Transnational feminism and global advocacy in South Asia

This collection presents South Asian and diasporic strands of transnational feminism that intermingle with the forces of globalization and empire and that are strategically deployed using models of advocacy and activism. The scholars in this collection explore how a series of existing and emerging feminist ideas and theories address, intersect, and measure-up against development goals, empowerment work, and postcolonial representations in South Asia and its diasporas. Together, the essays examine the multiplicity of modes through which academics, activists, advocates, Non Governmenta Organization (NGO) workers, and artists, often in collaboration with people on the ground, articulate relations of power, advocate for subjects, and envision and remake communities. Both the issues they write about and the sites they operate in are useful in contesting and re-imagining ways of knowing and being within South Asia and its diasporas. Hence, a thematic strain in this anthology is a scrutiny of factors and agents that inhibit and create transformations in the experiential realities and lived imaginaries of South Asian people, both rooted and diasporic. This insistence on capturing the broad brush-strokes as well as the fine nuances of circumstances of situated and diasporic peoples is to signal how conditioned both are by a wide range of global forces, and consequently, how they are mutually, albeit unevenly interrelated and inclusive. Our goal is to highlight such spaces or more accurately gesture to connections that function as localized zones, as intersecting points, as links and networks, and as places that activate transnational and global momentum to theorize new visions of community formations grounded upon social justice. The deliberate breach of discourse categories (or genre boundaries) in this volume, ranging from theoretical and personal reflections to literary analysis and ethnographic accounts, is an attempt to capture trajectories of global forces playing out in actual spaces, and trace sites where transformative opportunities can occur. The potential of such transformations is the ability to translate change to signal social justice for the people across multiple venues.