Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against

Multiple Oppressions (review)

Ester R. Shapiro

NWSA Journal, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2005, pp. 233-235 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nwsa.2005.0045

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/184752

[194.199.3.13] Project MUSE (2024-04-13 16:34 GMT) Depaul University

 Book Reviews 233

Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppres-

sions by Maria Lugones. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers, 2003, 249 pp., $75.00 hardcover, $27.95 paper.

ESTER R. SHAPIRO

In this profound, provocative, and richly rewarding collection of previ-

ously published and new essays, feminist philosopher and popular edu-
cator Maria Lugones shares themes emerging from decades of hard-won
learning within collaborative emancipatory practice. A volume in the
series Feminist Constructions, dedicated to accessible new work in femi-
nist ethics, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes uses “theoretico-practical” reflec-
tion within experiential social learning to dissolve false dichotomies
between theory and practice, offering a remarkably compelling textual
version of the transformative classroom. Recognizing text’s possibilities
and limitations in facilitating social learning from shifting locations,
Lugones weaves together innovative textual strategies to demonstrate
how political coalitions challenge cherished notions of individualism,
privacy and difference, illuminate human complexity and permeability,
and construct connections defying barriers to collective movements. Her
feminist philosophical analysis emerges from deliberative use of poetics,
vivid personal testimonials, and witnessings in varied practice settings,
and from collaboration with textile artist Mildred Beltre, illustrating and
inspiring the rigorous, destabilizing self-questioning that makes trust-
worthy coalitions possible. Lugones meticulously exposes the logic of
social stories and epistemic positions emerging from shifting locations of
power, provoking readers into multiple engagements with lived experience
[194.199.3.13] Project MUSE (2024-04-13 16:34 GMT) Depaul University

and the consequences of multiple sites of oppression while articulating

constructive, collaborative stances. As a result, Lugones offers a unique
interdisciplinary resource bridging epistemology and strategies of inter-
subjective practice with analysis of practice-based methods promoting
solidarities for social change.
Lugones’s substantive introduction presents unifying methods and
themes as she re-visioned chapters outside their original political/pedagog-
ical projects and re-positioned them as organically interwoven, beginning
with her ethical and methodological starting point, “I won’t think what I
won’t practice” (5). She instructs readers on how we can best join her lim-
inal, transformative pilgrimage: “I invite you to read the text praxically,
in the spirit of disruption, taking up the nonscripted possibilities in the
cracks in domination. . . . Under the weight of oppression, with little room
to maneuver, I attempt to intervene in the conceptual traps that constitute
us as oppressed” (30). Lugones communicates through various channels,
including dazzling displays of spanglish, initiating new choreographies of
self-in-relation-and-reflection. Lugones candidly articulates her methods
234 Ester R. Shapiro

for learning from difference through “playfulness, world-traveling, and

loving perception” (the title of Chapter 4, among her most influential
essays), engaging diverse readers through textual constructions designed
to defeat barriers to mutual understanding and collaboration. Speaking
from within her own multiple realities as Latina, lesbian, immigrant,
teacher, and activist, Lugones urges us to reflect from within the messy
realities of emancipatory social practice on our own participation in
conspiracies of privilege. Her earnest playfulness exposes methods of
incomprehension or defensive refusals used to protect ethnocentrist-racist
subjectivities, inviting us to look her in the eye and consider what we see
of our own reflection. “On the Logic of Pluralist Feminism” demonstrates
how identifying the “problem” of difference without making plurality
central in feminist thought operates as a technology of fragmentation
perpetuating oppression. The essay “Hard-to-Handle Anger” draws a
useful distinction between reactive, first-order anger of subordination and
forward-looking, politicizing second-order anger capable of transforming
oppression by transmuting fear into power. Lugones also explores anger
between oppressed peers, distinguishing constructive anger from anger
masking grief at encountering racism’s violent distortions. “Purity, Impu-
rity and Separation” uses the action/memory of making mayonnaise to
explore distinctions between “curdling” separations erasing multiplic-
ity, in contrast to “interweaving” which defeats the cutting edges of
fragmentation. Lugones concludes with three delightfully provocative
chapters designed to expand communities and social spaces embracing
multiplicity by speaking with loving pride to the multi-cultural mestizos,
the streetwalkers/callejeras, and the cachapera/tortillera (lesbians) among
us. Lugones compassionately explores distinctive dilemmas of exposure
for men of color and for Latina lesbians, encouraging readers to reject the
internalized fragmentation of the colonizing gaze with its policing of the
proper boundaries of community and to occupy public spaces in novel
ways, enlarging our capacity for inclusive participation.
Lugones’s commitment to practice-based theorizing demands repeated
readings and careful attention to her subtle distinctions, shifting narra-
tives, and to our own responsive dis-locations. Yet, I ended my reader’s
journey with a more nuanced appreciation of fragmentation’s cutting
edges, coalition’s healing properties, and active subjectivity as a radi-
cal collaborative stance. I hope every reader of this journal considers
Lugones’s sly, generous text for her unique interweaving of practice-based
theorizing with her compassionate capacity to get under the skin of stu-
dents in diverse classroom settings, expanding our resources for teaching,
and learning while building coalitions critical to emancipatory practice.

Ester R. Shapiro (aka Ester Rebeca Shapiro Rok) is Associate Professor

in Psychology and Latino Studies, at the University of Massachusetts,
Book Reviews 235

Boston, and research associate at the Mauricio Gaston Institute, where

she directs the Project in Gender, Culture, and Health. She is author
off Grief as a Family Process: A Cultural and Developmental Systems
Approach to Integrative Practice and is working on a family memoir
with recipes.

Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and India by

Purnima Bose. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, 280 pp.,
$79.95 hardcover, $22.95 paper.

LAURA WINKIEL

How is subaltern agency registered in narratives of elite institutions?

That is, how do illiterate peasants and workers, especially women and
children, appear in the historical records and individual stories of anti-
colonial struggle? How do they participate in the collective identity of the
nation? Purnima Bose’s investigation of these questions in Organizing
Empire contributes to ongoing debates about subalternity and its relation
to state-sanctioned power. In her account, the state’s disciplinary power
functions by placing constraints on agency and activism, insisting that
they be articulated through the figure of the autonomous individual.
Examining collective agency through the looking glass of individualism,
Bose argues that the figure of the individual functioned in two contradic-
tory manners. It could be used in support of anti-colonial resistance by
generating sympathetic interest in the struggle depicted as heroic or femi-
nist. Conversely, the focus on a single life story, whether heroic or villain-
ous, often displaced attention from the realities of the colonizing state’s
systemic violence. Bose tracks how the emphasis on the individual over
the collective ultimately constrains how the Indian nation is imagined.
She shows how elitist Hindu, masculine, middle-class forms of nation
building gained ascendancy over collectivist, subaltern models.
The problem of representing subaltern subjects was initially posed in
postcolonial studies by Gayatri Spivak in her groundbreaking essay, “Can
the Subaltern Speak?” This politically urgent debate has continued in
subaltern studies groups in India, Latin America, the United States, and
elsewhere and by postcolonial feminists such as Sangeeta Ray, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, Inderpal Grewel, and others. Adding important his-
torical and critical dimensions to this critical mass, Organizing Empire
demonstrates how colonial and postcolonial narratives devalue and con-
tain collective resistance by elevating the autonomous individual as the
subject of history.