Books by Susan Stanford Friedman

In this powerful work, Susan Friedman moves feminist theory out of paralyzing debates about us and them, white and other, first and third world, and victimizers and victims. Throughout, Friedman adapts current cultural theory from global and transnational studies, anthropology, and geography to challenge modes of thought that exaggerate the boundaries of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and national origin. The author promotes a transnational and heterogeneous feminism, which, she maintains, can replace the proliferation of feminisms based on difference. She argues for a feminist geopolitical literacy that goes beyond fundamentalist identity politics and absolutist poststructuralist theory, and she continually focuses the reader's attention on those locations where differences are negotiated and transformed. Pervading the book is a concern with narrative: the way stories and cultural narratives serve as a primary mode of thinking about the politically explosive question of identity. Drawing freely on modernist novels, contemporary film, popular fiction, poetry, and mass media, the work features narratives of such writers and filmmakers as Gish Jen, Julie Dash, June Jordon, James Joyce, Gloria Anzald%a, Neil Jordon, Virginia Woolf, Mira Nair, Zora Neale Hurston, E. M. Forster, and Irena Klepfisz. Defending the pioneering role of academic feminists in the knowledge revolution, this work draws on a wide variety of twentieth-century cultural expressions to address theoretical issues in postmodern feminism.

Drawing on a vast archive of world history, anthropology, geography, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, gender studies, literature, and art, Susan Stanford Friedman recasts modernity as a networked, circulating, and recurrent phenomenon producing multiple aesthetic innovations across millennia. Considering cosmopolitan as well as nomadic and oceanic worlds, she radically revises the scope of modernist critique and opens the practice to more integrated study.Friedman moves from large-scale instances of pre-1500 modernities, such as Tang Dynasty China and the Mongol Empire, to small-scale instances of modernisms, including the poetry of Du Fu and Kabir and Abbasid ceramic art. She maps the interconnected modernisms of the long twentieth century, pairing Joseph Conrad with Tayeb Salih, E. M. Forster with Arundhati Roy, Virginia Woolf with the Tagores, and Aime Cesaire with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She reads postcolonial works from Sudan and India and engages with the idea of Negritude. Rejecting the modernist concepts of marginality, othering, and major/minor, Friedman instead favors rupture, mobility, speed, networks, and divergence, elevating the agencies and creative capacities of all cultures not only in the past and present but also in the century to come.

Penelope's Web, published in 1991, was the first book to examine fully the brilliantly innovative prose writing of Hilda Doolittle. H. D.'s reputation as a major modernist poet has grown dramatically; but she also deserves to be known for her innovative novels and essays.

..". a major study of the poetry." -- Sandra M. Gilbert, NewYork Times Book Review..". the first book-length study toapproach H.D. from a feminist perspective.... Psyche Reborn is a valuable book notonly for H.D. specialists but also for those interested in twentieth-centuryintellectual history." -- Cheryl Walker, Signs..".lucid, deeply informed assessment... " -- Joanne Felt Diehl, Tulsa Studies inWomen's Literature"Indiana University Press should beheartily commended for promoting Psyche Reborn in paperback, hence making this vitalcritical work more widely available." -- Lesbian and Gay StudiesNewsletter..". a richly documented, polemical, andintelligent study... Friedman's is a splendid and rewarding achievement." --The Year's Work in English Studies