Pedagogies of Crossing

Pedagogies of Crossing

Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred

  • Author: Alexander, M. Jacqui; Halberstam, Judith; Lowe, Lisa
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • Serie: Perverse modernities
  • ISBN: 9780822336075
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822386988
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2006
  • Month: January
  • Pages: 424
  • DDC: 323.1
  • Language: English
M. Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience and the meaning of sacred subjectivity.

In these meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory, historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book, Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • I. Transnational Erotics: State, Capital, and the Decolonization of Desire
    • 1. Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: Feminism, Tourism, and the State in the Bahamas
    • 2. Imperisal Desire/Sexual Utopias: While Gay Capital and Transnational Tourism
  • II. Maps of Empire, Old and New
    • 3. Whose New World Order? Teaching for Justice
    • 4. Anatomy of a Mobilization
    • 5. Transnationalism, Sexuality, and the State: Modernity's Traditions at the Height of Empire
  • III. Dangerous Memory: Secular Acts, Sacred Possession
    • 6. Remembering "This Bridge Called My Back", Remembering Ourselves
    • 7. Pedagogies of the Sacred: Makinng the Invisible Tangible
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index