Scattered Hegemonies

Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices

1994

Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, editors

Explores the possibilities of doing feminist work across cultural divides without ignoring differences or falling into cultural relativism. The essays in this volume propose transnational feminist reading and writing practices that counter the "scattered hegemonies" of postmodernism, neo- and postcolonialisms, and feminism. The authors gathered here bring the issues of colonialism and postcolonialism into the typically aesthetic debates over postmodernism and the construction of culture; at the same time, they broaden these debates to include the normally excluded issue of feminist participation.

Explores the possibilities of doing feminist work across cultural divides without ignoring differences or falling into cultural relativism. The essays in this volume propose transnational feminist reading and writing practices that counter the "scattered hegemonies" of postmodernism, neo- and postcolonialisms, and feminism. The authors gathered here bring the issues of colonialism and postcolonialism into the typically aesthetic debates over postmodernism and the construction of culture; at the same time, they broaden these debates to include the normally excluded issue of feminist participation.

“Here is a book that brings feminist cultural studies writers into conversation with Asian women shelters activists, a conversation that reveals how risky it is for any of us to imagine that nationalism and post-modernism aren’t acutely political.” Cynthia H. Enloe

Scattered Hegemonies explores the possibilities of doing feminist work across cultural divides without ignoring differences or falling into cultural relativism. The essays in this volume propose transnational feminist reading and writing practices that counter the "scattered hegemonies" of postmodernism, neo- and postcolonialisms, and feminism. The authors gathered here bring the issues of colonialism and postcolonialism into the typically aesthetic debates over postmodernism and the construction of culture; at the same time, they broaden these debates to include the normally excluded issue of feminist participation.
Asking how ideas of postmodernism and postcolonialism are variously deployed by feminists and others in different locations allows the authors to trace the flow of information and theory in transnational cultural production. To this end, they pursue two lines of questioning: What kinds of feminist practices engender theories that resist the question of modernism? And how do we understand the production and reception of diverse forms of feminism within a framework of transnational social/cultural/economic movements?


Inderpal Grewal is an associate professor of women's studies at San Francisco State University. Caren Kaplan is an assistant professor of women's studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Here is a book that brings feminist cultural studies writers into conversation with Asian women shelters activists, a conversation that reveals how risky it is for any of us to imagine that nationalism and post-modernism aren’t acutely political.” Cynthia H. Enloe

“In a vividly written, theoretically incisive introduction, Scattered Hegemonies asks how feminism might be practiced differently across cultural and national divides. Stressing the crucial complexities and historical specificities of postmodernity, the introduction succeeds in the important task of charting how to tie the discourses of gender to global economic structures, patriarchal nationalisms, contending “traditions,” and local tissues of domination. The essays deliver on the promise of the fine introduction. The collection insists that analysis of the conditions of postmodernity cannot be kept hostage to the parochial quarrels about postmodernism. Eschewing both homogenization and relativism, this collection is a landmark of concrete analysis and theoretical clarity about transnational feminist practices that seek to be accountable within the terrors and possibilities of postmodernity.” Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz

In opposition to binary visions of the inequalities which continue to define the world (center/periphery, first world/third world, men/women), this book successfully proposes a new scheme of analysis centered on subjects and intersubjective relations influenced by balance of forces between the local, national and transnational dimensions. The strength of this work is twofold. First, it shows that it is impossible to speak of one of the dimensions without the construction of new paradigms in social researc

but above all in the search for new modes of “sameness” to facilitate each person’s conceiving his or her relationship to the world. For what makes Scattered Hegemonies original is that it was produced by men and women from cultural horizons who are determined to build a new transitional network of reflexion and action out of their differences.” Armand Mattelart, author of Advertising International: The Globalization of Consumer Culture

“Those of us who take intellectual production as a site for politics badly need the kind of profound and sophisticated thinking that went into this collection. . . . The pleasures of this text are multiple: it reminds us that critique can be an act of creation and alliance; it opens up needful conversations; it establishes the difference between understanding what it means to refer to the "global" without mistaking it for all that there is.” Wahneema Lubiano, Princeton University

“Grewal and Kaplan present us with feminist analyses beyond the ethnocentric limits of Western boundaries. . . . No section of the world is left untouched, underscoring the importance of turning our postmodern lenses outwards as well as inwards. . . . . Grewal and Kaplan’s Scattered Hegemonies provide globally diverse interventions into the discourses of postmodernity and identity politics. ”Journal of Communication

This kind of scholarship clearly requires strong bicultural perceptions, bilingual abilities, theoretical and critical sophistication, and rigo

and the essays offer some excellent samples of such scholarship.” Signs