Gender, Race, and Imperial Wars

Abstract

Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War. Edited by Robin L. Riley, 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, interrogates the “worldwide capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal form of imperialism” (p. 3) visible in global politics today both on its own and as a product of hundreds of years of imperialisms that remain a key scaffolding to this new imperialism. The dual purpose of this collection is (in the words of Cynthia Enloe in the foreward) to revive “persistent curiosity and nuanced understanding” (p. ix) and (in the editors' words) “reveal the many machinations of the new imperialism and the complexity of racial and gender formations within it” (p. 5). In service of these missions, the collection includes eight substantive chapters with a variety of empirical foci. While the authors share a theoretical commitment to interrogating imperialism, each treats the subject matter in importantly unique ways. In Chapter Two, Elisabeth Armstrong and Vijay Prashad show the conceptual and practical difficulties of establishing solidarity among feminist movements. They note that efforts at solidarity are often hampered by the fact that “U.S. feminists and other progressives often presume that the darker nations do not have an indigenous feminist tradition on par with their own” (p. 16). Using examples of US feminist attempts at solidarity with women in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan during the United States' conflicts with those states, the authors of this chapter demonstrate that presumed superiority often prevents American feminists from seeing the legitimacy of elements of national …