Guest professor Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Chandra Talpade Mohanty is one of the most important contemporary postcolonial scholars and activists.

She sees herself as an anti-racist feminist and is rooted in the tradition of socialist feminists and feminist theories of the 'Global South'. Mohanty's research interests include transnational feminist theory, postcolonial studies, analyses of imperialism and racism, anti-racist pedagogy and anti-capitalist critique.

In her texts, she analyses the intertwined power relations of colonialism, race, class and gender. For her, 'decolonisation', i.e. the critical examination of the colonial legacy at all levels, is a primary, scientific and at the same time political question that shows how the wealth of the few is linked to the poverty of the many.

Mohanty tells counter-stories, she reconstructs history/stories 'from below' in order to make other realities and alternatives visible and to shake up the supposed naturalness and normality of existing power relations.

Born in Bombay in 1955, Mohanty grew up in India. After living in Nigeria, where she taught English at a secondary school, she moved to the USA. She has been an American citizen since 2005.

Mohanty completed her Bachelor's degree in English at the University of Delhi in 1974. This was followed by a Master's in English Studies (1976) at the University of Delhi and English/Pedagogy at the University of Illinois (1980). Mohanty received his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1987. Among the numerous honours he has received are honorary doctorates from the University of Lund and the College of Wooster (Ohio).

Chandra Mohanty was Professor of Women's Studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, from 1992 and has been Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Sociology and Cultural Foundations of Education in the Humanities Department at Syracuse University, New York, since 2004.

Mohanty became internationally famous with her essay "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" (1984). The article has been translated into numerous languages and is one of the fundamental texts in women's and gender studies worldwide.

In this contribution, Mohanty criticised an understanding of 'Third World women' as a uniform and powerless group characterised by their victim status, using the example of some texts in the ZED Press series "Women in the Third World". She shows that this assumption is based on a colonial perspective.

Legal, economic, religious and familial structures in 'Third World countries' are constructed as 'underdeveloped', with the consequence that subjectivity and agency remain the preserve of privileged Western feminisms. Colonialism, capitalism, racism and sexism/heteronormativity are, as Mohanty shows, intertwined structures and ideologies and must be analysed in their interaction.

Today, she attaches much greater importance to analyses critical of globalisation and transnational feminist solidarity than she did in the 1980s. In her book "Feminism Without Borders: Decolonising Theory, Practicing Solidarity", published in 2003, Mohanty outlines a visionary model of society.

A society in which everyone can lead a self-determined and creative life, free from misogyny, heteronormativity, homophobia, racism, the compulsion to work for wages in undesirable and exploitative labour conditions, economic insecurity and the exploitation of ecological resources.

Taking up criticisms of her essay from 1984, she argues in this book and in the essay "'Under Western Eyes' revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles" published in the same year for solidary, feminist anti-globalisation movements of third world or 2/3 world countries and western or 1/3 world countries.