In this powerful work, Susan Friedman moves feminist theory out of paralyzing debates about us and them, white and other, first and third world, and victimizers and victims. Throughout, Friedman adapts current cultural theory from global and transnational studies, anthropology, and geography to challenge modes of thought that exaggerate the boundaries of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and national origin. The author promotes a transnational and heterogeneous feminism, which, she maintains, can replace the proliferation of feminisms based on difference. She argues for a feminist geopolitical literacy that goes beyond fundamentalist identity politics and absolutist poststructuralist theory, and she continually focuses the reader's attention on those locations where differences are negotiated and transformed. Pervading the book is a concern with narrative: the way stories and cultural narratives serve as a primary mode of thinking about the politically explosive question of identity. Drawing freely on modernist novels, contemporary film, popular fiction, poetry, and mass media, the work features narratives of such writers and filmmakers as Gish Jen, Julie Dash, June Jordon, James Joyce, Gloria Anzald%a, Neil Jordon, Virginia Woolf, Mira Nair, Zora Neale Hurston, E. M. Forster, and Irena Klepfisz. Defending the pioneering role of academic feminists in the knowledge revolution, this work draws on a wide variety of twentieth-century cultural expressions to address theoretical issues in postmodern feminism.

[Mappings] proposes a thoroughly multiculturalist and geopolitical definition of feminism that significantly expands the theoretical boundaries of feminist theory and that underlines the importance of narrative as a meaning-making process... Friedman casts a wide net, one whose timeliness, thoughtfulness, and engagement should prove inspiring and worthwhile for a large number of readers. -- Joseph A. Boone, University of Southern California Here is a work by a critic-theorist who is already a major voice in the fields of feminist, cultural, and narrative theories. This volume is a rich and thought-provoking contribution to all three areas... Unlike many other books on the same topics, it will appeal to the general reader, as well as to the specialist. Friedman is never pedantic, but her point of view comes through strong and clear. Her engagingly lucid writing style will certainly make her readable in more than one context. -- R. Radhakrishnan, University of Massachusetts

About the Author
Susan Stanford Friedman is Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin--Madison.

Reviews
Winner of the 1999 Barbara Perkins and Geroge Perkins Award, Society for the Study of Narrative Literature One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1999


Awards
Runner-up for Choice Magazine Outstanding Reference/Academic Book Award 1999.



Book Information
ISBN 9780691058047
Author Susan Stanford Friedman
Format Paperback
Page Count 360
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press
Weight(grams) 454g