Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism, Feminism and Politics

by Himani Bannerji (Editor)

Book by

Genres: Nonfiction

Paperback

Published August 1, 1998

About the author

Himani Bannerji is a Bengali–Canadian writer, sociologist, and philosopher from Kolkata, West Bengal, India. She teaches in the Department of Sociology, the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought, and the Graduate Programme in Women's Studies at York University, Canada. She is also known for her activist work and poetry. She received her B.A. and M.A. in English from Visva-Bharati University and Jadavpur University respectively, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Bannerji works in the areas of Marxist, feminist and anti-racist theory. She is especially focused on reading colonial discourse through Karl Marx's concept of ideology, and putting together a reflexive analysis of gender, race and class. Bannerji also does much lecturing about the Gaze and othering and silencing of women who are marginalized.

Reviews

[DC37 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is, as the title suggests, a short collection of essays written by "visible minority" women in Canada. The essays cover several topics but they are all about feminism and racism and these women's experiences in Canada. Some of the essays are more about the women's lived experiences, while others serve as analyses of other feminist works. Some important themes in this book include the observation of discrimination within feminist or other social groups and the silencing of immigrant women. This book taught me that a lot of these issues which I knew to be complex are actually much more so than I had originally thought. As a white male, it's important to read books like these as they serve as an insight into other people's hardships that I have never and will never experience. I definitely thought some of the essays were better than others, but overall they were all fairly informative. Some of the essays were more academic and I found those a lot harder to read. I didn't get as much out of those but I'm sure someone else who has more experience reading academic papers would have. The essays that I really enjoyed reading and learned a lot from were the ones that were more about personal experiences and the concrete forms of these problems. While this isn't exactly a new book (published in 1993) I think it is still extremely relevant. I don't know enough about these issues to really say how much of this book is noticeably outdated, but for me personally, the most important purpose of this book is it has really inspired me to search out more books like this, preferably more recent ones, and continue learning about these issues in this form. This is the first collection of essays I have read and I enjoyed the format as the book ended up including many people talking about many different things and the essays were all a good length to be read one at a time. Overall I really enjoyed this book and I think someone who has more interest and experience in academic papers they could get even more out of this book than I did. That said, I would recommend this book as a good starting point to then go on and read more books of the same style and tone. And of course, I think it is extremely important for everyone to read some sort of book like this to begin to learn about these problems even if they do not affect them personally and work towards assisting the people in our country and around the world who have to face these problems every day and hopefully eventually we can purge them completely from our systems of government and ways of life.