Books advancing the idea of a culture clash between the West and Islam have proliferated in recent years. This article focuses on three books published between 2002 and 2003 that were widely acclaimed and received: Italian journalist and feminist Orianna Fallaci's The Rage and the Pride (2002), well-known American feminist Phyllis Chesler's The New Anti-Semitism (2003), and Canadian broadcaster Irshad Manji's The Trouble with Islam (2003). Each book outlines the need to defend the West generally, and Israel in particular, from an Islamic threat, a threat reinforced by the idea of misogynist Muslim men. Each book also suggests that to take up a political position critical of the current U.S. and Israeli administrations (George W. Bush and Ehud Olmert, Ariel Sharon's successor) is at best being callous toward Muslim women and at worst supportive of profoundly misogynist political regimes. The author argues that a racial logic structures the three texts and that the Islamic world's treatment of women provides an opportunity to reinforce a message of European superiority in which both the U.S. bid for empire and the contemporary politics of the Israeli occupation are defended and legitimized. In this way, gender equality operates as a kind of technology used by states to manage populations. In an era of "bombs for their own good" directed at Muslim populations and defended as necessary for securing democracy and women's rights, an old imperial formula of saving Brown women from Brown men in the name of civilization is used with renewed vigor. This article is directed to feminists on the basis that post-September 11 conditions have profoundly altered the conditions of struggles to improve the status of women.

This article explores the ways in which Canadian identity has been reconfigured in the post-September 11 period. It is argued that there has been an increased tendency to define Canadian identity along civilizational lines as part of "Western civilization" and in a "clash of civilizations" framework. This reconfiguration has aimed to situate Canada internationally as a partner of the United States in foreign policy; internally, it has led to a re-whitening of Canadian identity and increased marginalization of its nonwhite minorities. Rather than being a simple retreat from Canadian multiculturalism, this reconfiguration represents a crystallization of some of the inequalities and inherent ambiguities and tensions present in liberal multiculturalism even in the best of times. The article analyzes the violent political reaction to a speech made by Sunera Thobani in October 2001 as a litmus test in helping to make sense of the disciplinary boundaries of "Canadian" identity in a period of crisis. Besides demonstrating the rigidity of the newly configured boundaries of Canadian identity and the precariousness of national belonging and limited political citizenship for nonwhite minorities, the Thobani case shows the kinds of feminisms that were still acceptable in this period and why anti-imperialist feminism was a threat to the logic of a civilizational discourse.

This article draws on the representational discourses that were circulated by The Globe and Mail, one of Canada's dominant national papers, in the immediate aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001. The author argues that the paper's coverage reinscribed and reaffirmed national mythologies of Canada as a peaceful haven, and of Muslims as either victims or terrorists. Drawing on colonial stereotypes, these representations were inflected to communicate a hegemonic interpretation that justified the rescue of Muslim women "out there." Simultaneously, representations of Muslim women in Canada demonstrated their distancing from the actions of Muslim men in Afghanistan.

This article presents an antiracist critique of recent calls by social justice advocates for the realization of "alternative" globalizations. It engages cultural analysis to examine the work of "race"-racism in constitutions of one popularly touted "alternative" globalization model, global environmentalism. Employing analytical frameworks developed in postcolonial and Cultural Studies, the author identifies some of the ways in which some celebrated configurations of global environmentalisms assume a cultural logic that privileges whiteness and racial hierarchy through the deployment of "race"-based anxieties about sex. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which these anxieties are collaboratively circulated and reproduced in discourses on overpopulation, environmental degradation, and, in the aftermath of September 11 and the invasion of Iraq, national security.

This article explores the meanings of race, identity, and nationality to illustrate how the self is constituted within travels to learn and teach abroad. The author draws from her research into the experiences of white and minority faculty and students who go to "developing" countries for research and work-study. A theoretical exploration of space elucidates how spaces are imagined and how identity is produced differently for minority and white participants in the spaces abroad. The article examines how identity is constructed in these travels and illustrates the struggles for minority students and faculty who travel alongside their white counterparts. Race is a palpable dynamic in international relations and has played a decisive role in colonial societies. The author argues that minority and white bodies that move from the North to the South experience a difference in terms of how their bodies are perceived by others, and more important, themselves. This essay cautions against replicating imperialism and racism and highlights the perils and possibilities inherent in international work.

This article explores the ways in which call center workers in India do telephone service work across national borders. Call center work is in many ways the epitome of what is commonly seen as "women's work." Interviews conducted in New Delhi, India, revealed, however, that managers, trainers, and workers talk about their work as gender desegregated. By situating call center work within gendered economic relations, the author explores the ways in which women and men talk about their performances of gender, which are situated within racialized encounters between the Indian workers and the U.S. clients they serve.

This article interrogates antiracism theorists for their failure to address ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The authors argue that the implications of this failure are profound. First, it marginalizes and excludes Aboriginal activists and academics from the larger project of antiracism. Second, this failure makes antiracism complicit in the ongoing colonization of Aboriginal people, and renders it largely irrelevant to Indigenous decolonization. Third, the article illustrates the ways in which this failure distorts our understanding of "race" and racism. The authors call for the decolonization of antiracism and offer suggestions on thinking through the ways in which historic and ongoing colonialism has shaped and continues to structure the relationship that peoples of color have with white settler nationalist projects. Finally, the authors underline the need for dialogue between antiracist theorists/activists and indigenous theorists/activists that is not simply based on common experiences of racism, but on addressing their different relationship to colonialism in Canada.

This article addresses the ideological practice by Marxists and non-Marxists of dissociating "race," class, and gender. To theorize this problem, Bannerji returns to Karl Marx' formulation of "the social," the ontological or the existential, in different terms or concepts. This is done to frame "race" as no more or less than an active social organization, a constellation of practices motivated, consciously and unconsciously, by political or power imperatives with implied cultural forms--images, symbols, metaphors, and norms that range from the quotidian to the institutional.

This essay argues for merging antiracism with critical transnationalism to seek innovative solidarities with Chinese Canadian elites. Critical transnationalism understands the world as being comprised of competing modernities, each making their own claims to histories of capitalism. In interviews, three young, middle-class, private-sector Chinese Canadian women articulate concerns about racism and sexism in the workforce, but are also impassioned about their careers and relish the challenges of trying to make it in the corporate world. These women express support for social justice initiatives such as antiracism, employment equity, and, more generally, the welfare state. It is argued that antiracism activists may wish to work through ambivalence felt toward private-sector elites and seek collective action with privileged women. Aspects of critical transnationalism can facilitate outreach by antiracism activists to elite Chinese Canadian women to forge new solidarities that are responsive to the contemporary context of globalization and the lives of these women.

This article examines the availability of print resources from Africa in a large Canadian university library. A measurement of scholarly resources from Africa confirms that they are significantly underrepresented in the academic library context. Economic and publishing challenges in Africa are half of the equation, but just as noteworthy are issues such as racism and systemic bias in North American library collection development practices.