Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 300 pp.

by Linda Seidel

Only nine years after Chandra Talpade Mohanty left India to begin her graduate work in the United States, she published an essay that quickly became a feminist classic, widely anthologized and translated into many languages: "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" (1986). Simultaneously a First World academic celebrity and a Third World woman often asked when she is "going home" (126), Mohanty occupies a location where the quest for feminist solidarity seems a matter of "survival" (117). She envisions a world in which feminist women—whether we are American academics, Indian lace makers, British electronics workers, or sweatshop laborers in any part of the world—will come to practice a solidarity grounded both in the particularities of each group's situation and in the recognition that the subjectivities and material realities of all of us are being shaped by global hegemonic capitalism. Her book, however, does not directly address all these groups; her target audience appears to consist of a more privileged and limited constituency: feminist teachers in First World universities. As such, we have much to answer for, especially if we are white.