Elora Shehabuddin presents a history of feminism as a story of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Western and Muslim societies…
CLASS DESCRIPTION
Western feminists, pundits, and policymakers tend to portray the Muslim world as the last and most difficult frontier of global feminism. Challenging this view, this class presents a history of feminism as a story of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Western and Muslim societies. Muslim women, like other women around the world, have been engaged in their own struggles for generations: as individuals and in groups that include but also extend beyond their religious identity and religious practices. The modern and globally enmeshed Muslim world they navigate has often been at the weaker end of disparities of wealth and power, of processes of colonization and policies of war, economic sanctions, and Western feminist outreach. Importantly, Muslims have long constructed their own ideas about women’s and men’s lives in the West, with implications for how they articulate their feminist dreams for their own societies.
The class will trace this longer history, from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era to the War on Terror of the early 21st century. It will examine how changes in women’s lives and feminist strategies have consistently reflected wider changes in national and global politics and economics. Muslim women, like non-Muslim women in various colonized societies and non-white and poor women in the West, have found themselves having to negotiate their demands for rights within other forms of struggle—for national independence or against occupation, racism, and economic inequality. This history comes alive through stories of conflict alongside those of empathy, collaboration, and solidarity across this, with a focus on encounters between women and men from South Asia, Britain, and the United States that led them to pause and reconsider norms in their own society, including cherished ideas about women’s roles and rights.
ABOUT OUR LECTURER
Elora Shehabuddin was born in Rawalpindi (in what is now Pakistan), to parents from Chittagong (in what is now Bangladesh), some 1500 miles away, at the other end of the Indian subcontinent. With her parents and sisters, she lived in and attended school in nine countries across South Asia, the Arab World, and eastern and western Europe, and visited many more before her first trip to the United States, to attend university, and there she has somehow remained.
She is Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Global Studies, Director of Global Studies, and Director of the Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley. She received her AB in Social Studies from Harvard University and PhD in Politics from Princeton University.
She is the author of Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism, Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh, and Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Sisters in the Mirror was selected as a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association and awarded the 2023 Coomaraswamy Book Prize by the Association for Asian Studies.
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/elora.shehabuddin
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Monday 17th March
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Monday 24th March
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Monday 31st March
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Monday 7th April
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Monday 14th April
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Monday 21st April
Luisa-Maria MacCormack (she/her)
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Monday 28th April
Elora Shehabuddin (she/her)
Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism
RECORDING
A recording of the lecture will be sent out by The Feminist Lecture Program after the event finishes, within 2 hours of the end of the class. This email will also contain any resources/reading list the lecturer shares.
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