Gender, Race, and Imperial Wars

Reviewed by Laura Sjoberg

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War. Edited by Robin L. Rileyand Naeem Inayatullah. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 254 pp., $74.95 hardcover (ISBN-10: 1-4039-7462-4).

Interrogating Imperialism, edited by Robin Riley and Naeem Inayatullah, interro-gates the ‘‘worldwide capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal form of imperial-ism’’ (p. 3) visible in global politics today both on its own and as a product ofhundreds of years of imperialisms that remain a key scaffolding to this new impe-rialism. The dual purpose of this collection is (in the words of Cynthia Enloe inthe foreward) to revive ‘‘persistent curiosity and nuanced understanding’’ (p. ix)and (in the editors’ words) ‘‘reveal the many machinations of the new imperial-ism and the complexity of racial and gender formations within it’’ (p. 5). Inservice of these missions, the collection includes eight substantive chapters witha variety of empirical foci.

While the authors share a theoretical commitment to interrogating imperial-ism, each treats the subject matter in importantly unique ways. In Chapter Two,Elisabeth Armstrong and Vijay Prashad show the conceptual and practical diffi-culties of establishing solidarity among feminist movements. They note thatefforts at solidarity are often hampered by the fact that ‘‘U.S. feminists and otherprogressives often presume that the darker nations do not have an indigenousfeminist tradition on par with their own’’ (p. 16). Using examples of US feministattempts at solidarity with women in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan during theUnited States’ conflicts with those states, the authors of this chapter demonstratethat presumed superiority often prevents American feminists from seeing thelegitimacy of elements of national liberation in non-Western feminist discourses.

These tensions between feminisms are also the subject of Chapter Six, byMonisha Das Gupta. Looking at student and scholarly reactions to the questionof why the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States occurred, Das Guptaargues that ‘‘Women’s Studies continues to be an imperial site implicated in theAmerican state’s long history of empire building’’ (p. 130) as it attempts toneatly compartmentalize the domestic and the international arenas. She urges apolitics of accountability on the part of US feminist academics, which she sees asa precondition for efforts to forge transnational feminist alliances. Addressingthe ‘‘problem’’ of women warriors, Robin Riley (in Chapter Eight) argues thatgender and (empire) state interact in another important way, where the UnitedStates’ ‘‘ideology of ‘national security’ relies on the narrative of helplesswomen,’’ which is constructed on nationalistic and racialized ideal-types of femi-ninity. In Chapter Nine, M. Jacqui Alexander shows that the sexualized, racial-ized, and nationalistic elements of the inside ⁄ outside dichotomy in globalpolitics define patriotism in terms of hypermasculinity and heteromasculinity(p. 230).

This theme is also prominent in Shampa Baswas’ work in Chapter Four.Baswas argues that resistance to US imperialism within the United States remainsfundamentally nationalistic, and therefore, crucially limited. Drawing on personal

� 2009 International Studies Association

International Studies Review (2009) 11, 368–370

experience, she recounts that, in the immediate post-9 ⁄ 11 atmosphere, ‘‘for a‘foreigner’ in the United States, most peace communities were not to offer thecomfort of ‘home,’ so thoroughly ‘Americanized’ had that space become’’(p. 63). The question of belonging is also a key issue in Himadeep Muppidi’sChapter Three, where he details the shame and rage involved with encounteringa museum of colonialism as a hybridized, postcolonial subject. Personal andnational identity also meet in Chapter Seven, by Hannah Britton, which arguesthat there are important ways in which apartheid South Africa and the UnitedStates, which championed the freedom of all South Africans, have changedplaces in the global political landscape. She chronicles the decline of the freepress, the Patriot Act, and race ⁄ gender bias as indicators of a coming (or alreadyexistent) ‘‘Apartheid USA’’ of decreasing freedom and increasing tyranny. InChapter Five, Ayesha Khan shows these issues extending to the United States’imperial interventions overseas. Khan argues that the United States’ strategicand imperial characterization of the Pakistani military government as benign‘‘will negatively affect the lives of millions [and] no doubt have less-than-positiveinternational consequences as well’’ (p. 125). She notes that ‘‘unfortunately, inthe rush to the ‘war on terror,’ this possibility has not been taken into adequateconsideration’’ (p. 125). Like the other authors in this collection, Khan showsthe ways that imperialism leads to not only normatively but also practically disas-trous policy results.

In the afterword to the volume, Zillah Eisenstein reminds the reader that thecollected works of the authors have revealed a number of important issues inglobal politics. She notes that ‘‘as a nation, we [the United States] have becomeless equal, less kind, less intelligent’’ (p. 241). Eisenstein points out that the vari-ous contributions to this volume show that ‘‘imperial minds are closed andoppositional,’’ and, to combat that trend, ‘‘the authors here ask us to keepthinking and opening ourselves to the unknown’’ (p. 242).

As a collection, Interrogating Imperialism has much to contribute to feminist andpost-colonial attempts to understand, critique, and transgress twenty-first centuryimperialism. A number of the chapters are serious contributions to the debateswithin feminist theory about how to approach differences in culture (Marchandand Parpart 1995; Narayan and Harding 2000; Chowdhry and Nair 2002;Mohanty 2003). Other chapters reveal important insights about political subjec-tivity within imperialism, which add nuance and depth to the literature on post-colonial studies (Spivak 1999; Chakrabary 2000; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin2002). The chapters, together and individually, fill a crucial void in the criticalsecurity literature (for example, Williams 2003; Booth 2007), which hasneglected issues of gender, race, and culture generally and almost entirelyignored their intersection. It asks crucial questions, including: what does tradi-tional work in IR miss that taking account of gender and race will make visible?What is the role of scholarly voices that challenge or complicate imperialism?How are the politics of identity and the politics of security intrinsically inter-linked? Given these vital engagements, this book is a must-read for thoseinvolved in postcolonial or feminist work in Security Studies. Its essays are bothcontributions to the critical theorizing of IR and important critiques of tradi-tional IR generally and Security Studies specifically.

While one of the major strengths of this collection is that it speaks to a num-ber of important issues in the theory and practice of global politics and globalsecurity, the diversity of the issues it speaks to is also one of its weaknesses. Everychapter in this volume addresses important issues in fascinating and inspiringways that leave the reader looking for more. In this search, however, the readergets a sense that their sum is somehow less than their parts because each essaydeals with such different issues using such different methods than the essaysaround it. It is difficult to find the implicit conceptual links, which sometimes

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pull the reader into unfaithful analyses of individual chapters in order to under-stand the collection as a whole. Still, being confused and frustrated by a frag-mented group of individually electric and significant essays is preferable to beinglulled into a sense of complacency by a coherent but uninspiring collection.Interrogating Imperialism will be of interest to scholars of global security and globalpolitics searching for ways to understand, critique, and reform the gender, race,and militaristic dynamics of the new imperialism.

References

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. (2002) The Empire Writes Back: Theory andPractice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge.

Booth, Ken. (2007) Theory of World Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Chakrabary, Dipesh. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.Chowdhry, Geeta and Sheila Nair, eds. (2002) Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations:

Reading Race, Gender, and Class. New York: Routledge.Marchand, Marianne, and Jane Parpart. (1995) Feminism ⁄ Postmodernism ⁄ Development. New York:

Routledge.Mohanty, Chandra. (2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Narayan, Uma, and Sandra Harding. (2000) Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural,

Postcolonial, and Feminist World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanish-

ing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Williams, Michael C. (2003) Words, Images, and Enemies: Securitization and International Politics.

International Studies Quarterly 47(4):511–531.

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