Conference celebrates the 20th Anniversary of Inderpal Grewal’s co-edited book Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practice

On Saturday, February 22, Barnard College at Columbia University hosted its annual The Scholar & Feminist Conference. The theme of this year’s conference was “Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Practices”. The conference celebrated the 20th year anniversary of Yale University professor Inderpal Grewal’s co-edited book Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practice.

In 1994, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan published the landmark Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practice. The work marked a pivotal moment in the development of transnational feminisms with its examination of the circulation of ideas, people, capital, goods, and socio-political movements across different spatial and temporal boundaries. As the University of Minnesota Press notes in its official description:

“Scattered Hegemonies explores the possibilities of doing feminist work across cultural divides without ignoring differences or falling into cultural relativism. The essays in this volume propose transnational feminist reading and writing practices that counter the “scattered hegemonies” of postmodernism, neo- and postcolonialisms, and feminism. The authors gathered here bring the issues of colonialism and postcolonialism into the typically aesthetic debates over postmodernism and the construction of culture; at the same time, they broaden these debates to include the normally excluded issue of feminist participation. Asking how ideas of postmodernism and postcolonialism are variously deployed by feminists and others in different locations allows the authors to trace the flow of information and theory in transnational cultural production. To this end, they pursue two lines of questioning: What kinds of feminist practices engender theories that resist the question of modernism? And how do we understand the production and reception of diverse forms of feminism within a framework of transnational social/cultural/economic movements?”

Today, their analysis remains crucial, with scholars looking at how these processes necessitate our rethinking of key categories of feminist analysis, including gender, sexuality, nationalism, modernity, hegemony, and power.

Grewal and Kaplan delivered the keynote lecture at this year’s Scholar & Feminist Conference, which brings together scholars from across diverse disciplines and regions to explore how transnational feminisms help us to analyze and respond to recent global transformations, such as the Arab Spring, the occupy movements, and other widespread protests aimed at transforming existing systems of governance. Other speakers included Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, Attiya Ahmad, Toby Beauchamp, Abigail Boggs, Tina Campt, Chris Cynn, Nadia Fadil, Abosede George, Harjant Gill, Magdalena Grabowska, Maja Horn, Neetu Khanna, Tate LeFevre, Lydia Liu, Tamura Lomax, Shayoni Mitra, Liz Montegary, Jennifer Nash, Tami Navarro, Catherine Sameh, Sima Shakhsari, Deborah Thomas, Jennifer Terry, Netta van Vliet, Neha Vora, and Bianca Williams.