This week the University of Washington Press unveils the new series, Decolonizing Feminisms: Antiracist and Transnational Praxis, edited by Piya Chatterjee. The series reflects the Press’s plans to increase publications that engage with gender, women’s, sexuality, and critical race studies. UW Press editor in chief Larin McLaughlin will travel to several conferences this fall to promote the new series: American Studies Association, American Anthropological Association, and National Women’s Studies Association, where she’ll be joined by Dr. Chatterjee.

Decolonizing Feminisms welcomes progressive and radical feminist writing that privileges the integral connections between theory, activism, policy making and other forms of social action. It will forward the work of activists and scholars whose explorations highlight the inextricable weaves of knowledge and power, and theory and practice. The series is particularly interested in interdisciplinary writing that considers the ways in which historical and contemporary forms of colonization, occupation and imperialism compel critical and imaginative frameworks for political resistance and progressive social change. It seeks to lift up feminist work that is grounded in situated understandings of colonization and colonialism, empires and imperialisms, and explores how these shape our experiences and understandings of heteronormative, racist, nationalist, communitarian, and state violence. The series seeks exemplary feminist writing and scholarship that engages cultural meaning, survival and resistance in critical and plural ways. Books in the series will include writing that is both rigorous and accessible to multiple audiences.

Further, these books—on their own and together—will underscore the important bridging conversations between writers focused on specific U.S. based struggles for social justice as well as those who locate their work around inequity and social justice in the global South. In bringing together antiracist and transnational framings, within particular locations and also across national and regional borders, we seek to interrogate the epistemological and political separations between “antiracist” and “transnational” feminisms—through the differences as well as the shared resonances of feminist work across the divides of “North” and “South,” and “First” and “Third” worlds. The complex differences and connections between the work of transnational and postcolonial feminist scholars, activists, and organizers and that of of U.S., immigrant, and native women of color will be highlighted in this series.

We’re delighted to welcome these distinguished scholars and activists to our series advisory board:

Angela Y. Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz
Jennifer Nez Denetdale, University of New Mexico
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Spelman College
AnaLouise Keating, Texas Woman’s University
Cecilia Menjivar, Arizona State University
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University
Nadine Naber, University of Illinois, Chicago
Richa Nagar, University of Minnesota
Margo Okazawa-Rey, Fielding Graduate University

Series Editor Piya Chatterjee received her Ph.D in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1995. She is currently the Backstrand Endowed Chair in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College, the Claremont Consortium. Her first book, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation was published by Duke University Press in 2001 and Zubaan/Kali for Women Press, New Delhi, in 2003. She has co-edited (with Manali Desai and Parama Roy) States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia (Zubaan, New Delhi, 2010) and (with Monisha DasGupta and Richard Rath) a special issue of the Journal of Historical Sociology, “Imperial Plantations: Past and Present” (2009). The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) was co-edited with Sunaina Maira. She has published on pedagogy, labor issues and rural women’s grassroots organizing in journals as varied as Frontiers, Pedagogy, Signs, the Journal of Historical Sociology and the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. She is also the co-founder of Dooars Jagron, a tea plantation women workers’ organization which has been running since 2002. She is currently supervising a rural women’s anti-violence-literacy program in south Bengal, building on the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. This is supported by the Global Fund for Women and will form the basis of another book on comparative, transnational literacies, Decolonizing Pedagogies. Piya has recently served on the U.S. national collective of INCITE: Women of Color against Violence. 

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Please direct all questions and submissions to Larin McLaughlin, University of Washington Press Editor in Chief: lmclaugh@uw.edu