The Women's Review of Books articles from February 2002

The Women's Review of Books archives from February 2002

The world in the classroom: Women teaching diaspora.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... A change in US immigration law introduced in 1965 has had an unexpectedly widespread and long-term impact on the numbers of women and men arriving from South and East Asia. Now a small but significant, and growing, number of those women (and...

Moving target: The study of Diaspora opens up a multitude of paradoxes, shifting identities and intellectual challenges.
February 1, 2002... Diaspora as a field of study, as a discourse, and even as methodology, appears to have arrived. There are centers of Diaspora Studies at Tulane University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of South Florida, Michigan...

Think globally, teach locally: Kamala Kempadoo and Lisa Sun-Hee Park trace multiple connections between their work and their lives.(Interview)
February 1, 2002... Kamala Kenpadoo and Lisa Sun-Hee Park are colleagues in Women's Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder and also teach, respectively, in the Sociology and Ethnic Studies Programs. The Women's Review asked them to talk about the...

The aesthetics of dislocation: Writing the hybrid lives of South Asian Americans.
February 1, 2002... The lived reality of relocations and dislocations of vast populations makes the phenomenon of diaspora a commonplace in our time. In this essay, I contend that in constituting diasporic identities and communities, it is critical to include the...

Foreign accents: Notes upon my return to the diaspora.
February 1, 2002... The United States' version of post colonial studies is particularly focused on questions of diaspora, migration, exile and displacement. These are, no doubt, important issues to address in a classroom in this- country. Yet we also need to be...

Class conflict: Student resistance and nationalism in the classroom.(Column)
February 1, 2002... It was the tenth week of the sixteen-week semester at a state university in the western United States, whose student population is predominantly white and middle- to upper-middle class. The topic of the day was military violence against women...

Hyphenation generation: Rosane Rocher reflects on ten years of cultural change on campus.(Interview)
February 1, 2002... In 1994 Rosane Rocher, of the Department of South Asia Regional Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, addressed a seminar on "New Directions South Asian Studies" with a paper called "Reconstituting South Asian Studies for a Diasporic Age."...

Who's Chinese? Gish Jen's stories explore the gendered terms of our traveling cultures.
February 1, 2002... I hang onto "travel" as a term of cultural comparison, precisely because of its historical taintedness, its associations with gendered, racial bodies, class privilege...frontiers...and the like. I prefer it to the more apparently neutral, and...

When worlds collide: Kum-Kum Bhavnani finds a growing fascination in the classroom with the links between North and South.(Interview)
February 1, 2002... Kum-Kum Bhavnani teaches sociology and women 's studies at the University of, California, Santa Barbara. She is the editor of Feminism and "Race," an anthology of essays published last year by Oxford University Press, and was appointed in 2000...

Human sacrifices: What happens when-women migrate and leave families behind? The case of the Philippines raises some troubling questions.
February 1, 2002... Rhacel Salazar Parrenas is the author of the recently published Servants of Globalization, a groundbreaking study of Filipina domestic workers in Italy. She has since gone on to study the children of those women, left behind-usually in the care...

Pedagogies of resonance: American literature speaks to an Asian audience in some unexpected ways.(Column)
February 1, 2002... I would like to share with you my experiences of teaching American literature in the Far East and my attempts at making American literature resonate in Asia. Because of my own specialty in ethnic American literature and my own interest in...

Working for change: Activists take on the global sweatshop.
February 1, 2002... In less than five years, labor rights, human rights, legal rights, community and religious organizations, later joined by university students based on their respective campuses, have formed coalitions to expose the excesses of globalization...

A womb of one's own.
February 1, 2002... Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood by Sandra Steingraber. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2001, 342 pp., $26.00 hardcover. Sandra Steingraber is to the human body what Annie Dullard is to the natural world. Both women...

Missing in action: Whatever happened to the gender gap?(women's opinions on the War on Terrorism)
February 1, 2002... Let's call it "The Case of the Missing Gender Gap." Ever since September 11, corporate media have denied that men and women have significant differences of opinion on terrorism and war, despite contradictory evidence in polls conducted before...

As American as apple pie.('Grandma Moses in the 21st Century')
February 1, 2002... Grandma Moses in the 21st Century by Jane Kallir, with contributions by Roger Cardinal, Michael D. Hall, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan and Judith E. Stein. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001, 264 pp., $65.00 hardcover. Could there have...

First family of abolition.('Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders')
February 1, 2002... Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders by Mark Perry. New York: Viking Press, 2001, 512 pp., $29.95 hardcover. Mark Perry has done what we Americans increasingly need to do if we are to...

Home on the range.('Standing Up to the Rock' and 'A Geography of Saints')
February 1, 2002... Standing Up to the Rock by T. Louise Freeman-Toole. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001, 213 pp., $26.00 hardcover. A Geography of Saints by Penny Allen. Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2001, 263 pp., $24.00 hardcover. These...

Immoral, unhealthy and pernicious.(Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties)
February 1, 2002... Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties by Gay Wachman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001, 236 pp., $24.00 paper. The "sapphic modernism" of such writers as Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein is by...

Fighting for her life.(A Woman Soldier's Own Story: The Autobiography of Xie Bingying)
February 1, 2002... A Woman Soldier's Own Story: The Autobiography of Xie Bingying by Xie Bingying, translated by Lily Chia Brissman and Barry Brissman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, 336 pp., $26.50 hardcover. In the autumn of 1926, a young...

Theory a la mode.(Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture, Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food, and Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food)
February 1, 2002... Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture by Sherrie A. Inness. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2001, 216 pp., $17.95 paper. Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food edited by Sherrie A. Inness. Amherst,...

Finding a home for my body in the world & song of my mother.(Poem)
February 1, 2002... Finding a home for my body in the world If only you didn't have such short thighs, my mother said. If only you had a waistline. We watched Miss Universe on TV, and I learned how to judge: subtract points for imperfect...

Assimilation and its discontents.(Money, Myths, and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men)
February 1, 2002... Money, Myths, and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men by M. V. Lee Badgett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 287 pp., $35.00 hardcover. Reading your own publicity is always risky. The lesbian, gay, bisexual,...

Riotous living.(The Rebecca Rioter: A Story of Killay Life )
February 1, 2002... The Rebecca Rioter: A Story of Killay Life by Amy Dillwyn. South Glamorgan, Wales: Honno Ltd., 2001, 178 pp., [pounds sterling]8.99 paper. The Rebecca Riots took place in Wales during the late 1830s and early 1840s, and were famous for one...

Russian vignette.(All the Clean Ones Are Married and Other Everyday Calamities in Moscow)
February 1, 2002... All the Clean Ones Are Married and Other Everyday Calamities in Moscow by Lori Cidylo. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2001, 252 pp., $23.95 hardcover. In 1991, Lori Cidylo decided at the age of 25 to chuck her job as a journalist...