Feminist Freedom Warriors

Chandra Talpade Mohanty is a postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist. As of 2013, she has served as the women’s studies department chair and professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. Her work became internationally known after the publication of her influential essay, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” in 1986. Her recent book, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity extends the argument of this essay and sets out an approach to transnational feminist collaboration. Dr. Linda Carty is a sociologist, activist, feminist and educator from Canada .She is also an author and essayist and is also a professor of Sociology at Syracuse.

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionAn Archive of Feminist Activism:Conversations with Margo Okazawa-Rey, Angela Y. Davis, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Himani Bannerjee, Amina Mama, Aida Hernandez-Castillo, Zillah Eisenstein, Linda Carty and Chandra Talpade MohantyChapter 1No Freedom without Connection:Envisioning Sustainable Feminist SolidaritiesMargo Okazawa-ReyChapter 2Troubling Explanatory Frameworks: Feminist Praxis Across GenerationsAngela Y. DavisChapter 3Materializing Class, Historicizing CultureHimani BannerjiChapter 4Being in Motion: Building Movements Across GenerationsMinnie Bruce PrattChapter 5Bridging Through Time: Inhabiting the Interstices of Institutions and PowerAmina MamaChapter 6Searching for Truth inCommunityAída Hernández CastilloChapter 7Towards a New Feminist Politics of Possibility and SolidarityZillah EisensteinPostscriptTowards a Politics of Refusal and HopeTaveeshi SinghBiographies

"Feminist Freedom Warriors is a provocation and an inspiration. The political and intellectual life stories of an amazing cohort of radical feminist takes us through five decades of dynamic history and spans the globe.Their stories, ideas, fortitude and courage provide a powerful guide to the freedom-making work of the mid 20th through the early 21st centuries. The book is yet another gift of insight and critical feminist praxis from Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Linda Carty, sister-scholars and collaborators whose own collective passion and commitments are also in every page of this collection."-Barbara Ransby, author, historian, activist and President of the National Women's Studies Association, (2016-2018)"This collection brings together feminist visionaries to think deeply about how we sustain our movements, each other, and ourselves in and through ongoing feminist struggle. Mohanty and Carty's dialogues with the contributors reveal crucial insights into building and theorizing multi-issue movements that rely on intersectional, anti-racist, transnational feminisms. The collaborative endeavor illuminates the persistent intellectual capaciousness and radical hope of these scholar-activists. The contributors' complex engagements with feminist theory and praxis across geopolitical frameworks reaffirm coalitional possibilities so necessary in these turbulent times."-T. Jackie Cuevas, author of Post-Borderlandia""In Feminist Freedom Warriors liberation is historicized, imagined, and enacted as contested struggle and dialogue. The intellectual-activist thinkers within explain that feminist praxis—poetics, pedagogies, and activism—is an ongoing refusal of global capitalism and colonialism. Comprising stories and interviews, Feminist Freedom Warriors shows that engendering political change, across racial and sexual identifications, is tied to the uneasy work of imagining solidarities outside our present (neoliberal) system of knowledge. What stands out, beautifully and urgently, is the praxis of sharing how to refuse infrastructures of violence. Feminist Freedom Warriors captures how sharing and talking and learning, and the struggle to collaborate, is tied to the grounded work of building new futures." —Katherine McKittrick, Associate Professor, Department of Gender Studies, Queen's University