Zuleika Arashiro and Malba Barahona (editors), Women in Academia Crossing North-South Borders: Gender, Race, and Displacement. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015, ISBN 978-1-4985-1769-0

Abstract

Exceptional historic times demand knowledge and knowers that go beyond the trivial and push the canon toward visibility of marginality as well as show the way to epistemic resistance and justice. Women in Academia Crossing North-South Borders embodies this push. It is a collective effort of seven migrant women academics, mostly from Latin America, who teach in different disciplines at universities in Australia, Europe, and Chile. The narrators use personal reflections and academic scholarship to dissect gender, racial, ethnic, and national hierarchies and inequalities in academia in the Global North that are problematized through migration. The authors' collective framework draws on Aníbal Quijano's understanding of coloniality, Enrique Dussel's work on Eurocentrism, and Linda Alcoff's theory of visible identities, among other scholarship in the areas of epistemology, postcolonial feminism, modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, and studies of identities (Dussell 1993; Alcoff 2006;Quijano 2007).Divided into chapters of each narrator's story of crossing borders and discovering her new social identity, the goal of the project is to bring visibility to Latin American women's experiences of "disruptions, relocations and dislocations" as well as "to facilitate an alternative path to the logic of knowledge as commodity" (Arashiro and Barahona, vii). By reflecting on and narrating the intersection among biographies, national histories, and academic careers in the Global North, the authors offer fresh perspectives on the ways their individual stories have been shaped by race, gender, politics, colonialism, and larger sociohistorical processes. Taking a critical stand against diversity understood as "mute" and passive multiculturalism, and against universal subjectivity that attributes migrant women's differences to "deficit, and very seldom on equal terms" (x), the authors articulate the construction/reconstruction of their Otherness as ranked humanity and knowledge in the "borders of hegemonic academic systems" (x). From migrant women academics' vantage point, the modern/colonial university is not neutral, objective, or depoliticized. Instead, it is "a geopolitical system of knowledge that dictates those whose knowledge is transmitted from local to universal, and separates them from the many other subjects who can only count as objects or providers of "stories'" (xii). In fact, for the authors, academia has become not only a marker of race, gender, and national difference but also a site within which they "have experienced growing awareness of contradictions and built resistance" (xiii). Drawing on their simultaneous inside/outside position and