Unassimilable Feminisms

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Reconceptualizing Identity Politics in a Post Identity Politics Age

   • Laura Gillman

   Pages 1-16

3. Reimagining Identity Politics in the New Millennium: A Postpositivist Realist Approach

   • Laura Gillman

   Pages 17-52

4. Womanisms at the Interstices of Disciplines, Movements, Periodizations, and Nations

   • Laura Gillman

   Pages 53-94

5. Storytelling as Embodied Knowledge: Womanist Praxis in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

   • Laura Gillman

   Pages 95-131

6. Latina/o Mestizaje/Mulatez: Vexed Histories, Ambivalent Symbolisms, and Radical Revisions

   • Laura Gillman

   Pages 133-161

7. Constructing Identity(ies) through lo Cotidiano (‘Everyday Practice’): A Postpositivist Realist Approach to Popular Spatial Traditions in Amalia Mesa-Bains’ Domesticana Aesthetic, Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s Mujerista Theology, and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God

   • Laura Gillman

   Pages 163-200

8. Back Matter

   Pages 201-242

   PDF

In an important new book, Laura Gillman argues that in this post-identity politics era, identities can still yield reliable knowledge. Focusing on womanist and mestiza theoretical writings, literary texts, and popular cultural representations, Gillman advances a comparative theoretical model of identity and consciousness that foregrounds a naturalist-realist account. She demonstrates that reason and knowledge originate from diverse human practices enacted in the social and natural world and can be explained and justified entirely in terms of them.

"Gillman enacts a critical recuperation of women of color feminisms . . . she approaches the feminist debates that she outlines fearlessly and with great vigor." - Maria Cotera, Associate Professor, Women's Studies Program & Program in American Culture (Latina/o Studies), University of Michigan and author of Native Speakers: Ella Cara Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González Mireles and the Poetics of Culture

"Gillman's Unassimilable Feminisms reminds us of the ongoing need to redefine identity politics in potentially transformative ways. I can't wait to use this important book in my teaching!" - AnaLouise Keating, Professor of Women's Studies, Texas Woman's University, author of Teaching Transformation, and editor of The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader

"Gillman's postpositivist realism, a construct she creates using marginalized voices and experiences which then becomes a lens in her reading of them, is an important contribution to the emergence of subjugated knowledge that has been traditionally ignored. Her understanding of 'objective' as emerging from experience upon which marginalized African American and Latina women have reflected, contributes to make our voices relevant beyond our mujerista/mestiza and womanist communities. This is but one of the many contributions this book makes to epistemology and ethical understandings of moral agency and self-definition. I highly recommend this book to those who recognize the importance of subjugated knowledgefor all epistemology and liberative praxis." - Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Emeritus Professor of Ethics and Theology, Drew University

LAURA GILLMAN is Associate Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies at Virginia Tech, USA.

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