ABSTRACT
The idea of transnational feminism, as articulated by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan in the first chapter of Scattered Hegemonies, focuses first and foremost on the situation of women: “gender is crucially linked to the primary terms and concepts that structure and inform the economic and cultural theories of postmodernity”. The “transnational” emphasis is what allows us to move beyond narrow, localized feminisms or Third World feminisms that depend upon a center-periphery model claiming subversive potential for “marginal” positions, and beyond world-system theories that depend upon “inadequate and inaccurate binary divisions”. By linking Miranda’s success to Caliban’s, John Edgar Wideman provides us with the fundamental relationship of feminism to anticolonialism. The overlapping presence of difference penetrates the historical force of narrow feminism and nationalism as it reveals itself to individuals and groups as the most fluid determinate of social interaction.
