Pedagogies of Crossing

M. Jacqui Alexander is Professor of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She is a coeditor of Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray! Feminist Visions for a Just World and Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures.

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1Part 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 212. Imperial Desire/Sexual Utopias: White Gay Capital and Transnational Tourism 66Part II: Maps of Empire, Old and New 3. Whose New World Order? Teaching for Justice 914. Anatomy of a Mobilization 1175. Transnationalism, Sexuality, and the State: Modernity's Traditions at the Height of Empire 181Part III. Dangerous Memory: Secular Acts, Sacred Possession 6. Remembering This Bridge Called My Back, Remembering Ourselves 7257. Pedagogies of the Sacred: Making the Invisible Tangible 287Notes 333Bibliography 373Index 395

“Pedagogies of Crossing is a tour de force. M. Jacqui Alexander addresses the conditions that make multiculturalism possible and powerfully shows us that those conditions are ultimately ethical and spiritual. Beautifully written and deeply moving, this book shows us how we need an ethic of translation if we are to be able to engage in classroom teaching so that both students and teachers can grapple with the politics of our complex, globalized world. Pedagogies of Crossing is a must read for anyone in women’s studies, anthropology, political science, English, comparative literature, or sociology.”-Drucilla Cornell, author of Defending Ideals: War, Democracy, and Political Struggles “In Pedagogies of Crossing, M. Jacqui Alexander ventures an archaeology of the heart to cross over to the ‘other side’ of knowing, returning the sacred to the classroom. Here the ‘altar of the secular gods of postmodernity’ is finally dismantled and we are urged the freedom to think before and beyond them. I am indebted to this sister-scholar-in-arms.” -CherrÍe Moraga, coeditor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color “[A] comprehensive, extensive exploration of Alexander’s journey through migration stories (including her own), through academe, the academy and teaching, and through African and Caribbean colonized identities and sexualized politics. Her collection contributes a great deal to the feminist examination of the need to remember, to communicate the experiences of women of colour, including the spiritual survival of women of colour by finding room for the inclusion the Sacred and sacred experiences, as she steps away from the secularized view of experience and power that post-modernism has brought about.” - Laure E. Lafrance (Atlantis)