Zillah Eisenstein
By The Laura Flanders Show - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA5mK7oQw4s, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112030537
Zillah Eisenstein is one of the foremost political theorists and activists of our time. She has written feminist theory in North America for the past twenty-five years. Her writing is an integral part of her political activism. She writes in order to share and learn with, and from, others engaged in political struggles for social justice. She writes about her work building coalitions across women's differences: the black/white divide in the U.S.; the struggles of Serb and Muslim women in the war in Bosnia; the needs of women health workers in Cuba; the commitments of environmentalists in Ghana; the relationship between socialists and feminists in union organizing; the struggles against extremist fundamentalisms in Egypt and Afghanistan; the needs of women workers in India, and the organizing of migrant women workers in Indonesia.
Zillah is Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York. Throughout her career her books have tracked the rise of neoliberalism both within the U.S. and across the globe. She has documented the demise of liberal democracy and scrutinized the growth of imperial and militarist globalization. She has also critically written about the attack on affirmative action in the U.S., the masculinist bias of law, the crisis of breast cancer and AIDS, the racism of patriarchy and the patriarchal structuring of race, the new nationalisms, corporatist multiculturalism, and the newest gendered and classed formations of the planet.
Zillah Eisenstein
Zillah Eisenstein grew up against the background of the civil rights movement in the USA. The daughter of communist, atheist, Jewish parents, her worldview has been shaped by this unusual background of politics. She writes: I have never known God as an explanation for what people do, or for what happens to them. I was brought up to believe in people: that people make the world through their struggle and pain. Her questioning attitude results in a book that is thoughtful, sometimes complex, but never complacent. She asks why it is that Bush can speak of good and evil in biblical terms, see no moral ambiguity in dropping bombs on Iraq, and yet be regarded as the leader of a secular state, while on the other hand Islamic leaders are defined as religious fanatics.
Her analyses of colonisation and of how the West is defined are illuminating. She brings to it skepticism about the language of racism and whiteness, of slavery and how this is both racialised and sexualised in the US context. Eisenstein examines the effect of September 11, the appropriations of Afghan women and the variety of feminist responses. Her vision for the future includes a theory of anti-racist feminism, and polyversal feminisms which take account of location and situatedness in terms of language, culture, class and a host of other defining identities. This book is timely in its trenchant critique of globalisation and US unilateralism. Her take, as a US citizen, on US imperial irresponsibility is refreshing.
2004 | ISBN 9781876756536 | Paperback | 218 x 140 mm | 236 pp