Publisher's Synopsis
Insurgent Feminisms: Women Write War brings together ten years of writing published on Warscapes magazine through the lens of gender. Since its founding in November 2011, Warscapes has urged an immersive reflection on war not as nationalist exercise but as an affective, traumatic and inevitable burden upon the victim, the witness, the artist and the ethicist.
In this collection, insurgency emerges in the raw and meticulous language of witnessing, and in the desire to render the space of conflict in radically different ways. There are no paeans to courageous soldiers here, nor pat nationalist rhetoric, nor bravado about saving lives. These perspectives on war come out of regions and positions that defy stereotypical war reportage or the expected war story. They disobey the rules of war writing and do not subordinate themselves to the usual themes and tropes that we have become so used to reading. Instead, Insurgent Feminisms advances a new paradigm of war writing. Truth rises to the top when these writers choose to dissent from the received wisdoms, styles and socio-political structures of violence that constantly put gendered bodies at risk.
Insurgent Feminisms comprises reportage, fiction, memoir, poetry and conversations from over sixty writers from thirty regions, primarily from the Global South, and includes contributions by Suchitra Vijayan, Chika Unigwe, Belen Fernandez, Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek, Nathalie, Handal Gaiutra Bahadur, Robtel Neajai Pailey, Sumana Roy and Lina Mounzer, as well as conversations with Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Lara Pawson, Panashe Chigumadzi and Annemarie Jacir, among several others.
