Reviews: |
by Susan Hawthorne
Wild Politics
‘Being a feminist’, she writes, ‘requires optimism because the basis of feminism is a belief that things can change, that we are not entirely caught in a deterministic trap which allows us simply to shrug our collective shoulders and avoid responsibility for the shape of the world’. So, despite the tension between the propositions for deep-down and do-able revolutionary transformation and what may be theoretical pipe dreams, I am left with the thought that there can be no great change that is not preceded by grand vision. And this is the ultimate strength of Wild Politics.
Shira Tarrant
Journel of Intercultural Studies.
Susan Hawthorne’s Wild Politics is an effective and convincing critique of the major aspects of globalisation in the contempory world. It offers an interdisciplinary, synthetic approach, impressively summing up a broad range of relevant international literature in the area of economics, law, politics and culture, with emphasis on an indigenous and ecofeminist point of view.
Patricia Bieszk
Traffic
Hawthorn challenged my belief in progress. Just when I thought I could comfortably assume that repressive conditions such as slavery were a thing of the distant past, Wild Politics shows how slavery remains a prevalent circumstance for too many, for instance, in the spheres of domestic help, third-world factory labour, and the sex industry.
Hawthorn demands that the reader look at the world in a different way. To dismiss her ideas would be to miss the urgent point that, in a world where patents are owned for bio-engineered genes, where trans-nationals can claim ownership of the seeds of plants, and where anything under the sun can be sold, traded, mutated, manipulated and made inaccessible to the average citizen, there are solid reasons why the value-loaded march of globalisation needs revision.
Lisette Kaleveld
JAS Review of Books Issue 19
Review
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Wild Po;itics