Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism and the West

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.