Leela Fernandes weaves a powerful cautionary and instructive narrative regarding the fate of new interdisciplinary studies, focusing on transnational feminism in particular as these issues seek institutional belonging in the U.S. academy. The author is concerned that as the transnational feminist paradigm achieves an institutional presence, there has been less of a systematic attempt lately to “interrogate the limits of the paradigm” and the accompanying “disciplining of interdisciplinary scholarship” (p. 12). But while Fernandes strikes a cautionary tone concerning the limits of the transnational feminist paradigm, she is not content to leave her analysis within the realm of critique. She also attempts to build upon transnational feminist scholarship and demonstrate “ways in which [it] can and has served as a productive approach to feminist thought” (p. 24). Hence, this book highlights both the “limits and possibilities” of feminist knowledge practices toward eliminating injustice and inequality and transforming power hierarchies.
Employing transnational feminist scholarship as a case study, the author goes to impressive lengths to familiarize readers with the vast body of interdisciplinary scholarly contributions to the transnational feminist paradigm. To date, her work is perhaps one of the best to carefully and successfully unpack the category of transnationalism and its prominence in terms of framing feminist knowledge in regard to cross-border issues. However, the rigorous theoretical attention and detail that provides this book with its strengths simultaneously makes it less accessible for undergraduates, but it definitely should be required reading for women and gender studies graduate students.
At the core of the author’s work are three interrelated questions regarding transnational feminism. First, “in what ways is the dominance of this paradigm shaped by national imaginary?” Second, “in what ways is transnationalism an idea that is shaped by a national public in the United States as much as it is a concept that is grasping historical processes that have in fact unsettled the nation-state?” And third, “in what ways has the idea of transnationalism begun to discipline research and writing in interdisciplinary fields of knowledge?” (p. 11). To address these questions, Fernandes takes us on a somewhat circuitous but nonetheless valuable and enlightening journey.
As any strong introductory chapter should accomplish, Chapter 1 provokes and tantalizes the reader to find out more about how national imaginings shape and act as a disciplinary mechanism on interdisciplinary scholarship. However, Chapters 2, 3, and 4, while no doubt valuable as stand-alone chapters, leave the reader a little frustrated as to how central they are in addressing the interrelated questions posed here. On their own, Chapters 2, 3 (explorations of the power implications of visual representations of language and film in both national and transnational circuits), and 4 (knowledge regimes) offer powerful conceptual terms such as “economies of emotion” (p. 64), “politics of citationality” (p. 125), “ethics of control” (p. 131), and “the ethic of risk” (p. 131), to name a few.
It is in Chapters 5 and 6 that the real import of Fernandes’s work is made visible, and they are also the chapters that may generate the most debate among transnational scholars. Here, the author interrogates the canonical set of knowledge practices underlying and distinguishing transnational paradigms from other (inter)disciplinary studies. Central to transnational approaches is the claim of “moving beyond and past” the state-centric, traditional lenses of international and comparative studies. Hence, transnational paradigms seek to decenter the state (particularly the U.S. nation-state).
Fernandes takes issue with the moving-beyond claim. On one hand, while transnational scholarship embraces this claim, little attention is given to the way in which this body of work inadvertently reproduces U.S. state-centric interests. This is often achieved in ways that are both “instrumental”—funding available for certain kinds of research and course offerings based on students demands to know about conflicts and crises—and “accidental”—critiques of U.S. state power that end up recentering the state. On the other hand, in their efforts to sustain legitimacy and credibility, interdisciplinary programs invariably employ the moving-beyond claim to represent a sense of newness, difference, and discontinuity in order to set it apart from other established disciplines. As a result, this is where the author makes perhaps her strongest and most provocative assertion in the entire book—that what is often perceived to be a foundational knowledge base of the transnational interdisciplinary paradigm is in fact style parading as substance. To clarify, this is not to suggest that interdisciplinary studies lack content, but rather to highlight that these studies tend to achieve prominence based on their stylized practice of “linguistic innovation and categorical discontinuities that become the foundation of interdisciplinary knowledge” (p. 153).
One of the far-reaching pedagogical implications of the moving-beyond claim for transnational feminist scholarship regards the knowledge gaps experienced by students in both graduate-level and undergraduate programs that study women and gender outside of the United States. Here, Fernandes’s keen observations may resonate with many of us engaged in teaching interdisciplinary approaches. She is not convinced that interdisciplinary studies, and particularly transnational feminist scholarship, “is adequately training students to research and have expertise on gender/sexuality/women in places outside of the United States” (p. 149). This deficiency of adequate training and intellectual depth emerges from a lack of a systematic approach that leaves students unversed in this area. In other words, before students can go on to theorize about gender in other parts of the world, they have to be grounded in the political, historical, economic, and cultural context out of which women’s experiences in those countries emerge. Therefore, Fernandes warns that failure to engage in deeply rich, contextual, area/country-specific studies will only result in “producing new generations of U.S. centric conceptions of feminist thought and practice” (p. 149).
Overall, Fernandes’s work pushes all of us engaged in transnational feminist scholarship to reflect on the limits of the “rigid attachment” to “moving beyond” as the canonical set of knowledge practices representing interdisciplinary studies. However, while these limits often concern finding and maintaining institutional belonging, which in turn produces the disciplinarily, Transnational Feminism in the United States provides liberating possibilities that may enhance reflection and interrogation.
