A Conversation Introduction In Spring 2016, Simten Coşar, a professor of political thought in the Faculty of Communication at Hacettepe University, Ankara Turkey (retired in 2017), traveled to the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) at Amherst to continue her research on feminist encounters in and with the … Read more
Reprinted with permission from American Anthropologist Vol. 123, No. 1 (March 2021) Abstract The American ethnographic film canon remains dominated by straight white men. As anthropology takes on the task of confronting the riddle of white supremacy, this is a good time to consider who remains missing from popular taxonomies of anthropological cinema and to … Read more
Introduction Hajj is annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca and one of the five mandatory religious duties of Islam. Physically and financially capable Muslims must perform hajj once in their lifetime. As with most Islamic practices, hajj can be traced back to the era of the Prophet Abraham and now, in 2019, it attracts more than … Read more
In February 2014, the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) held its annual conference, Scholar & Feminist Conference XXXIX – “Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Practices.” As organizers of the conference, we sought to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. … Read more
This essay draws from a larger project where I think with a remarkable pair of leading Muslim feminist activists and authors in the Marxist anti-colonial movements in India, charting a critical pre-history to the Bandung moment of the 1960s and an important genealogy of transnational feminist thought. Rashid Jahan and her student, Ismat Chughtai, were … Read more
This article examines how the process of unlearning shapes the emergence of gendered subjectivities in the context of a religious reform unfolding among the Mising tribal community in Majuli, Assam. Individuals of the Mising tribe have historically practiced a form of religiosity which they believe has developed over four or five centuries as their ancestral … Read more
In Fall 2012, I started my dream job. I had been hired as a queer cultural studies professor in an interdisciplinary department at a public university. After nearly a decade of training in the field of cultural studies with an emphasis in transnational feminist and queer critique, I was offered a tenure-track position in the … Read more
This issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, “Transnational Feminisms: Contexts, Topics, Forms,” co-edited by Attiya Ahmad and Catherine Z. Sameh, emerges out of a 2014 conference held at Barnard College. The conference featured academics, artists, and activists who came together to mark the twentieth anniversary of Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s book, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational … Read more
My country needs me and if I were not here I would have to be invented. –Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county, everybody’s Zora. –Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” “I remember the very day I … Read more
I attended Brown in the mid- and late-1980s, so the literary reclamation of Zora Neale Hurston was well underway by that time. I read everything I could get my hands on. Their Eyes Were Watching God was the first book we discussed in my “Black Women Writers” class, and from there I moved on to … Read more
