Author: mascara

Salsa in the Suburbs

by Alejandra Martinez

ISBN 9781923099630

Puncher and Wattmann

Reviewed by ALISON STODDART

Immigration has always been a topic on the Australian socio-political agenda.  A talking point that affects all members of our multicultural society and can be heard everywhere, from offices to cafes, gyms to hairdressers. There is no doubt that it is currently on the agenda again, brought to the foreground by Pauline Hanson’s divisive antics in parliament and the rise of anti-immigration rallies.  One unfortunate aspect of this debate is the simplistic way it has come to be presented in the media. Going some way to revealing the cultural nuance that permeates every aspect of the immigration process, Salsa in the Suburbs is the story of Juan, a Uruguayan who brought his wife and three young daughters to Australia in the 1970’s to escape a military dictatorship. 

The novel is set in the suburbs of Western Sydney, a setting that immediately places the theme of migration and multiculturalism at the centre of the story. And enticingly, the topic of an older generation entering the dating world sets up a storyline that is both tender and humorous.

Juan is a recently bereaved widower in his seventies, in mourning and relying on his daughters, who all reflect varying ties to their heritage. His middle daughter Lola is married to Leo, a fellow Uruguayan and together they have two boys.  It is Lola who takes on the role of carer and protector of Juan and the one who clings most to her Uruguayan roots. A trained scientist who opts out to work in a supermarket, she struggles with mental illness and finds it hard to reconcile the life she has to the one she envisioned for herself.

Her older sister Betty, an ex-nurse, has turned her back on the burden of her family and has chosen to take her Australian husband and three Australian-born children to live an alternate life in Mullumbimby, making soaps and candles and experimenting with herbal medicine. She is living in alignment with her values, or so she thinks, but Betty has the conundrum of knowing that her heritage is running through her veins when she discovers that her grandmother too, was a healer.

The third daughter Malena is a thinly drawn character who has fled the Australia embraced by the rest of her family and lives in Italy with her Italian husband. Does she perhaps question her place in the land where her parents chose to settle, and is her fleeing to Italy a way of settling the dissonance in her mind of having to choose between her cultural heritage and her upbringing? 

The novel is divided by chapters utilising the narrative technique of internal focalisation whereby a chapter is narrated by a single character. The chapters are prefaced by poetry (Juan), journal entries (Lola) and soap recipes (Betty). These become clues to each character’s state of mind and nicely segue into the actual narrative. We are privy to Lola’s scribbling in her diary, reflecting her increasingly erratic state of mine, and Betty’s distancing from the world around her by entering into the soothing world of soap and yoga. Betty eases the tension of attending the funeral of a beloved aunt by making Lemon Balm soap, but we only know this from the recipe at the start of the chapter.

Juan, the patriarch of the family, is a complex character. He knows all the words to Carlos Gardel songs, a composer, singer and prominent figure in the history of tango. It is unsure if Juan reveres Carlos Gardel because he was a fellow exile, with Gardel being born in France – but unable to return took on the nationality of Uruguay, or because he simply loved the music of Tango that Gardel composed and sang.  Probably a mix of both.

Missing his beloved wife Carmen, he nevertheless cannot help comparing her unwillingness to assimilate into Australian society with his own embracing of life in Australia. Carmen never felt at home in Australia and always looked to the future when she and Juan could return to their ‘real’ home. Whereas Juan recognises the opportunities that Australia lays at his children’s feet and the fact that they would never ‘go home’ with him and Carmen. He muses upon this very aspect. “For Carmen the pull of her roots had been stronger than the pull of her children. Not for me, I wanted to be closer to my daughters” (page 105). 

Juan is devoted to family but finds it hard to assimilate the changing role of men in society. He loves his three daughters but it’s his first-born grandchild, a boy, whom he dotes on.  Juan has a streak of culturally inherited misogyny, and his respect is kept for the men in his family, his grandsons and his sons-in-law, particularly the blue-collar one.  His son-in-law Chris who built his own house “brick by brick” is clearly admired over and above Malena’s husband, a university educated lawyer with multiple degrees.  “He doesn’t need to fix anything”, contemplates Juan to himself when thinking about his daughter’s husbands. “He pays tradesmen to do it”.

It is Juan who retains the romance and innocence of his youth.  Aging as he is, he never loses his belief in love and remains open to it in any form.  Whether from his beloved labrador Coco or from an ad placed in the newspaper searching for a lady “to share conversations and outings with” (page 1). 

Juan’s story takes a right hand turn when, without the help of the newspaper advertisement, he meets a widowed aboriginal woman at his local park when they are both walking their dogs. Their clashing of cultures is not much subtly highlighted but glaringly obvious with the woman’s attempt at understanding Juan’s pronunciation of his name. “Hooarn” she finally manages after mimicking his accent.

Ultimately though this is the most complex character in Salsa. Her name is Frances, and Juan is initially repelled by her, but comes to understand her and in turn, to love her. Upon first meeting Frances, Juan thinks she is crazy. “You are very rude, the woman tells me. I’m not rude, you are a stupid woman that cannot control her little dog” (page 57).

Martinez brings aspects of intersectionality to the novel through Frances and creates a relationship between her and Juan that is believable and deeply touching. Although their growing love affair puts a strain on the family as the family reassess all that they know about cultural belonging and generational change. 

Given the deeply troubled history of political representation, national recognition, the contexts of incarceration rates and more, it is difficult to write an Indigenous character without inflicting settler-colonial assumptions. Martinez brushes lightly over her story. The novel could explore the immigrant and Indigenous persons’ relationship as a way forward, based on a deeper understanding of the violence of dispossession. If an author is going to bring up these themes in 2025, they must handle them in culturally safe and appropriate ways. Frances’ story of her mother being part of the stolen generation is simplistically touched on and feels like a mere gesture. Other references to Indigenous culture and activism, such as the Freedom Ride of 1965, are fleetingly mentioned. There is minimal engagement on the theme of Aboriginal dispossession. It does, therefore, feel like this character is tokenising the Aboriginal presence, the author using Frances’ heritage merely to explain the unity that springs up between her and Juan, both being from violent and unsettled nations. 

Martinez writes in a straightforward way.  She engages in a lot of dialogue which mostly feels authentic but every now and then the tone of her characters shift.  There is a discrepancy between Juan’s inner monologue and his spoken word, which can be jarring. 

The novel is ripe with rituals of food, traditions and family. Spanish words like the South American herbal coffee equivalent ‘mate’ and social gatherings, ‘asado’s’ pepper the narrative.

Salsa in the Suburbs is the story of a migrant journey on unceded and unsettled land. It explores the collective confusion that the children of these migrants feel as they straddle two cultures. It is an exploration of immigration and all its inherent obstacles encountered by migrant people, including the internalised racism that simmers beneath benign white Australian of the 1970’s. 

An overarching theme of the novel raises the questions of where does a person feel most at home?  Is it in their culture or in their geographical location?  Where does one get a sense of place? It is also a story that explores the experience of exile and migration across time with the interesting alternative perspective from another culture, one that is over 60,000 years old and displaced in its own land. It covers a myriad of themes that include mental health, ageing and identity.

Martinez is a Blue Mountains, New South Wales based writer who migrated to Australia at the age of seven to escape political turmoil in Uruguay. She was the winner of the 2022 Newcastle Writers Festival Fresh Ink Emerging Writer Prize, which went on to be developed into this novel. She has produced a sweetly told story of a migrant family, ultimately an Australian family and what that entails. It is an engaging example of inclusive fiction with diverse character representations.
 
ALISON STODART is a country born and bred, Sydney writer who holds a Master’s degree at Macquarie University in Creative Writing. X @a_hatz5

Joss: A History

Grace Yee

Giramondo

ISBN:9781923106314

Reviewed by NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON

Grace Yee’s Joss: A History challenges contemporary poetry readers with the unspoken premise ‘How far can we deconstruct history to examine and understand it?’ Yee’s Joss takes up the mantle of a documentary poet (docu-poet) such as Pasiley Rekdal, who in West: A Translation scrutinises the legacy of Chinese labour in the American West that helped construct the great railroads, using and responding to historical documents and traces of Chinese culture. In
Joss, Yee reviews the impact of Chinese workers in the goldfields of Victoria, New South Wales and Aotearoa inspired by the unmarked and segregated graves of over a thousand ‘Chinamen’ she discovered scattered across White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo. Yee uses the tools of documentary poetry throughout Joss which Jospeh Harrington writes traverses and crosses boundaries “in the sense that it decreases the distance between writing history and poetry, while experimenting with the received forms of both.” This new collection builds upon Yee’s work in the triple award-winning Chinese Fish yet differs in the ways it interrogates and re-narrativises history and Chinese settler experiences through docu-poetry techniques. Somewhat more fragmented and ambitious in scope, as Yee writes, “They sutured these documents”, the poet employs fragmented, pastiched lines and surrealist techniques to highlight the unique experiences of Chinese settlers, the absurdity of racial discrimination and how the struggles and cultural nuances of migrant minorities in Australia are ultimately subsumed, fragmented and erased by the White Australia narrative.

A ‘joss’ is a physical statue in Chinese deity worship. In Chinese tradition the statue is not viewed as a simple representation of the deity but contains the actual spirit of the deity, which serves as an apt metaphor for Yee’s collection. These poems are not representations of Chinese people across the goldfields, rather an attempt to embody the spirit of these ancestors within each poem. In a poem such as “best quality vegetables” Yee utilises the finest properties of her work, with a bio-poem that uplifts her ironically named character “bound feet lily flower” while also leaning into her critique of Australian culture: “we don’t go / to the theatre, dance halls or picture shows, because this is / the time of the larrikins and my life is a silent feature film.”  The word “larrikin” is ironically repeated throughout the collection. From a term that originally meant “hoodlum,” larrikin has evolved into an affectionate “Ocker” term that bears interrogation, for one era’s or group’s larrikin is another’s murderer. As Yee explicates in the prose poem that combines several assaults and the failures of the justice system into one poem, “Playful Bodily Harm,” with the “Death Result of Unmistakeable Larrikin Assault on any Chinaman.” The evocative “my father was not a gardener” asks the reader to see the Chinese gardener as greater than the role he inhabits of immigrant labourer, and rather as someone who “rode out to orion’s belt in his sherlock hat” yet lived a life of quiet tolerance as “every night he out-walked the doughnut boys fuckin’ asians out.” These contrasts typify the moments in the poems in Joss, fragments of beauty are abutted against corrosive encounters of racism to jarring effect. 

However, at times the narrative within the poems in Joss moves between the past and present in dizzying ways that may leave the reader unsure of where the narrative “I” sits, in the past or the present. While this shift in time works in a poem such as “chinoiserie,” in other poems like “Alluvial Mining” the shifts leave the reader confused as to the logical leaps and connections being made between the past and the present. The poems where narrative disjunction works to full effect are evidenced in the three erasures in the collection, “the march,” “the history of botany bay” and “the work” which utilise the satirical qualities of erasure to critique articles from the Bulletin’s “Anti-Chinamen Special of 1888” as

foreigners

                                                                                 surrender to
                                                                                                                                                                  everlasting
                              white                                planet                              history

Here Yee is asking us to both face and acknowledge this overt racism that was entrenched by the White Australia Policy and Australian culture. In “longest imperial dragon” the poet points her lens directly at this policy and its effects that ripple out today, “paw paw 婆婆 said, the way through / the immigration restriction act is through the prime minister’s / stomach after the second world war Chinese restaurants / became gwei lo 鬼佬 palatable.” [page 4] The latter poem is an example of the successful rendering of Yee’s surrealist mash-up techniques where enjambment is used to full contrastive effect with, for example, “prime minister’s” scraping against the unexpected “stomach” that opens the following line.

When Yee allows her work to lean into its documentary poetry qualities the poems shine and speak for themselves. The list poem, “2.8km west of Ballarat Bird World,” that recounts the state of the graves of Chinese miners is poignant and touching, as is “Non-European Ancestry” that recounts the names of “Chinese born Australians Who Enlisted in World War 2.” This is where documentary poetry excels, in bringing unknown history to the fore with poetic techniques. Of this style “(heffernan lane)” (with an accompanying archival photograph of women in traditional dress) is a standout poem that combine’s Yee’s skills for bringing history to life in prose poetry while making social commentary, acknowledging the poverty and cultural erasure experienced by a people with a rich history, where she wonders “how do we daughters of middle kingdom – world famous for self-effacement – begin to deconstruct the status quo of colonialist, anthropological government?”

In the last poem of the collection, “This story” Yee writes, “Dysphasia is an inability to arrange words in the proper order due to pressure from a central lesion (thieves looters slavers omniscient narrators).”  With such a prescient line that could have set the tone for the collection it may have been prudent for the poet to place “This story” at the opening of Joss. This would have allowed readers the opportunity to embrace this fragmented style of poetry structure and time shifts within the poems from the outset. While ultimately readers may find Joss a more difficult read than Chinese Fish, the scope of Joss casts a wider net.

Even though Yee may have not hit the mark with every poem in this collection, as a whole Joss succeeds in opening up the reader’s mind to seeing how the Chinese miners whose lives she examines, and their ancestors today spend their time “building tolerance for life’s implacably white horizons.” As historian Anna Clark explains, in the past “the nation’s collective memory was nudged by persistent noise generated outside the formal discipline” of history and will continue to be by important works of docu-poetry such as Grace Yee’s Joss.

References

Clark, A. (2022). Making Australian history: Vintage Books.

Harrington, J. (2011). Docupoetry and archive desire. Jacket2. https://jacket2.org/article/docupoetry-and-archive-desire\

Hailstones Fell Without Rain

by Natalia Figueroa Barroso

University of Queensland Press

ISBN: 9780702268816

Reviewed by ANNA MERLO

Hailstones Fell Without Rain is a complex story of culture, immigration, sacrifice and, above all else, love. Natalia Figueroa Barroso’s debut novel takes a tri-partite form, with a brief interlude, following the lives of Grachu, Chula and Rita. All three Ferreira women are part of the Uruguayan diaspora, scattered across time and place, but united by the strength of the women in their bloodline. 

The Office of Literary Endeavours                                                                                                 1.

Mark Roberts

5 Islands Press 2025

ISBN 9781923248090

Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK

In his third poetry book, The Office of Literary Endeavours, Mark Roberts embraces many interlinked themes, dealing mainly with the relationship of the poet, or any individual, to the land we stand upon. The eponymous poem, whose title smacks of Orwell’s Ministries in Nineteen Eighty-Four, encapsulates the collection, its three parts coming at the beginning, middle and end of the book.  

In part 1, maree, on her way to the office, “before beginning her poem…slipped and fell/ into the valley/ her death”. However, the poem finds its true home:

the poem remained
etched into her bones
as her skin fell away
the words in her fingers
toes belly and heart
dissolved into the earth
(p.2)

This interconnection reverberates with the issue of land and Aboriginal dispossession:

even in daylight
stories are hidden here
at night they call to us
singing across country
(p.3, “Returns”)

and Black history:

     language carried on wind
               a history
we can’t read ………….
 built over silenced
                     genocide
     this was never
     our country
(p.22, “Wolgan Valley”)

2.

In “Gweagal Shield,” we’re reminded of the battles during first contact:

                       For the English
this is empty country terra nullius−
the confrontation an inconvenience.
and the theft of weapons for display in the British Museum:
A shield pierced by shot is dropped.
Collected and catalogued
it becomes the first spoil of a long war.
(p.22)

Like the campaign for return of the shield to country, “river poem” is a plea for the return of Aboriginal place-names:

I want
to know
the real name
of this river

not the name on your map
I want to know the name it has had for ever
(p.24)

Closely linked to this theme are poems recalling Roberts’ heritage and the relationship between his progenitors and the land. “Returns” is a sequence of four poems detailing a journey from Melbourne to Ireland, where the family began:

We have left behind my great grandmother’s
sea chest which contained all her possessions
when she travelled to Sydney 150 years ago.
(p.3)

Leaving Strokestown Park, the poet recalls his grandfather’s stories of “home”:

We drive out through the gates
the chill in our bones
a reminder of a history
that follows us down
these short country roads.
A land that tugs at memory.
(p.4)

3.

Back in Australia, poems revisiting places inhabited by the immigrants reinforce the connectedness with country, despite colonisation:

                                                                                   This is a return
to a place, a connection with country stretching through my family,
the hints and suggestions of a buried history, a land that fills the
imagination. (“Gaanha-bula”, p.10)

Other poems exemplifying this subject are “Wassail, Cargo Road, Lidster, N.S.W., 1937”, “Learning to Shoot” and “cargo road”.

The second half of the collection is thematically more diverse. Poems like “Sediment” speak of the difficulty of maintaining this connection:

                           history
layering onto a recent garden
hard to sense connections
buried  by guns
                          and imported gods
(p.33)

The future is bleak, an unreal city, its citizens lacking in empathy:

Meanwhile we rush towards the station anxious
to make the train home, giving the man in a dirty sleeping bag,
sheltering in the pedestrian tunnel, a wide berth.
Then on Friday night, gathered on the rooftop ,
we watch the pretty explosions of fireworks
and listen to dogs barking in the street below.
(p.31,“Armistice Day 2023”)

Yet rejuvenation is still possible, as in “cutting the grass”:

he told them that he remembered
where the grass had been

they took away his mower
within days
the first green shoots
appeared through cracks in the concrete
(p.43)

4

Many of the poems in this section wittily re-invent movies and plays of the modern era.

“The Office of Literary Endeavours 3” concludes the volume. Here we learn that maree’s books and papers have not arrived, the road to the town has been cut by rebels, a bridge blown up and a levee bank destroyed. It is not clear when the office will be reopened. 

Like his subject matter, Mark Roberts’ poetic language can be humorous, contemporary or, at its finest, evocative and lyrical. One last poem, “limestone,” deserves special mention:

memories of fish
swim through the darkness
of an ancient coral mountain
above
fluorescence
from horizon to a forgotten shore
we shrink
to an imagined significance
a point between a grounded history
and an infinite curve of time
a choreographed immigration
                            of rock and earth
a beauty that no ideology
                            can prevent

*

Margaret Bradstock, a Sydney poet, critic and editor, lectured at UNSW for 25 years, has been Asialink Writer-in-residence at Beijing University, co-editor of Five Bells for Poets Union, and on the Board of Directors for Australian Poetry. Poetry collections include The Pomelo Tree (winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize) and Barnacle Rock (winner of the Woollahra Festival Award, 2014). Editor of Antipodes, the first Australian anthology of Aboriginal and white responses to “settlement” (2011) and Caring for Country (2017), Margaret’s ninth poetry collection is Alchemy of the Sun (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024).

Lithosphere

Ben Walter

Puncher & Wattmann

ISBN: 9781923099685

Reviewed by ZOWIE DOUGLAS-KINGHORN

Ben Walter’s poetry collection sits between a rock and a hard place. It’s difficult to do nature writing without tumbling into a didactic crevasse, or bathing in the seductive, never-ending wellspring of descriptive language. But the poems that Walter hews together are curiously delectable in their deviance from both. The term ‘lithosphere’ was famously coined by the geologist Joseph Barrell during the early 1900s to describe the earth’s crust; the rocky outer shell that sits between the atmosphere above and the asthenosphere below, where things start to heat up and become liquid. The geological theme calls to mind Walter’s 2017 novella, titled Conglomerate (published with the Lost Rocks series by A Published Event), where he writes of a group of bushwalkers hiking in the southwest of Tasmania. A sense of propulsion emerges as the distinctions between the hikers and their surroundings are dissolved by walking, speech and muscle movement. The narrator poses the question: “How to square such sensations? The inner and outer slowly eroding, a curse on their bodies and a blessing for their minds.” This sense of oneness suspends his hikers in the present, giving them a brief reprieve from the halting anxiety of debt, familial illness and relationship breakdowns, being surrounded by the “indifferent plains that let them wander where they wanted.” This may be another nod to Gerald Murnane, a feature of another one of Walter’s stories, ‘Landscape Within Landscapes’, from his collection What Fear Was (Puncher & Wattman, 2021). It’s a sense of escapism that imbues Lithosphere as well.

At a time when writers are compelled to respond to the urgency of the current moment, Lithosphere retreats into obscure intricacy in a way that is both intriguing and baffling. Stones have evidently preoccupied Walter for a while, as we have gone from his novella, Conglomerate (2017) to the poetry collection Lithosphere (2025) in the space of a decade. True to form, these poems are amassed from publications over the years. There is granular detail on every page, with delicious morsels of verisimilitude. You might expect to be bored by a book about rocks, but Lithosphere is full of delights. The strength of this collection is its geographical multiplicity, the way it shows the faultlines between nature and people, pastoral and urban, suburban and wild landscapes. There’s a sense of friction where Walter seems determined to write against the grain of more popular lyric poetry in nature writing, and one that has titillating results. But some of its poems feel a little bit stubborn in their opacity—almost as if they are trying too hard to hem themselves into their own little niche.

Nevertheless, Lithosphere encapsulates the multiplicity of Tasmania beautifully, such as in the poem ‘Knocking’: ‘

and open walls
framing a view
of the cold,
a painting
or triptych
of spooling fog
the suburbs and
all the same sun
(p.9)

It is an experience one has when looking through windows in Hobart, where different parts of one room could show the mountain, river, or an industrial park. It frames these snippets with a collage-like texture, challenging the idea of wilderness as a pure or remote concept that exists somewhere far away. Instead of wilderness being a place cordoned off, everyday objects are animated by their own wildness. In ‘Knocking’, the stone huts are animated by “draft-drunk doors.” In ‘Apples’, fruits are characterised by their names in proximity to young people:

 … croftons and jonathans,
bustling eyes, other names like children,
older children waiting in the fields;
(p.70)

Here, I was reminded of how teachers often use the apple skin analogy to describe the thinness of the earth’s atmosphere in comparison to its overall mass—if the atmosphere is the apple skin, then the lithosphere is the crunchy outer layer. It makes you think about the atmosphere as something precious, rather than a limitless expanse to be polluted ad infinitum. Perhaps in a similar way, what Lithosphere does best is make us think more closely about the natural world—close in a literal sense. For example, in the poem ‘Mt Styx’, nature is portrayed as an ailing body: ‘gum splints on the roads; /the fractures are healing,’ (p.39) This image reminded me of Anna Krien’s 2017 Quarterly Essay, The Long Goodbye: Coal, Coral and Australia’s Climate Deadlock, where Krien likens global warming to a fever. It’s a way of flipping the concept of ‘the environment’ inside out, bringing it from an idea that exists on the margins of the human experience and into the physical centre of it. This is the kind of nature writing that gets under your skin, reminding us that the earth is inseparable from its human inhabitants, that the hard border between the self and the world outside is itself a fiction. 

Other phrases in ‘Mt Styx’ that lampoon linguistic flexibility are ‘regeneration burns’, a term loosely applied across Sustainable Timbers Tasmania’s harvesting operations to justify its wholesale razing of forests. The ‘mythic river’ mentioned here belies the river Styx’s naming. Running from the Needles, or Mt. Mueller (also the title of another poem in the collection), the Styx River in Tasmania is punctuated by fallen trees, and so it was colonially known as the ‘River of Sticks’ until the spelling was changed, according to the journals of the Land Commissioners for Van Diemen’s Land. Of course, the Styx is also one of the rivers of the underworld, as well as the name of the Greek goddess. According to Hesiod’s poem Theogony, the monster Echidna may have been born to Styx, but this isn’t explored in Lithosphere.

Walter’s voice is brusque, his narrator’s stoic landscapes made up of ‘grinding stones’. The phrase brings to mind the process of digestion in dinosaurs, breaking down the tough fibres of cycad plants by ingesting rocks to assist the gut bacteria. This ruminative mode is a feature of Walter’s nature writing. What if we were to look at the stones beneath our feet as organisms with lives and stories? Or even just look beneath our fingernails and acknowledge the fact that we are all made up of microbiota? Animals and plant life make up more of our microbiome than anything else. As writer Jane Rawson writes in Human/Nature, human bodies are more like swamps than a discrete entity. Ben Walter’s Lithosphere abounds in such littoral zones. From the cover image of the dead tree flooded by lake water to the poem ‘The Oysters Roar’, where there are ’rounds of unshucked applause / bursting from the silt.’ Oysters filter pollutants from the sea, turning food particles into pearls. Geographies are shaped by their underlying geologies. The ‘pink and white stones’ at the end of Conglomerate are reminiscent of the boulders across Tasmania’s west coast, which are known as conglomerate rock for their being many rocks ground together under the weight of glaciers.

It’s the slow transfiguration of a landscape that makes this collection so enjoyable, and at some points a little under stimulating. The collection feels too contained at times, and perhaps a little too safe. These are poems that are hard and sparkling and perfect, splendid in their fixity. But maybe that’s the point.

ZOWIE DOUGLAS-KINGHORN lives in lutruwita/Tasmania, where she writes, rollerskates and sells flowers. You can usually find her snipping mountain gum on the side of a highway somewhere.

Insurgent Visions: Feminism, Justice, Solidarity

by Chandra Talpade Mohanty

 Duke University Press (2025)

ISBN: 978-1-4780-3222-9

Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET

Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s latest book published in 2025 by Duke University Press is an event in itself, if only because her previous and only other book was published more than twenty years ago in 2003 by the same publisher, but also because Mohanty’s radical feminism has inspired generations of politically committed academics across the world and in particular in the Global South for her astute, complex and sophisticated, yet forthright analysis of systems of oppression and exploitation from the standpoint of some of the most marginalised communities — immigrant women of colour, female workers in sweatshops, Indigenous people, refugees or noncitizens fighting for survival in borderlands ranging from Mexico to Kashmir or Palestine. If Mohanty is not what may be called a prolific writer, it is likely due to her militant work outside of the academy. Being an ‘activist scholar’ as Mohanty has described herself takes a lot of time and effort despite being poorly valued and appreciated by the neoliberal corporate university. As Mohanty writes in Part Two of her book on “Neoliberal academic landscapes, transnational feminisms, cross-border solidarity”: “In North America, the binary that distinguishes the “academy” from the “community” or the academic from the activist […] has assisted in the creation of apparently distinct spaces where the former is privileged over the latter.” (164) 

     Mohanty’s critique of US higher education and of academia in particular is one of the many enlightening, thought-provoking aspects of her book. Elsewhere in a chapter running as a discussion with other feminist activist scholars and originally published in 2015, Mohanty quotes fellow academic Leila Farah on the woman of colour’s burden. Unlike Rudyard Kipling’s so-called white man’s burden, tasked with having to ‘civilise’ the non-western world, diasporic women of colour like Mohanty are posited as native informants whose insurgent knowledges from the ground up risk being co-opted, appropriated, commoditised, and ultimately domesticated by the US academy. As Farah puts it: 

Since all institutions are complicit with the neoliberal project in many ways, those who straddle academic lives and employ feminist praxis within communities outside of the hallowed halls often are positioned to act as intermediaries, breaking the age binaries of formal and informal education and knowledge production, bearing a great burden in repositioning and reconciling these multiple spaces. Unfortunately, that increasingly seems to be women of color who are non-US based originally… (97)

While those age-old binaries are still effective in 2025, even the problematic positioning of immigrant women of colour within the US academy has been rendered precarious and is now potentially under threat following the far-right accession to power under the aegis of the Trump administration. This non-negligeable shift may be a reason for the publication of Insurgent Visions. Indeed, it is not just that insurgent disciplinary fields such as gender, queer, postcolonial, indigenous or environmental studies have been disconnected from the social movements from which they emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, or that they have become increasingly institutionalised as a result of a broader shift toward a money-spinning, profit-run, fee-paying higher education industry. As the far-right is winning the battle of ideas (the so-called ‘culture wars’), those abovementioned disciplines have been falling under repeated attacks through defunding, the closure of entire departments and their replacement with conservative, traditional value-oriented curricula that promote heteronormativity, white supremacy, hypermasculinity, or climate-denialism instead. 

    While Mohanty’s tone may at times sound alarming (and rightly so), her analysis of the historical moment we are in remains by and large hopeful that with the disappearance of ‘intermediaries’, to quote Farah’s term again, new opportunities will open up that “recall the genealogy of public intellectuals, radical political education movements, and public scholarship that is anchored in cultures of dissent,” (162) as well as “examin[e] those knowledges that derive from political mobilizations that push up, in, and against the academy, ultimately foregrounding the existence of multiple genealogies of radical transnational feminist practice.” (163) Mohanty extensively draws upon two recent grassroots mobilisations in the US context — the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020, and the university campus encampments in the wake of the war on Gaza in 2025 — to prove her case that a revival of a revolutionary spirit of revolt and resistance is possible amongst younger generations, this even in a dire context whereby, as Mohanty acknowledges, “both US foreign and domestic policy at this time are corporate and military driven. Both have led to the militarization of daily life around the world and in the United States — specifically for immigrants, refugees, and people of color.” (146) 

     The fact that these two protest movements quickly spread beyond US borders is significant insofar as another key aspect of Mohanty’s book relates to the question of the transnational. Her skillful ability to unpack, deconstruct, and remobilise this much-touted term for militant purposes shows Mohanty at her best as she smoothly and elegantly deals with the whole gamut of available theory at hand while simultaneously placing her intricate theoretical reflections at the service of community organising at a ‘glocal’ (global and local at once) level. Whereas, as Mohanty deplores, “ “transnational” often becomes a placeholder for business as usual, marked as “progressive” in the face of a conservative, xenophobic backlash,” (134) she also asks in her conclusion to a chapter entitled “Transnational Feminist Crossings: on Neoliberalism and Radical Critique”: “What would it mean to be attentive to the politics of activist feminist communities in different sites in the Global South and North as they imagine and create cross-border feminist solidarities anchored in struggles on the ground?” (201) 

     Through her attempts to articulate a transnational frame/network of solidarity across multiple faultlines (racialised gender, the international or sexual divisions of labour, or the North/South divide), Mohanty in her book seeks to build and elaborate upon those two academic essays for which she is most renown, namely “Under Western Eyes [UWE]: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1988) and “Under Western Eyes Revisited [UWE-R]: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles” (2003). Whilst, on the one hand, UWR (a reference to Joseph Conrad’s novel) strived to carve up space for a nascent third world critique of white feminism in the wake of decolonial national liberation movements of the 1960s/70s and neoliberal structural adjustment programs of the 1980s/90s targeting what would become known as the Global South following the Fall of the USSR, on the other hand, UWE-R aimed to grapple with the reality of a New Global Order under the American umbrella (so-called Pax Americana) concomitant with the rise of anti-globalisation/capitalist protest as in Seattle or Genoa. 

     Insurgent Visions may be construed in this regard as an effort to reconcile or ‘dovetail’ (to use one of Mohanty’s most favored word in her book) the ‘particularist’ bend of UWE with the ‘universalist’ penchant of UWE-R in light of the fact that we now live in a highly ‘uneven and combined’ world (to use Leon Trotsky’s phrase) following the gradual decline of the global American hegemon (a decline that dates back as early as the 2001 Twin Tower attacks and has been compounded by the Afghanistan debacle of 2021). Hence, do we find scattered across her book elements of what could be dubbed Mohanty’s third conceptual shift: 

Our conceptual foci would need to shift, and that might be possible when different cross-border practices, spaces, and temporalities are brought into ideological and geographic proximity with one another in ways that produce connectivity and intersubjectivity (albeit a tense or uneven one) rather than an absolute alterity. (177)

This question about the connectivity of multiple though unequally organized geographies, temporalities, and interests […] raises additional questions about the analytic and political consequences of deploying an either/or framing: either connectivity or separation. (174) 

This shift begins in the lives of women, learns from their perspective, and formulates policies that are attentive to local, place-based struggles as they exist within structures of privilege, power, and inequality. (78) 

While place-based struggles and contextual approaches to women’s resistance […] are key to understanding larger struggles for gendered economic justice, it is the universal principles embodied in the right to equity and dignity […] that constitute the broad parameters of our vision of gender justice. (61-2)

     In her deployment of a radical transnational politics, Mohanty chiefly deals with, and moves back and forth between, three geographical locations and contexts in her book, while embracing an intersectional approach that helps her nagivate and find commonalities of struggle. Whether it be in the context of justice for Palestine, the US carceral/military state, or Hindu fundamentalism (Hinduvta) in India, it is mostly poor (and in India lower-caste Dalit), Brown/Black (but also White, itself a colour as Mohanty emphasises), queer, indigenous, and/or Muslim women of colour who must bear the brunt of institutionalised social stigma imposed upon them. As Mohanty argues: “Since the early 1990s, the geopolitical triad of the United States, Israel, and India have shared a vision of threat and security based on Islam and Muslims as the common enemy, cemented through close and ongoing economic and military alliances.” (122) One also has in mind those trans/homophobic policies implemented in the Trump era (one of the most recent being a ban on transgender people in the military), or the way that the US privatised prison industry has disproportionately targeted poor women of colour in recent years, all the more so since, as Mohanty adds, “mass incarceration is the other side of the coin of mass deportation” (122) through the separation of Brown and Black families, women and children at the US/Mexico border. At the grassroots level, though, the insurgent visions of Dalit, Palestinian, and Brown/Black communities in the US all point to a common, universal horizon begging “the larger question here [on] how to move from the politics of representation to a politics of equity and justice.” (68) 

Yet perhaps the most essential question raised by Mohanty in her book (a question that will bring us back to the figure of the activist scholar) bears upon the ethical (one may even say moral) responsibility that each one of us in our respective constituencies hold: “Who resides in which spaces? Who belongs and who are rendered outsiders? Who is constituted as the knowledgeable and the unknowledgeable? Which knowledges and ways of knowing are legitimised and which are discounted?” (165) From her privileged position as a US resident-citizen and established academic, Mohanty has chosen throughout her professional life to invest and redistribute her time and effort into “knowledge [that] is produced by activist and community-based political work” (68), while speaking truth to power without at the same time capitalising on it to advance her own career. To herself as well as to the educated, left-leaning reader of her book who may share Mohanty’s insurgent vision, she thus asks as a leitmotiv and a source of motivation at once: “What am I doing with my power and my privileges? To me, that is the question that people who live in the United States need to ask. What are the privileges that you have, and what are you doing with those privileges?” (44)

PAUL GIFFARD-FORET holds a Ph.D. from Monash University in Australia. His thesis focused on the literature of Australian women authors of Southeast Asian background. He now works as a lecturer at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle University in France.