Cartographies of Knowledge and Power

Situating themselves as immigrant women of color living in North America working inside and outside of the academy, Alexander and Mohanty grapple with the responsibility of redistributing knowledge and power via curriculum building. They inquire about the function of the category “transnational” in the context of feminist studies, given the hegemony of the neoliberal corporate structure of both the U.S. academy, and nation at large. They survey contemporary U.S. women’s and gender studies and LGBTT/queer studies syllabi to form analysis of the ways in which “transnationalism” is deployed (Alexander, Mohanty 25). In their findings, they suggest that some programs have claimed the category of “transnational” by merely signaling a geographical “elsewhere” in their syllabi, without teasing out more complex global relations such as imperialism, capitalism, and coloniality. In doing so, it risks employing a symbolic gesture of decoloniality while upholding empire at its worst. To reframe the function of transnationalism, they ask, “when is the transnational a normativizing gesture—and when does it perform a radical decolonizing function?” (Alexander, Mohanty 24).

To dive into this crucial question, Alexander and Mohanty begin to map out power relations within processes of knowledge production. Using the U.S. academy and syllabi as the site in which this power formation takes place, they analyze the ways in which hierarchies and boundaries are drawn across participants of knowledge production. They ask us to consider who exactly is producing knowledge, and who derives benefit from it. Citing “academic/activist” dichotomies, they note the ways in which the academy has divided the social formation of knowledge production, divorcing it from scholarship rooted in “cultures of dissent” (26). They urge for a destabilization of this model, and to reconsider who is implicated in the process of knowledge production. They ask, “Who resides in which spaces? Who belongs and whom are rendered outsiders? Who is constituted as the knowledgeable and the unknowledgeable? Which knowledges and ways of knowing are legitimized and which are discounted?” (Alexander, Mohanty 29).

I draw from this foundational essay to inform my thought process in bringing together the various international films and texts that make up this syllabus. My goal is for the cited works to offer crucial analysis on global political processes and the ways in which U.S. empire and the academy is complicit in that.

Works Cited

Alexander, M. Jacqui, Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Cartographies of Knowledge and Power.” Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis. State University of New York Press, 2010. Digital.

access file here: https://knowledge4empowerment.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/alexander-and-mohanty-2010-cartographies-of-knowledge-and-power-transnational-feminism-as-radical-praxis1.pdf