Twenty years after the publication of Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, the Barnard Center for Research on Women hosted a conference bringing together senior and junior scholars whose work animated – and continues to be animated by – its publication. During this video recorded plenary session, senior scholars Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Lydia Liu, Jennifer Terry, Tina Campt, and Deborah Thomas, reflect on the circumstances leading to the emergence of transnational feminisms and the ongoing legacies of these projects.
In their opening remarks, the editors of Scattered Hegemonies, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, emphasize the collaborative work and the connective threads – both conceptual and thematic – leading to the publication of the book. From different parts of the world, trained in different realms of study, focused on different issues, the feminist scholars who contributed to Scattered Hegemonies, and the broader transnational feminist projects the volume indexes, shared a commitment to postcolonial thought and were interested in exploring how an engagement with then emergent “postmodern” lines of thought might counter gendered discourses of “rescue and retrieval” that continue to configure marked gendered subjects, most notably women, as colonized subjects.
The “transnational” they envisioned does not seek to embed and reproduce hegemonic capitalist, nationalist, masculinist, or modernist discourses, but to carve out analytical space to examine what Lisa Lowe refers to as the “intimacies of four continents” 1 in order to open up – rather than limit and forestall – feminist political possibilities.
Though the term “transnational feminism” now circulates widely, Grewal and Kaplan underscored the continuing salience of the underlying questions animating their collective work: how to grapple with global asymmetries and hierarchies across multiple interrelated vectors of sociopolitical, economic, and discursive realms; and how to think of feminist, queer, class, race, religion and other bases of sociopolitical difference and power without assuming or privileging local or national forms masquerading as universals.
Political struggles do not stop at or preclude the academy. Grewal and Kaplan provide a brief analysis of how higher education is a site and means through which always mutating forms of power and hierarchy are produced and consolidated. Noting how feminist and attendant works continue to struggle against accusations of it being “biased,” “too topical,” “not rigorous,” and “low brow,” they stress the importance of undertaking long-term, careful and dialogical research that is attentive to those who are (and continue to be) marginalized, ignored, and elided, and that provides us with a deeper and collective understanding of “what’s going on and why.”
Grewal and Kaplan’s remarks are followed by brief discussions of the individual trajectories their works have taken, and other panelists discussing of how their individual works have taken up and probed the limits of transnational feminisms. During the final segment of the plenary, the audience Q&A, there are discussions of: the interrelation and difference between international and transnational; thinking the “decolonial” in relation to the “transnational’; how to navigate and survive the increasing demands placed on scholars in the face of a neoliberalizing academy; and pressure points and tensions between feminist studies programs and other academic programs, most notably area studies.
Works Cited
Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
- Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).[↑]
