally free. The meanings of color are shifting slowly and contradictorily given the new slaveries of the globe.
Color, and its cultural and political naming in terms of race, has no one meaning. The slave trade designated a new context for seeing Black skin; today the exclusion of most African countries from the cybertech world renews this context in historical form. Yet, colors continue to mix, and Yellows and Browns have more visibility in the global cyber economy. Columbus 'invented' the Indian; the Indian was something else before he 'discovered' them. Afterwards, they were hung, and burned with unspeakable rage and cruelty but the Spanish slaughters and violence destroyed much of these traces.
Yet meaning is always sluggish and complex. Aimé Césaire writes that Hitler was seen as a monster, not because of the crimes themselves that he was responsible for, but because he used these crimes to humiliate the white man. He used against Europeans the European colonialist practices that had formerly been "reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'coolies' of India, and the 'niggers' of Africa". This reflects in part the fact that Hitler did not see Jews as white; nor did many Europeans.
Language is the only means we have to name what we see, and it also gets emptied of meaning. Each word is filtered through the concentrated power of our times, which selfishly captures meaning for itself. The world becomes indecipherable and as Jean Baudrillard says, 'undecidable'. When little is expected of language it no longer has effective meaning. Instead, image becomes the operating mode; reality is disconnected from itself and we are left with "radical uncertainty". Digitality only reencodes these modes of exchange: artificiality replaces the real.
However, people retain their human capacity to know pain or to feel jubilation. The 1991 Gulf War happened, even if the US pretends it did not; our president does not know much and is probably one of the least educated rich men of the world even though we pretend he leads. The children of Iraq continue to suffer and die whether this is named or not.
Seeing and being seen, Islamic and Muslim culture is rediscovered by political and economic forces. Once again the ascendency of Islam returns, even if this time it is from a marginalized positioning. As such, feminisms and women's resistance in Islam, which are not new, but are being newly uncovered once again, allow us to see more of the history and presence of women's struggle for liberation as central to the globe. So much is said to be new, when most of everything is almost always also old.
I, a woman born in the US of communist and atheist parents, wonder anew about my identity. Raised as an atheist, I have never known God as an explanation for what people do, or for what happens to them. I was brought up to believe in people: that people make the world through their struggle and pain. Others enter the world 'believing'. We each share the point of entry which initiates us to a way of seeing and thinking. Jew, Muslim, atheist, Christian, Hindu — each starts with a before ... with some shared explanations of beginnings. There are too many kinds of religious belief and ways of believing, and too many kinds of nonbelieving for there to be any simple divide between secular and religious. Bush speaks of good and evil in biblical terms, is said to see no moral ambiguity when he decides to drop bombs on Iraq, and yet is said to lead a secular state. Meanwhile, others, in Islam, are defined as religious fanatics.
The wars in Israel and Palestine and Rwanda and between Hindu and Muslim in Gujarat, and white and Black in South Africa speak intractability. But the struggles of secular Muslims in Iran against the Khomeini regime also bespeak human struggles that move beyond neat divides. Yet our politicians have no interest in opening our language or our thinking or our seeing. Progressives standing against all forms of fundamentalist extremism — capitalist, Muslim, Christian — must make a new clarity possible for seeing a shared humanity.
Israel, initially founded on the idea of freedom for Jews, is also an apartheid state practicing racism against Palestinians. That is why Israel is seen as the new South Africa in much of the world outside the US. This reminds me of how bigoted and reactionary so many of the middle-class Jewish communities — in Atlanta, Georgia, and Columbus, Ohio — were to my family as my parents actively took part in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. These communities wanted nothing to do with us, making it impossible for us to move into their neighborhoods; and we were not interested in their synagogues.
How do oppressive moments get appropriated as supposedly democratic? Who gets to claim the meaning of democracy and for whom is it claimed? White propertied men used colonialism and imperialism to appropriate democracy for themselves. The Enlightenment articulated the language of democracy in spite of its dependence on the slave trade. Haitian revolutionaries were silenced by the revolutionaries of the American colonies. India is said to be a democracy yet Gandhi does not stand alongside Jefferson in US history books because Gandhi was an anti-Western/anti-materialist democrat. Democracy that looks different from Western individualism is dismissed as something else, from 'else-wheres'. This power of naming affects all viewing and seeing. It even gives feminism to the West, when struggles for women's freedom have existed always, and everywhere. And while it does this, many progressive feminisms which have existed within the West are also denied.
My 'always' and 'everywhere' assume I know more than I do. But right now I must think subversively which means seeing comparatively. The larger the sweep, the better the understanding of similarity as partial and incomplete. Similarity is not the same as sameness; and yet a simple notion of difference will not do because any one site has its multiple meanings which are not fully knowable. The big sweep is no more incomplete than the small local site. It just feels safer.
I was brought up by my communist parents to believe that I should never endorse a way of being or living that I would not be willing to embrace myself. I have used this as my democratic guide — always to imagine myself in the situation before giving my support for it. But I now wonder if this is too limiting, that it assumes that we must be willing to exchange each other's lives, when all I need to do is to understand another person's choice. Do not misunderstand this stance as liberal pluralism, or cultural relativism.
My radically plural standpoint requires that humanity be respected and allowed self-determination, but in cacophonous voices. This polyversal humanism locates the feminist promissories of this book. My radical pluralism does not allow for suicide bombers, no matter their gender, because this involves indiscriminate killing. Nor does it allow any form of racialized or gendered exclusion of any person from the right freely to choose their path in life. I move beyond the liberal/Western notion of diversity which accepts out of necessity, rather than choice, that people will differ. This means seeking out cultural differences in order to deepen understanding by sharing and decentering the self with a newly fulfilling complexity.
Being direct and open with each other allows us to try and subvert the cultural constructions that continually confront us and keep us from knowing what someone else is thinking. I must ask questions in order to know. But subtle webs of silence — be it about lovers, or dreams, or family sadnesses — are defined as private. Privacy, as a veil for secrecy and fantasy, can often disable and disengage. Many cultures, including those of the West, think silence is better than openness. Yet Westerners are said to be too open, too brash, too noisy about private tales. Just look at our tv shows. But it is as though the more that is revealed publicly — from Bill Clinton's affairs to the sexual abuses of the Catholic priests — the more silences operate privately. I find the silences, rather than more talk, deafening.
Thinking is done best by borrowing, dialoguing, mirroring, exchanging, arguing. This means that modernity, secularism, terrorism, the West, Islam, globalization, feminisms — all need clarification. The difficulty of speaking in power-filled discourses is that we reproduce them at the same time as we challenge them. The term 'slavery' itself is a homogenized abstraction that silences the incredible individualized lives of the slaves themselves. Yet slavery must be named for its crushing inhumanity. I interrogate and challenge the very idea of the West, and yet find myself using and replicating it too much of the time.
The present scourge of terrorism disallows, from above, a careful hearing of whose terror the US is concerned with. The so-called "war on terrorism" is used across the globe to silence human rights activists. Whereas the US has often in the past authorized human rights rhetoric, today it authorizes anti-terror legislation allowing governments here and elsewhere to equate human rights dissidents with terrorists.
US security guidelines now require Arabs and Muslims from Iran, Iraq, and Syria who enter the US to be fingerprinted and photographed, although Saudis are exempt. Arrests and threats of deportation plague most Arabs and Muslims throughout the US. Since September 11, 2001, more than 40 percent of Pakistanis in Brooklyn have been detained. Families are leaving the US for Canada and elsewhere in order to avoid the constant surveillance and fear. Houman Mortazavi, who emigrated from Iran, says of the US: "I've been seriously thinking of moving somewhere civilized, where I will not be prosecuted for who I am." Another Iranian says the US is plagued by a new cesspool of racial conservatism.
There seems to be little consistency in and reason for many of the violations of civil rights. Saudis are often exempt, yet several Saudis were on the planes that destroyed the peace and quiet of so many on 9/11. Similarly, none of the initial 598 detainees suspected of Al Qaeda connections who were held at Guantanamo Bay came from Iraq. Yet the war of/on 'terror' was directed against Iraq. Bush repeatedly used Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) as justification for war. Bush declared Saddam an "imminent threat", declared that he would pass on WMD to Al Qaeda if left in power. Yet, no weapons have been located; and more and more information has surfaced to show that this threat was more made up than real. This kind of misinformation, deception, and lying makes it almost impossible to think.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Against Empire by Zillah Eisenstein. Copyright © 2004 Zillah Eisenstein. Excerpted by permission of Spinifex Press and Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsPreface
1. Unilateral Empire: The United Nations of America
2. Thinking to See: Secrets, Silences and Befores
3. Humanizing Humanity: Secrets of the Universal
4. Fictions of the West: Their De-Racing and De-Sexing
5. Colonialism and Difference: The "Othering" of Alternative Democraices
6. Non-Western Westerners: The Difference Color Makes
7. Feminisms and Afghan Women: Before and After Sept.11
8. Feminisms from Elsewheres: Seeing Polyversal Humanity
Index