BOOKS

Sherene Razack, Malinda Smith, and Sunera Thobani. States of Race:

Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, July 2010), ISBN 9781897071595.

http://www.btlbooks.com/bookinfo.php?index=208

What is a Canadian critical race feminism?

As the contributors to this book note, the interventions of Canadian critical race feminists work to explicitly engage the Canadian state as a white settler society. The collection examines Indigenous peoples within the Canadian settler state and Indigenous women within feminism; the challenges posed by the settler state for women of colour and Indigenous women; and the possibilities and limits of an anti-colonial praxis.

Critical race feminism, like critical race theory more broadly, interrogates questions about race and gender through an emancipatory lens, posing fundamental questions about the persistence if not magnification of race and the “colour line” in the twenty-first century. The writers of these articles – whether exploring campus politics around issues of equity, the media’s circulation of ideas about a tolerant multicultural and feminist Canada, security practices that confine people of colour to spaces of exception, Indigenous women’s navigation of both nationalism and feminism, Western feminist responses to the War on Terror, or the new forms of whiteness that persist in ideas about a post-racial world or in transnational movements for social justice – insist that we must study racialized power in all its gender and class dimensions.

JOURNALS

Dua, Enakshi, Narda Razack, and Jody Nyasha, Eds., Race, Racism, and

Empire: Reflections on Canada, Special Issue of Social Justice, vol.

32, no. 4 (2005),

http://www.socialjusticejournal.org/fliers/32-4flier.html

This special issue of Social Justice, guest edited by Enakshi Dua, Narda Razack, and Jody Nyasha, focuses attention on the unique manner in which race, racism, and empire are articulated in the Canadian context. Currents in Canadian critical race scholarship include theorizing the relationship between race, racism, anti-racism and empire; exploring transnational processes in the construction of "race" and racism; and reflecting on the re-articulation of "race" and racism in Canada in the post-September 11 period as it has been shaped by local and transnational forces. Articles point to Canada’s involvement in post-September 11 militarization, framed in terms of a "clash of civilizations." Other essays uncover the way in which the construction of Canada as a national space, with an attendant national identity, has been tied to a transnational discourse of whiteness, as well as the ways in which transnational processes shape diasporic identities.