M. Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of
transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings
together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her
incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on
feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more
recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander
points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent
by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism.
Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer
studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions
of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a
thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the
heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and
for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience
and the meaning of sacred subjectivity.
In these
meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory,
historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the
criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and
the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents
its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and
consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the
Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the
academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the
limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original
and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational
memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently
constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful
antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book,
Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new
forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.