At the Cutting Edge

About the Book
A significant collection of essays that honours Kumari Jayawardena, a pioneering South
Asian feminist scholar, activist and social scientist. Contributors offer a rich compendium of critical thought on issues that resonate closely with her work on gender, nationalism, race and class. Eminent scholars across disciplines are: Uma Chakravarti, Kumkum Sangari, Nancy Fraser, Valentine M. Moghadam, Radhika Coomaraswamy, Laksiri Jayasuriya, R. S. Perinbanayagam, Aloysius Peiris, Malathi de Alwis, Sheila Rowbatham, Romila Thapar and Maithree  Wickramasinghe. Jayawardena’s pioneering book on Third World feminism and nationalism showed that feminism was not a western import and that its existence and growth in emerging post-colonial nation states was distinctly related to their modernizing impulses. These essays explore several issues that animate current feminist activism and scholarship and locate it at the cutting edge with its promise of both abrasions and vision.

Review/s
Kumari Jayawardena’s work has been critical in pointing to a method of understanding the undercurrents of feminism and democracy in contemporary South Asia… [She] mapped, for the first time, the trajectory of Third World feminists, tracing their emergence to contexts of struggles against colonialism and imperialism, struggles that resulted in projects of nation building.—Kalpana Kannabiran, The Book Review

About the Author
Neloufer De Mel is Professor of English at the Department of English, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She is the author of Women and the Nation’s Narrative: Gender and Nationalism in 20th Century Sri Lanka (2001) and Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative in the Armed Conflict (forthcoming).

Selvy Thiruchandran is Executive Director of the Women’s Education Research Center (WERC), Colombo. She is the author of The Spectrum of Femininity, Feminine Speech Transmission; Subjectivities and Historicism; Stories form the Diaspora: Tamil Women, Writing; Ideology, Caste, Class and Gender; and The Other Victims of War: Emergence of Female-Headed Households in Eastern Sri Lanka.