Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism, and the West

by Zillah Eisenstein

In Against Empire, Zillah Eisenstein extends her critique of neoliberal globalization. Faced with an aggressive American empire hostage to ideological extremism and violently promoting the narrowest of interests, she looks to a global anti-war movement to counter US power. Moving beyond the distortions of mainstream history, she detects the silencing of racialized, sex/gendered and classed ways of seeing. Eisenstein insists that the so-called West is as much fiction as reality, while the sexualized black slave trade emerges as an early form of globalization. Plural understandings of feminisms as other-than-western are needed. Black America, India, the Islamic world and Africa envision unique conceptions of what it is to be fully, polyversally, human. Hope for a more peaceful, just and happier world lies, she believes, in the understandings and activism of women today.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Feminist Theory, Politics, Theory

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2004

About the author

Zillah Eisenstein is Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York. She has written feminist theory in North America for the past twenty-five years. Her writing is an integral part of her political activism. She writes in order to share and learn with, and from, others engaged in political struggles for social justice. She writes about her work building coalitions across women’s differences: the black/white divide in the US; the struggles of Serb and Muslim women in the war in Bosnia; the needs of women health workers in Cuba; the commitments of environmentalists in Ghana; the relationship between socialists and feminists in union organizing; the struggles against extremist fundamentalisms in Egypt and Afghanistan; the needs of women workers in India.
Throughout her career her books have tracked the rise of neoliberalism both within the US and across the globe. She has documented the demise of liberal democracy and scrutinized the growth of imperial and militarist globalization.

She has also critically written about the attack on affirmative action in the US, the masculinist bias of law, the crisis of breast cancer and AIDS, the racism of patriarchy and the patriarchal structuring of race, the new nationalisms, and corporatist multiculturalism.

Reviews

[Safia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zillah Eisenstein’s book Against Empire: feminism, racism, and the west was an interesting and overall great read. The book is semi-biographical, historical, and theoretical which contained a lot of information and new ideas of how to discuss the unknown and what she called the 'elsewhere'. She adds new meaning to words in order to better illustrate that for example sex, race, and class are not separate but united - as well as - acknowledge her lack of information and expertise in certain topics and lived experiences. Eisenstein's writing takes a post-colonial perspective on the West’s empire-building by monopolizing the meaning of democracy, liberty, and feminism. Feminisms need to be local and interpreted by their local setting by women.

[Golbarg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zillah Eisenstein [http://www.ithaca.edu/zillah/] is the most powerful and elequent anti-racist feminist theorist around--her book "Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism and 'the' West" is one of the most cogent feminist critiques of the US Empire, and the state of war women find themselves in (fighting both domestic tyranny as well as foreign domination)....her writing style is really liberating and hopeful! I feel relieved and empowered when reading Eisenstein! Her analysis of Islamic feminism could have been better but still she offers a good review of what's been said and written over the years...

[Kayla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had Zillah as a professor last semester and loved her class. She is an amazing and truly interesting woman!