Insurgent Visions: Feminism, Justice, Solidarity

by Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Overview

In a current era marked by carceral logics, authoritarianism, and white supremacy, there has never been a greater need for the tools and inspiration that radical feminism provides. In Insurgent Visions, Chandra Talpade Mohanty explores methods of anticapitalist resistance to radically transform everyday life. She presents insurgent feminism—a theory and praxis with which to contest and replace the practices of violence grounded in racialized gender relations. Insurgent feminism unsettles existing power structures in order to enact new relationships and forge new subjectivities, epistemologies, and communities. Drawing on organizing efforts in the US-Mexico borderlands, Palestine/Israel, and Kashmir, as well as on abolitionist and Dalit feminisms, Mohanty contends that the knowledge that emerges from the experiences of marginalized groups who are struggling for economic, racial, and social justice is key for imagining feminist futures. She also turns to the neoliberal landscape of higher education in the United States and the difficulties of instituting transformative antiracist and anti-imperialist feminist knowledge building. Mapping new challenges for radical praxis, Mohanty reconfigures feminist studies while offering a model for decolonial cross-border organizing and solidarity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478061175
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/08/2025
Series:	a John Hope Franklin Center Book
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Chandra Talpade Mohanty is Chair and Distinguished Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University and author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Insurgent Feminisms: Genealogies, Struggles, Futures  1
Part I. Capitalist Scripts, Imperial Projects, Decolonizing Feminism
1. Anticapitalist Feminist Struggle and Transnational Solidarity / Interview with Jesper Nordahl  29
2. Gendering Justice, Building Alternative Futures / with Sarah Miraglia 47
3. Mapping Transnational Feminist Engagements: Neoliberalism and the Politics of Solidarity / with Linda Carty  83
4. Borders and Bridges: Securitized Regimes, Racialized Citizenship, and Insurgent Feminist Praxis  119
Part II. Neoliberal Academic Landscapes, Transnational Feminisms, Cross-Border Solidarity
5. US Empire and the Project of Women’s Studies  141
6. Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Radical Praxis / with M. Jacqui Alexander  159
7. Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique  183
8. The Challenge of Solidarity: Notes on Transnational, Insurgent Feminist Praxis  207
Bibliography  217
Index  239
 

Editorial Reviews

For the last several decades, Chandra Talpade Mohanty has been an indispensable voice in radical feminist scholarship. In her brilliant new collection Insurgent Visions, as throughout her work, she urges multipronged analyses rooted in a deep understanding of the unmitigable nature of capitalist exploitation. Mohanty demonstrates how our scholarship and activism, if they adequately respond to the pressing demands of our historical moment, should help forge grounded feminist solidarities with Palestine, Kashmir, and beyond. The transnational insurgencies she advocates demand a future free of racism, transphobia, and the fascism that threatens us all.”—Angela Y. Davis

“Insurgent Visions as a living record of Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s scholarly activism is a gift to all of us fighting for justice and freedom in times of escalating violence. That Mohanty’s wisdom derives from a deep and sustained engagement with community is everywhere evident in this powerful collection. Mohanty teaches us that we can only create different kinds of subjects, relationships, and worlds by insurgency, rising in revolt against imperialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. Mohanty both calls for an insurgent feminism and gives us many inspired glimpses of that feminism at work. A vital and visionary contribution.”—Sara Ahmed

“Insurgent Visions is an invitation to imagine new horizons of freedom and dignity, but also an invocation to refusal. Chandra Talpade Mohanty urges us to refuse the normalization of patriarchal violence in settler colonialism, neoliberal dispossession, and racialized genocide. Taking us from the university’s spaces to the US-Mexico border and the occupied territories of Palestine and Kashmir, Mohanty documents in an inspiring manner the struggles and hopes of marginalized communities.”—R. Aída Hernández Castillo

From the Publisher

Insurgent Visions is an invitation to imagine new horizons of freedom and dignity, but also an invocation to refusal. Chandra Talpade Mohanty urges us to refuse the normalization of patriarchal violence in settler colonialism, neoliberal dispossession, and racialized genocide. Taking us from the university’s spaces to the US-Mexico border and the occupied territories of Palestine and Kashmir, Mohanty documents in an inspiring manner the struggles and hopes of marginalized communities.

R. Aída Hernández Castillo

Insurgent Visions as a living record of Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s scholarly activism is a gift to all of us fighting for justice and freedom in times of escalating violence. That Mohanty’s wisdom derives from a deep and sustained engagement with community is everywhere evident in this powerful collection. Mohanty teaches us that we can only create different kinds of subjects, relationships, and worlds by insurgency, rising in revolt against imperialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. Mohanty both calls for an insurgent feminism and gives us many inspired glimpses of that feminism at work. A vital and visionary contribution.

Sara Ahmed

For the last several decades, Chandra Talpade Mohanty has been an indispensable voice in radical feminist scholarship. In her brilliant new collection Insurgent Visions, as throughout her work, she urges multipronged analyses rooted in a deep understanding of the unmitigable nature of capitalist exploitation. Mohanty demonstrates how our scholarship and activism, if they adequately respond to the pressing demands of our historical moment, should help forge grounded feminist solidarities with Palestine, Kashmir, and beyond. The transnational insurgencies she advocates demand a future free of racism, transphobia, and the fascism that threatens us all.

Angela Y. Davis