South Asian Feminism beyond Borders:
Contradiction, Contestation, and Alliance in Transnational Context

Conference Date: October 19, 2006
Madison Concourse Hotel
Feminist Pre-conference at the South Asia Conference, Madison 2006

Contact: Rafia Zakaria (rzakaria@indiana.edu).

Application Deadline: July 25, 2006.
Please send presentation title, an abstract of 200-300 words, and contact/affiliation details to rzakaria@indiana.edu if you would like to participate in the pre-conference (details below).

Description:

We continue the tradition of holding a feminist pre-conference at the South Asia conference, Madison, where we promote discussion and reflection on themes of contemporary relevance for South Asian feminist scholar-activists – this will be the 4th such pre-conference. At last year’s pre-conference (devoted to the theme of Complicity), a recurring concern was the challenge of articulating South Asian feminisms in transnational contexts.

The question of how to analyze and respond to transnational forces is not, of course, a new one for feminists. Postcolonial feminist scholarship, for example, points to the complicity of particular types of Western feminist projects of an earlier era with global projects of colonialism, and much Third World feminist scholarship points to the on-going complicity between the institutionalized efforts for gender transformation in modernist development projects and the exploitation and silencing of women in the global South. And, the emergence of regional and national feminisms, such as “South Asian” feminism, can itself be seen as a response to this problematic, one which poses its own set of difficulties. However, the question of how we name and respond to transnational contexts takes on new forms, and poses new questions, remaining a central concern for feminist activists scholars, as can be seen in the recurrence of that issue in our discussions of complicity in the last pre-conference.

This year’s pre-conference continue the conversations from last year, taking up the theme of “South Asian Feminism beyond Borders: Contradiction, Contestation, and Alliance in Transnational Context.” Our exploration of this topic will be broad, and not limited to the impact of neoliberal policies of economic globalization on women, or to questions of South Asian feminism in diasporic contexts, though of course, these will be an important part of any investigation of South Asian feminism in transnational contexts. Rather, we seek explorations that examine the ways in which transnational issues and contexts are not only objects of investigation in their own right, but are noted in terms of the ways they shape the issues we take up, our modes of engagement, and the approaches we use.

In the tradition of the feminist pre-conferences at Madison, our aim here is not so much to have a set of theoretical papers (though we will, no doubt, of necessity have theoretical engagement), but to take these questions up in ways that help us, as scholar-activists, initiate reflection, conversation, and engagement through dialogue. We are especially interested in presentations that focus on the following questions:

a) Transnational discourse is inherently liminal nature, given its dual focus toward disparate audiences separated by political, national and religious differences. How can we, as transnational feminists, focus our research both toward the subjects of our research in South Asia and Western academic audiences? What kinds of compromises does this endeavor invoke and how far is this dual articulation possible without sacrificing authenticity of the subject?

b) How can key aspects of nations and states, struggles surrounding struggles around citizenship, fundamentalist movements, war, violence, civil liberties, ethnicities, sexual minorities, racial politics, and social identities be articulated within the ever shifting contextual paradigms of transnational discourse?

c) What are the possibilities and spaces for articulating alternative venues for South Asian feminism such as south-south linkages? What do we stand to learn from a conversation between U.S anti-racist feminism and Third world/transnational feminisms?

d) South Asian feminism is itself a transnational project, as exchanges between South Asian feminists from different nations in the region are inherently transnational engagements. How will recognizing this shape the ways in which we take up and address key feminist concerns and issues within both our own national contexts and in transnational ones?

e) What are the theoretical and practical implications of constructing and articulating a transnational feminist identity within/for South Asian feminism, and what are the questions posed by such an endeavor? What strategies can be utilized to give such an identity both disciplinary coherence and academic relevance? What can South Asian feminists in particular contribute to the construction and understanding of transnational feminism as a disciplinary and activist venture? What are the vulnerabilities faced by South Asian feminism in particular to being incorporated into orientalist discourses that perpetuate the construction of South Asian women as inherently lacking in agency?


We hope to focus our collective energies on investigating the theoretical and practical implications of constructing and articulating a “South Asian Feminism beyond Borders,” even as we grapple with the ways in which the configuration “South Asian” itself marks the geographic boundaries and spaces of our scholarship and activism. As always, we seek not finished academic papers, but engagements, conversations, exchanges – all are welcome, and we especially encourage newer scholars and graduate students to join us.

We would like to invite participants interested in defining the context of their work, and reading fragments of their writing that critically examines challenges in cross-border transactions in forming, sustaining feminisms, in relational and self-reflexive (rather than self-referential) text?

The Pre-Conference is scheduled between 2 and 7 p.m on October 19, 2006 in Senate Rooms A and B at the Madison Concourse Hotel in Madison, Wisconsin.

 

Organizers:

Sukanya Banerjee, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Srimati Basu, DePauw University
Shefali Chandra, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
S. Charusheela, University of Hawai`i at Ma¯noa
Angana Chatterji, California Institute of Integral Studies
Lubna Chaudhry, SUNY, Binghamton
Elora Chowdhury, University of Massachussets Boston
Manali Desai, University of California, Riverside and University of Reading
Prita Jha, University of Manchester
Lamia Karim, University of Oregon
Sujata Moorti, Old Dominion University
Jyoti Puri, Simmonds College
Saadia Toor, City University of New York
Kamala Visweswaran, University of Texas, Austin
Usha Zacharias, Westfield State College;
Rafia Zakaria, Indiana University