Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, Eds. Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, SUNY Press, Albany, New York, 2010, 244 pages, $24.95 paper, ISBN 9781438429380.

Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis is an inspiring book. Through a set of critical self-reflections on alliances involving feminist scholars in the United States and Canada and grassroots organizations around the world, the contributors to this edited volume explore both the potentials of transnational feminist collaborations and the relations of power embedded within them. Developed out of a 2006 workshop at the University in Minnesota, the collection centers on the possibilities of endorsing “transnational feminism” as a postcolonial alternative to “international” or “global” feminism. It insists that we critically mind the historicity and positioning of meanings of transnationality, including the relations of power through which it has become a, perhaps overused, theoretical framework. To be useful, the volume instructs, transnational feminist studies must remain an unstable field that contests its own definition; it must be subject to continuous critical scrutiny. Moreover, debates over the field should not be geared toward an academic audience but be part of the forging of connections that work against binaries of individually vs. collaboratively produced knowledge; academy vs. activism; and theory vs. method. In this volume, transnational feminism becomes an intersectional set of understandings and tools in which transnational praxis grounds (as opposed to claims) feminisms and thereby enables us to interrogate the forms of power that work through them.

In their introduction, editors Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar propose “collaboration” as a tool to bridge the gap between efforts to theorize knowledge production across borders and concrete practices for enacting solidarities through them. This move is self-consciously defiant of the ways collaborative practices are marginalized in the academy (i.e., in file and tenure reviews and prestige), and the collection also aims to challenge and stretch our understandings of what collaboration can mean. Throughout the text, collaboration is not treated as a set of concrete strategies or models. Rather it is a theoretical challenge to “rethink transnational feminist frameworks by creating new spaces for political and intellectual initiatives beyond disciplinary borders, artistic/activist divides, and North/South dichotomies” (page 14). Central to this understanding of collaborative process is a self-critical, dialogic practice that at once resists celebrity/expert politics and refutes the ethic of maverick individualism that dominates the academy. Yet despite this insistence that we interrogate the unequal politics of such feminist praxis, the book remains optimistic about their possibilities. So much so that one might wonder if “collaboration”—which carries the double meaning of 1) working with someone to produce or create something; and 2) traitorous cooperation with an enemy—is the right word for their purposes (or if the contributors might have more thoroughly reflected upon this second meaning).

The book includes nine chapters, plus the above-mentioned introduction by Swarr and Nagar and a conclusion jointly written by all the collaborators. At the heart of the collection are the seven chapters in the second and third sections of the book. Grouped under two headings (“Dialogical Journeys” and “Representations and Reclamations”), these pieces offer reflections on and histories, testimonials, and critical performances of transnational feminist praxis in action. The essays are diverse in their themes, ranging from dialogically written essays by feminist scholars and grassroots activists to a collection of short writings by women involved in a dance troupe for “women artists of color from the Third World” (page 149) to a set of letters by Swarr and Sam Bullington about their years of work with organizations in South Africa promoting gay and lesbian rights and equitable distribution of AIDS medications. As these themes suggest, the chapters do not fit conventional formats and include forms of experimental writing that allow space for dialogue and difference within them. However, the contributors/chapters are united in their insistence on attention to how relations of power and the politics of difference shape feminist collaborations, and together they offer a set of, at once, enactments, guides, and caveats illuminating the possibilities and challenges of transnational feminist praxis.

All essays in the volume are worth reading; however, a few stand out in my mind. First, in a beautifully and thoughtfully written piece, Professor Geraldine Pratt and members of the Philippine Women Centre of British Columbia and Ugnayan ng Kabataang Pilipino sa Canada/The Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance “examine and hesitate over” (page 65) their collaborative research about and work with Filipina women on the Canadian Live-in Caregiver Program. These women face issues ranging from deskilling to social and political marginalization to the stresses of family separation. The authors reflect on what it means to work together and create a collaboration based on common understanding as opposed to common identity. They discuss not only the challenges they have faced, including an unequal distribution of time and resources, but also the opportunities their work has offered to learn from those differently situated than oneself. In a vibrant performance of many of the book themes, the authors argue against idealizing any single model of collaboration. They insist instead that the methods and modes of such joint endeavors must “depend on the circumstances and the particular needs of the community at that time” (page 71).

In another chapter, Professor Linda Peake and Karen de Souza of Guyana’s Red Thread raise important and difficult questions about the challenges of, and contradictions embedded in, collaborations between North American academics and grassroots organizations in the global South. Red Thread is a small but high profile organization that, among other activities, advocates for Guyanese women’s legal and labor rights and conducts educational and training workshops. As a matter of principles, but to its financial peril, it has resisted NGOization. Peake and de Souza reflect on how both despite and on account of Peake’s best (and admirable) efforts to help the Red Thread access funding, their collaborations are shaped by North America academic timelines, agendas, and career trajectories because their funding has become dependent on Peake’s participation. Through these and other examples, the authors draw critical attention to how the paradoxes embedded in “transnational feminist praxis” can reproduce the very hierarchies it hopes to challenge and perpetuate inequalities among women, and they push us to consider what an alternative set of research trajectories might look like.

Finally, Rachel Silvey’s essay bravely focuses on the failures of transnational feminist praxis. Silvey reflects on the challenges she faced working collaboratively with migrant workers and migrant rights activists in Indonesia, as well as students in Indonesia and the United States, to produce a short documentary film for undergraduates. She had hoped the film, which was conceived as a deliberately transnational project, would disrupt stereotypes and inaccuracies of immigrant factory working women and push North American viewers to challenge the exoticization of these women and perceptions of them as “victims.” However, she found that her students misunderstood the documentary and interpreted it problematic ways: their comments suggested that they had maintained a sense of distance and moral superiority from the women featured in the film and judged these women rather than critically examining their own knowledge and life practices. Silvey acknowledges but refuses to end her analysis with these setbacks. Instead, she self-reflexively mines her experience for lessons for future endeavors, a move that itself enacts a crucial transnational feminist praxis.

The two sections that include these reflections and testimonials are headed by an opening section with two chapters, one by M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty and the other by Jigna Desai, Danielle Bouchard, and Diane Detournay, that take up questions of language and meaning weaving through the other essays (and particularly the term “transnational”). Desai, Bouchard, and Detournay’s essay examines “transnational” as a “keyword” alongside other terms it often modifies, such as collaboration, theory, praxis, and the university. Alexander and Mohanty’s paper takes up the important project of modeling a map of radical, non-normative transnational feminist solidarity and pedagogy, and offer corresponding guidelines for realizing such practice.

These two chapters raise important questions and make important points regarding the use of “transnational” academic scholarship and teaching. However, one of the few moments of pause I had while reading this book came during Alexander and Mohanty’s essay. The piece aims to critically map how the category “transnational” is mobilized in core women’s/gender studies and LGBTT/queer studies classrooms, demonstrating a problematic “trend” in which instructors locate the transnational “elsewhere or positioned Eurocentrically, or within the United States as theoretically normative.” (page 34). We undoubtedly need to examine how the transnational is deployed in relationship to racial and colonial histories, and to consider how academic and activist sites become “differentiated geographies of knowledge production” (page 27) that produce insides and outsides. However, I was left with questions about the authors’ methodology, which was simply described as involving the analysis of thirteen syllabi from a cross-section of core women’s/gender studies and LGBTT/queer studies classes in the United States. Thirteen syllabi seems like a rather small sample to make such a crucial point, and the authors never explained how these syllabi were selected, in what sense they could (or could not) be taken as a representative sample (and of what), if the authors of the syllabi were consulted (or interviewed), or if any of their lectures were attended. One can only imagine that courses on women’s/gender studies and LGBTT/queer studies are taught in diverse ways across the country. Moreover, while syllabi certainly indicate an author’s political and intellectual orientation and stakes, they can also be misleading or incomplete when read outside of the context of classroom instruction. Such a circumscribed study seemed out of place alongside the nuanced discussions and the years (even decades) of in-depth collaborative praxis discussed in other chapters of the book.

However, this issue is perhaps a minor one in the context of such an ambitious and inspirational collection, and, if anything, it points to the need for more extensive research and self-reflection on the politics and pedagogies of transnational feminist practice. As Alexander and Mohanty, and the volume itself, rightly insist, this project is one we all need to be engaged in as we embark upon research collaborations across relations of difference and put together our course syllabi each quarter/semester.

The issues and themes discussed in this book are crucial ones that warrant further discussion, contemplation, and critical self-analysis. To this end, chapters of this collection could certainly be taught in undergraduate classes in Feminist Studies, Anthropology, Geography, Sociology, and Development Studies to introduce students to critical issues facing feminist scholars and grassroots organizations in an interconnected world. The book will also be an important tool for graduate students and scholars who are thinking through the politics of collaboration and transnational feminist praxis.