Description
My paper specifically asks the question: how can we theorise the political participation and activism of third-world women within historical anti-imperial international networks? In part one of this paper, I begin with an appraisal of critical IR historiographies. Firstly, I demonstrate how both conventional western historical thought and some critical historiographies of IR are constructed as universal, whilst drawing on provincial, western thought. This section draws out the analytical biases of epistemological Eurocentrism. In part two, I analyse scholarship on non-western thought as a response to this bias, but point to three limitations of such readings. In part three, I consider ‘anti-imperial’ as an alternative analytical and political framework, which is transdisciplinary, historically situated, and attentive to multiaxial struggles. In part four, I analyse the disavowals of women’s international thought in IR and beyond, and posit my feminist and anti-imperial theoretical framework, making the claim that South Asian feminist thought is international thought. Using a plethora of cross-archival sources of Indian women’s political participation in the early to mid-twentieth century, I claim that historical Indian women’s ‘imperial experiences’ was both a lived reality and a pivotal space for (re)thinking competing visions of the ‘international’. In the concluding section, I bring the discussion back to rethinking international thought and reiterate my theoretical commitments to blur the theory/practice divide when reading international thought and discuss how examining women’s international thought can open up possibilities to rethink conceptual tools of international, intellectual, and feminist thought.
