Please join us for our second event of three this spring, featuring discussions of recent titles in South Asian Studies via Zoom webinar:

The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism

ON ZOOM, registration required. Register here:  https://dartmouth.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4RW4BjScTXW1xsuvyJ-UVw

Beginning in the 1970s, women of the decolonizing world offered new visions of liberation that centered the ideas and lives of women. Galvanized by International Women’s Year in 1975 and the UN’s Decade of Women, Third World women developed novel ideas of equality and self- determination, building a new internationalism in opposition to neocolonialism and postcolonial authoritarianism. In The Future That Was, feminist historian Durba Mitra offers a pathbreaking account of how these women wrote Third World feminism into being, catalyzing a momentous expansion of knowledge about women, gender, and sexuality that transformed emancipatory politics across the globe.

Mitra shows how women from former colonies in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and beyond envisioned a radically just world—and did so by insisting that research on the world’s women lay at the heart of debates about global inequality, development, and human rights. Women gathered at international conferences, wrote reports on the dangers facing women, and took to the streets in protest, building a world of knowledge that contested the devastating effects of patriarchy and colonialism. Yet, despite hundreds of laws, institutions, and publications created through the efforts of these women, the future they imagined was never fully realized. The Future That Was transforms the story of decolonization and its aftermath through the history and ideas of women. By excavating these vital pasts, Mitra shows how we might envision a future of our own that is freer than the present.

Speaker 

Durba Mitra, Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University

Commentators

Disha Karnad Jani, Postdoctoral Researcher, Universität Bielefeld 

Kelvin Ng, PhD Candidate in History, Yale University  

Rebecca Waxman, PhD Candidate in History, University of California, Los Angeles

Moderator

Tara Suri, Assistant Professor of History, Dartmouth College

SPONSORED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF ASIAN SOCIETIES, CULTURES AND LANGUAGES & THE BODAS FAMILY SOUTH ASIA PROGRAMMING FUNDS AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE