Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism and the West - Tapa dura

'Zillah Eisenstein, one of the most lively feminist theorists of democracy, here calls on us to question universalism, to embrace a more radical "polyversal" understanding of today's world, and, out of both efforts, to craft a more genuinely feminist democracy. As always, Eisenstein is way ahead of the curve.' - Cynthia Enloe, author of "Maneuvers: the International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives." 'When Eisenstein boldly declares that "the globe needs anti-racist feminist voices for peace", she speaks for us all. Embodying writing as an act of resistance in Against Empire, she offers a renewed politics of radical anti-colonialism centered around a constructive recognition of difference that privileges diversity as a fundamental feature of global community. Ultimately, she identifies the pursuit of justice as a common standpoint uniting us all.' - bell hooks, feminist theorist and cultural critic. 'This is a powerful and provocative work, at once an autobiography of an ardent and wide-ranging activist and a critical study of the workings of empire in this time. Eisenstein not only shows how feminism can and must rise to its global challenges, but how the workings of empire are systematically related to gender. She refuses the recourse to culturally imperialist notions of "women" and the "human" and shows how each of these terms might gain a broader, emancipatory meaning within a global framework.' - Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor, UC Berkeley. 'Zilla Eisenstein writes with passion and commitment. She traces the complexity of the relationships between gender, class, race and religious oppression against women, links the global with the local, the West with the East, the personal with the political, the economic with the cultural. Despite the complexity of her subject her language remains simple, illuminating and refreshing in this dark age of war and neo-imperialism.' - Nawal El Saadawi, Cairo

In Against Empire, Zillah Eisenstein extends her critique of neoliberal globalization. Faced with an aggressive American empire hostage to ideological extremism and violently promoting the narrowest of interests, she looks to a global anti-war movement to counter US power. Looking beyond the distortions of mainstream history, she detects the silencing of racialized, sex/gendered and classed ways of seeing. She 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. Plural understandings of feminisms as other-than-western are needed. Black America, India, the Islamic world and Africa envision unique conceptions of what it is to be fully, 'polyversally', human. Hope for a more peaceful, just and happier world lies, she believes, in the understandings and activism of women today.