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Issue: 6.3: Summer 2008
Guest Edited by Neferti Tadiar
Borders on Belonging: Gender and Immigration

About the Contributors

Malik Ahmed was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan. He lived in South Africa in the 1990s and has been living in New York since 2001. He is one of the founding members of PAGE (Pakistani Activists for Gender Equality).

Natalia Almada's debut feature-length documentary, Al Otro Lado about immigration, drug trafficking and Corrido music was nationally broadcast on PBS's award winning program P.O.V. in August 2006 and had a special week long engagement at New York's Museum of Modern Art in March 2006. Al Otro Lado was nominated for a 2005 Gotham Award and was an official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, the New York Latino International Film Festival (Kodak Cultural Award), Cinefestival (best feature film), Morelia Film Festival (honorable mention for Best documentary), Puerto Rico International Film Festival (best documentary) and others. The film received support from the Sundance Documentary Fund, Latino Public Broadcasting, the Tribeca All Access Program, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Arizona Humanities Council. Her experimental short, All Water Has A Perfect Memory, about a cross-cultural family remembering the loss of a child, was an official selection of the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, and was awarded best short documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival and a gold plaque award at the Chicago International Film Festival. Natalia is a 2006 and 2007 MacDowell Colony Fellow, a 2006 Rockefeller grant nominee and a 2005 recipient of a Creative Capital Grant and a New York State Council for the Arts grant for El General. She received her Masters of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and works as a freelance editor.

Paola Bacchetta is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She is also the Director of the Beatrice Bain Research Group (BBRG), Berkeley's research center for gender, sexuality and race. Her Ph.D. is in sociology from The Sorbonne, Paris. Her geo-political areas of specialization outside the U.S. are India and France. She is author of Gender in the Hindu Nation: RSS Women as Ideologists (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2003), and co-editor of Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World (New York: Routledge, 2002). She has published many book chapters and articles on gender, sexuality, "race"-racism, postcoloniality, political conflict, space, social movements and social movement subjects (feminist, lesbian, queer, right-wing) in journals such as Social Text; Feminist Studies; Journal of Women's History; Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography; Growth and Change; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. She is Co-Director (with Trinh T. Minh-ha) of the Committee for a Graduate Group Program in Transnational Feminist Studies at UC Berkeley. Her current research is two-fold: on sexuality in Hindu nationalism, and on sexuated "race"-racism and lesbians "of color" in France.

Mary Pat Brady is Associate Professor of English and Latino/a Studies at Cornell University where she teaches courses on Latina literature, art, and culture, Twentieth Century U.S. fiction, as well as courses on gender, immigration, and the war on drugs. Her first book, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Duke UP, 2002), won the Modern Language Association Prize for the Best work of Chicana and Latino Literary and Cultural Criticism. She has also published numerous articles including "'Full of Empty': Creating the Southwest as Terra Incognita," in Nineteenth-Century Geographies, edited by Helena Michie and Ronald Thomas (Rutgers University Press, 2002); "The Fungibility of Borders," in Nepantla: Views from South 1 (2000); "The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories," in American Literature 71.1 (1999); "Specular Morality, Drugs, and the Anxiety of the Visible," in Making Worlds: Metaphor and Materiality in Feminist Thought, edited by Susan Aiken and Sallie Marston (University of Arizona Press, 1997). Her essay on Sandra Cisneros won the prestigious Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published in American Literature in 1999. She is also an Associate Editor of the groundbreaking Heath Anthology of American Literature (5th Edition). Brady is also the past recipient of numerous fellowships including the Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists, the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, the University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the University of California, Santa Barbara Women's Studies Dissertation Fellowship, as well as two Project 88 fellowships from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Maria Hinojosa is an award-winning journalist and author who is managing editor and host of NPR's Latino USA. In addition to hosting each week's show, Hinojosa is the senior correspondent for the Emmy award-winning PBS newsmagazine NOW.

Kayhan Irani is an artivist dedicated to unleashing beauty and truth from unconventional and irregular platforms. After receiving traditional theater training from the High School of Performing Arts in New York City, Kayhan went on to expand her repertoire doing traditional and non-traditional theater at various venues such as Lincoln Center, The Public Theater, Chashama Theater, The Lower East Side Tenement Museum and on city streets. Her one-woman show We've Come Undone, highlighting the lives of immigrant women post 9/11, is an experiment in how contemporary performance can be combined with participatory theater to engage audiences in political and social change. It has been presented across North America at college and university campuses, international theater festivals, fundraisers, and even at Burning Man. Kayhan served as an artistic consultant and researcher for Barnard College's "Storytelling Project", an initiative which links research to practice through the development of a curriculum to teach about race, racism, and social justice using storytelling and the arts. She is currently co-editing a volume of essays, Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the Power of Narrative to Build Community and Make Social Justice Claims (Routledge 2008), and is writing an ESL TV show for the City of New York. She is a member of the Dramatists' Guild.

Lisa Lowe is professor of Comparative Literature at UC San Diego and an affiliated faculty member in the Ethnic Studies Department and the program in Critical Gender Studies. She is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 1996), and a coedited volume The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke UP, 1997) and a forthcoming book, Metaphors of Globalization. Her current project, The Intimacies of Four Continents, is a study of the convergence of colonial slavery and indentured labor in the Americas as the conditions for modern liberal notions of freedom.

Martin F. Manalansan IV is associate professor of anthropology and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He presently serves as co-chair of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists and board member of the Association for Feminist Anthropology. He is also the Social Science Review Editor for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. His book, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora was published by Duke University Press in 2003 and was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize by the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists in 2003. His publications include three edited collections: Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America (Philadelphia Temple University Press, 2000) which was awarded the 2001 Cultural Studies Book Prize by the Association for Asian American Studies, (with Arnaldo Cruz-Malave) Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York University Press, 2002), and (with Katharine Donato, Donna Gabbacia, Jennifer Holdaway and Patricia Pessar) a special issue of the International Migration Review (2006) entitled "Gender and Migration Revisited." His essays have appeared in journals such as Social Text, positions: east asia cultures critique, and GLQ. His current projects include Manila's urban modernity, return migration to the Philippines and the cultural politics of space, food, and olfaction in Asian American immigrant communities of New York City.

Ruth Marshall is the Director of the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA - French Foreign Ministry) based in the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and Associate Researcher at the Centre d'Etudes des Mondes Africains (CNRS-Sorbonne) in Paris. She holds a DPhil (Oxon) in Politics, and over the past fifteen years her research has focused on Nigeria and, more recently, the Côte d'Ivoire. She has published extensively on the political implications of the Pentecostal revival in Nigeria, and on issues of autochthony, citizenship, and violence in the Côte d'Ivoire. Her current research, funded by a grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, focuses on ultra-nationalist youth militants and militia groups in Southern Côte d'Ivoire. As well as academic work on the Ivorian crisis, Dr. Marshall has consulted for the International Crisis Group and the Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide at the United Nations. She has lived in West Africa (Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal and Nigeria) for the past seven years, and her current mandate as Director of IFRA involves the promotion of social scientific research in West Africa and the reinforcement of links and exchanges between West African and European/American researchers and institutions.

Bharati Mukherjee won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for fiction for The Middleman & Other Stories. She is the author of seven novels, including most recently The Tree Bride and the best-selling Desirable Daughters and Jasmine; two collections of short stories; two books of non-fiction, co-authored with her husband, Clark Blaise; and numerous essays on immigration. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nadine Naber is an Assistant Professor in the Program in American Culture and the Department of Women's Studies and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She received her Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching focus on Arab American Studies; Women of Color and Transnational Feminisms; Race and Ethnicity; and Colonialism and Post-Colonial Theory. She is co-editor of the book, Race and Arab Americans: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (Syracuse University Press). She is co-editor of the book The Color of Violence (For INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, Boston: South End Press). Nadine is a co-editer, with Rabab Abdulhadi and Evelyn Alsultany, of Gender, Nation, and Belonging, a special issue of the MIT Online Journal of Middle East Studies on Arab American Feminisms. She has published articles that situate Arab American Studies in the context of U.S. Racial and Ethnic studies, and Women of Color Feminisms in the Journal of Cultural Dynamics; the Journal of Asian American Studies; the Journal of Ethnic Studies; Feminist Studies; and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. She is co-founder of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, North America (cyber AWSA); Arab Movement of Women arising for Justice (AMWAJ) and Arab Women's Activist Network (AWAN) and a board member of Incite! Women of Color against Violence.

Susan C. Pearce is Assistant Professor of Sociology at East Carolina University. She earned her M.A. (1992) and Ph.D. (1997) in Sociology at the New School for Social Research. She is the co-author (with Elizabeth Clifford and Reena Tandon) of Immigrating Women, to be published by New York University Press (forthcoming). Her work is concerned with the relationship between culture and politics. Specifically, she conducts research on ethnicities, landscapes, and power, through projects such as the U.S. immigration rights movement, the collective memory of the Solidarity movement in Poland, the counter-amnesia of the New York African Burial Ground, and her research with Natalie Sokoloff on immigration and intimate partner violence.

Queers for Economic Justice is a progressive non-profit organization committed to promoting economic justice in a context of sexual and gender liberation. Their goal is to challenge and change the systems that create poverty and economic injustice in their communities, and to promote an economic system that embraces sexual and gender diversity. They are committed to the principle that access to social and economic resources is a fundamental right, and they work to create social and economic equity through grassroots organizing, public education, advocacy and research. They do this work because although poor queers have always been a part of both the gay rights and economic justice movements, they have been, and continue to be, largely invisible in both movements. This work will always be informed by the lived experiences and expressed needs of queer people in poverty.

Dylan Rodríguez is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside, where he began his teaching career in 2001. Rodríguez is an interdisciplinary scholar activist whose work attempts to engage the field of radical and revolutionary praxis that has emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, across the different sites and moments of struggle against global racism, white supremacy, and other forms of institutionalized dehumanization. He is the author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and the forthcoming Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Arrested Raciality, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Among other political-intellectual collectives, he has worked with and/or alongside such organizations as Critical Resistance (a leading force in the contemporary prison abolitionist movement), INCITE!, and the Critical Filipino and Filipina Studies Collective. Dylan Rodríguez's writings have appeared in such journals, anthologies, and popular publications as Radical History Review, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, What Lies Beneath, Kritika Kultura (Philippines), and Social Identities. He is an Associate Editor for the journals American Quarterly and Radical Philosophy Review, and sits on the editorial board of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order.

Robyn Rodriguez's research interests are in the areas of globalization, labor and trans/nationalisms. She is currently completing her book manuscript tentatively entitled, "Brokering Bodies: The Philippine State and the Globalization of Migrant Workers." "Brokering Bodies" will be published by the University of Minnesota Press and is expected to be published in late 2009. Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as Signs, Citizenship Studies and the Sociological Forum. A long-time activist in the Filipino community organizing around labor, immigrant rights and women's issues, Rodriguez is currently active in building the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (NAFCON), a national network of grassroots Filipino immigrant groups.

Natalie J. Sokoloff, Professor of Sociology, has been a member of the faculty of John Jay College of Criminal Justice for 35 years. She is also a member of the doctoral faculties in Sociology, Criminology, and Women's Studies at the Graduate School, City University of New York. She teaches courses on women, crime, and justice; imprisonment and empowerment; and domestic violence. In 2005 she was doubly honored with the Outstanding Teacher Award at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology's Division on Women and Crime. Also, in 2006-07 she was granted a John Jay College Scholarly Excellence Award. Professor Sokoloff's two latest books are The Criminal Justice System and Women, 3rd Ed. (co-editor, McGraw-Hill, 2004; 2nd Ed., 1995; 1st Ed.: Clark Boardman, Ltd., 1982) and Domestic Violence at the Margins: Readings on Race, Class, Gender and Culture (co-editor, Rutgers University Press, 2005). Her earlier publications include: Between Money and Love: The Dialectics of Women's Home and Market Work (Praeger, 1980; translated into Japanese, 1987); The Hidden Aspects of Women's Work (co-editor, Praeger, 1987); Black Women and White Women in the Professions: Occupational Segregation by Race and Gender, 1960-1980 (Routledge, Chapman, Hall, 1992). Professor Sokoloff has published widely in many journals and edited volumes. Multicultural Perspectives on Domestic Violence: A Bibliography, is free and available online. Her current research is on domestic violence in immigrant communities in Baltimore, MD. She is on the Board of Directors of the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women's College Program; Alternative Directions, Inc., a prisoner re-entry program for women returning to their communities from prison; and the National Research Committee for Inside/Out, a college program that brings traditional college classes into prisons where students from these two communities learn in direct interaction with each other.

Neferti Tadiar is Professor of Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies in the Department of Women's Studies at Barnard College. She is also currently the Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. Her research concerns the role of cultural practice and social imagination in the production of wealth, power, marginality and liberatory movements in the context of global relations, with a focus on contemporary Philippine and Filipino cultures and their relation to political and economic change. She is the author of Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004) and co-editor (with Angela Y. Davis) of an anthology of essays, entitled Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (2005). Her new book, Things Fall Away: Philippine Literature, Historical Experience and the Makings of Globality, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Miriam Ticktin is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at the New School for Social Research. She received a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University in 2002, and a Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology in "co-tutelle" with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in France, also in 2002. She has published on topics such as the politics and ethics of medical humanitarianism, immigration and asylum-claims in Europe, the role gender and sexual violence play in the context of immigration, and how suffering figures in legal claims. Her work appears in journals such as in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society; American Ethnologist; Interventions: International journal of postcolonial studies; Ethnicities; and PoLAR (Political and Legal Anthropology Review) and in various edited volumes. Her co-edited volume, "Government and Humanity" is forthcoming with Duke University Press, and she is currently completing her manuscript entitled, "Between Justice and Compassion: The Politics of Immigration and Humanitarianism in France" about the fight for social justice of undocumented immigrants in France.

Basia Winograd is a NYC based documentary filmmaker. She studied film directing at Poland's National Film School in Lodz, and at Columbia University, where she received her MFA in 2006. Basia's documentaries have aired on Thirteen, the BBC and other national television stations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Her first film, a documentary made for Polish television in 1998, was about the lives of Polish immigrants in New York City.

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