Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World(A Hypatia Book)

A considerable amount of feminist thinking today works across borders in ways that unsettle familiar philosophical and political frameworks. Moreover, feminist work is increasingly attentive to factors such as class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion that configure the lives of different groups of women and men in multiple ways within contemporary cultures and nation-states. This work also crosses regional, national, and continental boundaries. The essays in this volume bring to their focuses on philosophical issues the new angles of vision created by the multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminisms that have been developing around us. These multicultural, global , and postcolonial feminist concerns transform mainstream notions of experience, human rights, the origins of philosophic issues, philosophic uses of metaphors of the family, white antiracism, human progress, scientific progress, modernity, the unity of scientific method, the desirability of universal knowledge claims, and other ideas central to philosophy.

Table of Contents:
Introduction. Border Crossings Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding Globalizing Feminist Ethics Alison M. Jaggar Feminism, Women's Human Rights, and Cultural Differences Susan Moller Okin Cultural Alterity: Cross-Cultural Communication and Feminist Theory in North-South Contexts Ofelia Schutte How to Think Globally: Stretching the Limits of Imagination Lorraine Code Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism Uma Narayan "It's Not Philosophy" Andrea Nye Chandra Mohanty and the Revaluing of "Experience" Shari Stone-Mediatore Sitios y Lenguas: Chicanas Theorize Feminisms Aída Hurtado What Should White People Do? Linda Martín Alcoff Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a View of Privilege-Cognizant White Character Alison Bailey Multiculturalism as a Cognitive Virtue of Scientific Practice Ann E. Cudd It's All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation Patricia Hill Collins Dualisms, Discourse, and Development Drucilla K. Barker Resisting the Veil of Privilege: Building Bridge Identities as an Ethico-Politics of Global Feminisms Maquiladora Mestizas and a Feminist Border Politics: Revisiting Anzaldúa Melissa Wright Burnt Offerings to Rationality: A Feminist Reading of the Construction of Indigenous Peoples in Enrique Dussel's Theory of Modernity Lynda Lange Gender, Development, and Post-Enlightenment Philosophies of Science Sandra Harding

About the Author :
Uma Narayan is associate professor of philosophy at Vassar College. She is the author of Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism and co-editor, with Mary Lyndon Shanley of Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives. Sandra Harding is professor of education and women's studies at the University of California Los angeles. She is the editor of The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future, and the co-author of a chapter in UNESCO's World Science Report 1996 entitled Science and Technology: The Gender Dimension. Her most recent book is Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies.

Review :
"These essays by well-known feminist thinkers address philosophical issues concerning ethics, politics, knowledge, science, human experience from multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminist perspectives... The range of topics addressed is impressive and the clarity of the writing makes it accessible to reflective readers unfamiliar with the scholarly literature."--The Philosopher's Magazine, Summer 2001