World, Class, Women - Global Literature, Education, and Feminism (Paperback)

This book addresses how current debates about education could make a contribution to feminist thought. Contemporary feminist theory explores gender relations through theories of subjectivity with focusing on how education fosters the development of subjectivities. This book talks about how the new economics of schooling under regimes of global capitalism are affecting the gendering subjectivities. Reading the World looks at postcolonial literature and feminist novels in order to theorize how the shrinking of the public sphere, the diminishing powers of the nation-state, the waning democracy, the rise of the global corporation and the reign of corporate ideologies influences access to learning, what counts as knowledge, the socialization and reproduction of land, and subsequently, both the meaning of subjectivity and the possibilities of a radical feminism.
Both global feminism and feminist history offer examples of the ways education has historically countered oppressive ideologies, injustices, economic inequality, disenfranchisement, and the knowledge factories which convey these imbalances of power. Because critical pedagogy is centrally concerned with using education to further democratic projects and economic redistribution, it is essential, given the gender of poverty, that it develops materialist theories of gender not exclusively based in psychoanalysis or libel ideas of assimilation, tolerance and inclusion.
In order to construct a rationalist critique of feminist subjectivity, this books draws on black feminism, postcolonial feminism, socialist feminism, but also a rich postcolonial literary tradition which foregrounds learning as a means of resisting hegemonic power and imperialisms.
This book is concerned with enriching a number of scholarly fields