Anna Carastathis

Challenging the triumphal narrative of ‘political completion’ that surrounds intersectionality--as ‘the’ way to theorize the relationship among systems of oppression--and which helps to cement the impression of mainstream feminism’s arrival at a postracial moment, I argue we should instead approach intersectionality as a ‘provisional concept’ which disorients entrenched essentialist cognitive habits. Rather than assume that ‘intersectionality’ has a stable, positive definition, I suggest intersectionality anticipates rather than delivers the normative or theoretical goals often imputed to it.

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the review: "Fortunes of Feminism" is a collection of essays authored by Nancy Fraser between 1985 and 2010 and prefaced by a narrative about the rise, decline, and potential resurgence of “second-wave socialist feminism.” Divided into three corresponding parts (“Feminism Insurgent,” “Feminism Tamed,” and “Feminism Resurgent?”) it contains some of Fraser’s best known essays, which, although admittedly “not written with [the] aim” of tracing historical shifts in recent feminist movements, have nevertheless been “organized” into a volume which claims to do just that...

In this chapter, I explore the role of violence in colonial rule and its role in decolonization struggle by posing the question, “what is alive in Fanon’s thought?” What can Fanon tell us about white settler state power and Fourth World decolonization struggles? I explore the relevance of Fanon’s account to the ongoing colonial situation on the northern part of Anówara Kawennote (Turtle Island), occupied by Canada. In this analysis, I am informed by Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) political philosopher Taiaiake Alfred. I juxtapose Alfred’s theory of “nonviolent militancy” with Fanon’s concept of “violence in action.” I perform a reading of Fanon and Alfred to glean an understanding of the phenomenality of colonial state power.

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the review: "For those familiar with McWhorter’s work, the publication of "Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America" was long awaited. I had en-countered an early form of the argument McWhorter rehearses in thisbook in an article she published in 2004 in "Hypatia." At that time, it was one of very few published critical engagements with the intersectional model of oppression. It had come to seem to me that, as the model became “mainstreamed”—that is, appropriated from Black feminists, who had introduced and elaborated the concept—the representational purposes to which intersectionality was now harnessed had changed. McWhorter pondered whether the increasingly vague gesture to intersectionality in feminist circles had become little more than “just a strategy to avoid charges of racism or classism.” (McWhorter, 2004, 38–39) What I found impressive about that article was its iconoclasm. McWhorter’sproject was to go beyond postulating that racial and sexual oppressions intersect—a claim rarely theorised in mainstream (that is, white-dominated) feminist theory. She argued that a genealogical investigation of the production of race and sex could illuminate their common investment with a form of power that, following Foucault, she termed “biopower”..."

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the review: "In 1995, Leonard Harris published an article for which he received death threats, exposing the white supremacist underpinnings of institutionalized philosophy in the United States: “There are those [...] who doubt that the Ku Klux Klan created American Philosophy [...] However, even without [that] belief [...] there are reasons to think that American Philosophy is compatible with the wishes of the Klan” (Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 68(5): 1995, 135). If more tempered in tone, "Reframing the Practice of Philosophy" testifies to the abiding white dominance and white solipsism of the discipline. In the latest of “the indefatigable George Yancy’s collections,” contributors make effective use of autobiography to “articulat[e] the lived interiority” of experiences of exclusion, marginalization, and tokenism reflected in statistics which reveal the “paucity of African Americans and Latinos/as in the field of philosophy in the United States”--which remains a “predominantly white and male field” (45, 4, 1, 2). Fifteen years ago, 1% of U.S. philosophers were black; still today only 1% are. Less than 30 are Black women, “doubly disadvantaged in the profession by the intersection of race and gender” (49). Only 3.8% of graduate students in philosophy are Latin@, and only “half a dozen” are “established professional philosophers” (169). As Grant Silva writes in his review published in the "APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy", “more honest conversations like [those staged in "Reframing the Practice of Philosophy] must take place in order for our field to reinvent itself along more equitable lines, assuming that this is indeed a collective goal” (2012, 8). The unbearable whiteness of academic philosophy, means, as Charles Mills puts it, that transforming the discipline is “going to be a long haul” (65)...