At the Cutting Edge : Essays in Honour of Kumari Jayawardena

Contents: Acknowledgements. Preface: the personal being political/Selvy Thiruchandran. Introduction: Affirmations at the cutting edge: feminist debates and key texts/Neloufer De Mel. 1. The 'Burdens' of nationalism: some thoughts on South Asian Feminists and the nation state/Uma Chakravarti. 2. Shaping pressures and symbolic horizons: the Women's Movement in India/Kumkum Sangari. 3. Mapping the feminist imagination: from redistribution to recognition to representation/Nancy Fraser. 4. Feminism and nationalism in the Middle East/Valentine M. Moghadam. 5. Are Women's Rights Universal? Re-engaging the local/Radhika Coomaraswamy. 6. Constructions of culture and identity in contemporary social theorising/Laksiri Jayasuriya. 7. Singing of birth and death: dialogue and identity in Lullabies and Dirges/R.S. Perinbanayagam. 8. Gender and class in the Nascent Church and in early Christianity: a comparative study of two experiments/S.J. Aloysius Pieris. 9. Domesticity and its discontents/Malathi De Alwis. 10. Ponnambalam Arunachalam and Edward Carpenter: The Ripples of a friendship/Sheila Rowbotham. 11. Is the another country?/Romila Thapar. 12. Imported or indigenous knowledges? Feminist ontological/epistemological political/Maithree Wickramasinghe. Contributors. Appendix.

"Activist, feminist, labour historian and theoretician, Kumari Jayawardena is one of the most significant political thinkers in South Asia today. Her academic and poetical work has inspired generations of South Asian scholars and activists over the last few decades, and the essays in this volume, contributed by scholars eminent in their particular areas of interest, address many of her concerns.

A critical engagement with nationalism and its linkages with gender, class and ethnicity has animated much of Jayawardena's work. Her pioneering book on Third World Feminism and Nationalism showed that feminism was not a western import and that its existence and growth in emerging post colonial nation states was distinctly related to their modernising impulses. Importantly she paved the way for an understanding of Third World Feminisms as varied and rooted in regional, historical and cultural specificities.

Many of the essay's in this volume are in dialogue with this initial post-colonial feminist phase and take it as a point of departure to explore several issues that animate current feminist activism and scholarship. There is a concern with second-wave feminism's stress on a politics of difference and recognition that challenges the premises of universal human rights standards and the potential and pitfalls of feminism's third, transnational phase. There is an exploration of the relationally of gender to the state, historiography, multiculturalism and feminist methodology." (jacket)