In this work, several generations of academic feminists reflect on the history and identity of feminism. The first section articulates feminism's historical concerns by asking questions about feminism as a history. The second section explores more fully how feminism is in conflict with itself. Challenging the contention that a comprehensive or representative feminism is possible, these essays confront the changing conceptions of feminism.

For women, for lesbians and gays, for African Americans, for Asians, Native Americans, or any other self-identified and -identifying group, who can speak? Who has the authority to speak for these groups? Is there genuinely such a thing as "objectivity," or can only members of these groups speak, finally, for themselves? And who has the authority to decide who has the authority? This collection examines how theory and criticism are complicated by multiple perspectives in an increasingly multicultural society and faces head on the difficult question of what qualifies a critic to speak from or about a particular position. In different formats and from different perspectives from various disciplines, the contributors to this volume analytically and innovatively work together to define the problems and capture the contradictions and tensions inherent in the issues of authority, epistemology, and discourse.

No concept has been more central to the emergence and evolution of identity studies than social justice. In historical and theoretical accounts, it crystallizes the progressive politics that have shaped the academic study of race, gender, and sexuality. Yet few scholars have deliberated directly on the political agency that notions of justice confer on critical practice. In "Object Lessons," Robyn Wiegman contemplates this lack of attention, offering the first sustained inquiry into the political desire that galvanizes identity fields. In each chapter, she examines a key debate by considering the political aspirations that shape it. Addressing Women's Studies, she traces the ways that "gender" promises to overcome the exclusions of "women." Turning to Ethnic Studies, she examines the deconstruction of "whiteness" as an antiracist methodology. As she explores American Studies, she links internationalization to the broader quest for noncomplicity in contemporary criticism. Her analysis of Queer Studies demonstrates how the commitment to antinormativity normalizes the field. In the penultimate chapter, Wiegman addresses intersectionality as the most coveted theoretical approach to political resolution in all of these fields.

Originating as a proponent of U.S. exceptionalism during the Cold War, American Studies has now reinvented itself, vigorously critiquing various kinds of critical hegemony and launching innovative interdisciplinary endeavors. "The Futures of American Studies" considers the field today and provides important deliberations on what it might yet become. Essays by both prominent and emerging scholars provide theoretically engaging analyses of the postnational impulse of current scholarship, the field's historical relationship to social movements, the status of theory, the state of higher education in the United States, and the impact of ethnic and gender studies on area studies. They also investigate the influence of poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, and cultural studies on U.S. nationalist--and antinationalist--discourses. No single overriding paradigm dominates the anthology. Instead, the articles enter into a lively and challenging dialogue with one another. A major assessment of the state of the field, "The Futures of American Studies" is necessary reading for American Studies scholars.

"Contributors." Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Gunter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, Jose Estaban Munoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos

"We thought the study of women would be a temporary phase; eventually we would all go back to our disciplines."--Gloria Bowles, From the Afterword

Since the 1970s, Women's Studies has grown from a volunteerist political project to a full-scale academic enterprise. "Women's Studies on Its Own" assesses the present and future of the field, demonstrating how institutionalization has extended a vital, ongoing intellectual project for a new generation of scholars and students.

"Women's Studies on Its Own" considers the history, pedagogy, and curricula of Women's Studies programs, as well as the field's relation to the managed university. Both theoretically and institutionally grounded, the essays examine the pedagogical implications of various divisions of knowledge--racial, sexual, disciplinary, geopolitical, and economic. They look at the institutional practices that challenge and enable Women's Studies--including interdisciplinarity, governance, administration, faculty review, professionalism, corporatism, fiscal autonomy, and fiscal constraint. Whether thinking about issues of academic labor, the impact of postcolonialism on Women's Studies curricula, or the relation between education and the state, the contributors bring insight and wit to their theoretical deliberations on the shape of a transforming field.
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Contributors." Dale M. Bauer, Kathleen M. Blee, Gloria Bowles, Denise Cuthbert, Maryanne Dever, Anne Donadey, Laura Donaldson, Diane Elam, Susan Stanford Friedman, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Inderpal Grewal, Sneja Gunew, Miranda Joseph, Caren Kaplan, Rachel Lee, Devoney Looser, Jeanette McVicker, Minoo Moallem, Nancy A. Naples, Jane O. Newman, Lindsey Pollak, Jean C. Robinson, Sabina Sawhney, Jael Silliman, Sivagami Subbaraman, Robyn Warhol, Marcia Westkott, Robyn Wiegman, Bonnie Zimmerman

Originating as a proponent of U.S. exceptionalism during the Cold War, American Studies has now reinvented itself, vigorously critiquing various kinds of critical hegemony and launching innovative interdisciplinary endeavors. "The Futures of American Studies" considers the field today and provides important deliberations on what it might yet become. Essays by both prominent and emerging scholars provide theoretically engaging analyses of the postnational impulse of current scholarship, the field's historical relationship to social movements, the status of theory, the state of higher education in the United States, and the impact of ethnic and gender studies on area studies. They also investigate the influence of poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, and cultural studies on U.S. nationalist--and antinationalist--discourses. No single overriding paradigm dominates the anthology. Instead, the articles enter into a lively and challenging dialogue with one another. A major assessment of the state of the field, "The Futures of American Studies" is necessary reading for American Studies scholars.

"Contributors." Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Gunter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, Jose Estaban Munoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos

Reflecting the burgeoning academic interest in issues of nation, race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of identity, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media brings all of these concerns under the same umbrella, contending that these issues must be discussed in relation to each other. Communities, societies, nations, and even entire continents, the book suggests, exist not autonomously but rather in a densely woven web of connectedness. To explore this complexity, the editors have forged links between usually compartmentalized fields (especially media studies, literary theory, visual culture, and critical anthropology) and areas of inquiry-particularly postcolonial and diasporic studies and a diverse set of ethnic and area studies. This book, which links all these issues in suggestive ways, provides an indispensable guide for students and scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. Essays in this groundbreaking volume include Julianne Burton-Carvajal on ethnic identity in Lone Star; Manthia Diawara on diasporic documentary; Hamid Naficy on independent transnational film genres; Robyn Wiegman on whiteness studies; Faye Ginsburg on indigenous media; and Jennifer Gonzales on race in cyberspace; Ana M. Lopez on modernity and Latin American cinema; and Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan on Warrior Marks and multiculturalism and globalization. A volume in the Depth of Field Series, edited by Charles Affron, Mirella Jona Affron, and Robert Lyons Ella Shohat is a professor of cultural studies at New York University. Her books include Israeli Cinema, Dangerous Liaisons, and Talking Visions. Robert Stam has been named University Professor at New York University. He is the author of over ten books on film and cultural studies. Together, Shohat and Stam authored the award-winning Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.

In this brilliantly combative study, Robyn Wiegman challenges contemporary cliches about race and gender, a formulation that is itself a cliche in need of questioning. As part of what she calls her "feminist disloyalty," she turns a critical, even skeptical, eye on current debates about multiculturalism and "difference" while simultaneously exposing the many ways in which white racial supremacy has been reconfigured since the institutional demise of segregation. Most of all, she examines the hypocrisy and contradictoriness of over a century of narratives that posit Anglo-Americans as heroic agents of racism's decline. Whether assessing Uncle Tom's Cabin, lynching, Leslie Fiedler's racialist mapping of the American novel, the Black Power movement of the 60s, 80s buddy films, or the novels of Richard Wright and Toni Morrison, Wiegman unflinchingly confronts the paradoxes of both racism and antiracist agendas, including those advanced from a feminist perspective. American Anatomies takes the long view: What epistemological frameworks allowed the West, from the Renaissance forward, to schematize racial and gender differences and to create social hierarchies based on these differences? How have those epistemological regimes changed-and not changed-over time? Where are we now? With painstaking care, political passion, and intellectual daring, Wiegman analyzes the biological and cultural bases of racial and gender bias in order to reinvigorate the discussion of identity politics. She concludes that, for very different reasons, identity proves to be dangerous to minority and majority alike.