The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism

The Future that Was offers a necessary historical account of Third World[1] women’s contributions to the field of Gender and Development and Transnational Feminisms. Durba Mitra intervenes by arguing that Third World women’s contributions to knowledge production through attending conferences, writing and research, publishing, and on the ground protests, between 1970 to late 1980s set the foundation for contemporary transnational feminisms and envisioned a future free of authoritarian rule that we still desire today.

This book is a history of Third World women that moves beyond reductive narratives of victimhood. This is a history that recognizes and validates Third World women’s substantial contributions to the global feminist politics invested in opposing interlocking oppressive power discourses. In writing this history, Mitra challenges the usage of the terms “Third World women” and “Third World feminism”, “as a developmental descriptor and a pejorative term” (p. 15) and traces the genealogies of the terms to their use in “wide-ranging radical movements for decolonization in many parts of the world and women of color feminism in the First World” (p. 15). Mitra sheds light on an overlooked history of the use of the term “Third World” long before it became exclusively associated with underdevelopment, economic stagnation and gender inequality mainly after the 1970s. “As anticolonial nationalist movements gained momentum”, (p. 37) in the early twentieth century, Third World women were already building solidarity networks by holding transregional and transnational conferences with aspirations to build more democratic postcolonial nations. These anticolonial coalition-building efforts were later revived and resumed during the UN Decade for Women and found their way into women of color feminist thought and “directly shaped the emerging concept of transnational feminisms after 1989 with the end of the cold war” (p. 16).

This linguistic reclamation of the term “Third World” is also reclaiming the overall history that the book offers. A history that recognizes how Third World women “built extensive infrastructures for the study of women” (p. 164) through creative strategies and methodology. Third World women “transformed the use of research and writing to contest increasingly authoritarian structures across the decolonizing world” (p. 165). They built networks of collective knowledge production and utilized their skills and strategies to “demand real and lasting decolonization” (p. 27). Highlighting this rich history of feminist contributions is particularly important because, after the failed attempts to build fully sovereign postcolonial nations, Third World women “reconceptualized neocolonialism as primarily a form of epistemic domination” (p. 16) and recognized the need to take initiative to reverse Western epistemic hierarchies through local knowledge production as the first step to decolonization.

In the first three chapters, Mitra demonstrates how Third World women found new horizons in UN conferences to once again build international networks. Their former Afro-Asian solidarity networks in the 1950s and 1960s had almost faded due to the “growing politics of discord, disillusionment, and grief in the face of state failure, global economic inequality, and the perpetual threat of war” (p. 43). During UN Decade for Women that lasted until 1985, funding dedicated to research on Third World women and conference spaces provided ample opportunities for Third World women and “catalyzed knowledge production and publication on women at a scale never known before” (p. 61). Furthermore, UN conferences offered Third World women the space and language to critique West-centric modes of knowledge production. Through telling the story of Wellesley College Conference in 1976, Mitra highlights how Third World women expressed dissatisfaction and dissent about how the conference was only invested in centering white women researchers who treated them “as objects of research and only “native informants”” (p. 48). However, Third World women still managed to build international coalitions during UN conferences by forming what Mitra labels as “counter-conference” that took place overnight and during which “questions of legal subordination of women in customary law, neocolonial governance, and authoritarianism” were discussed (p. 47).

Mitra also rethinks the status of women reports produced during UN Decade for Women by arguing that Third World women adopted innovative ways of doing research—such as using photographs which was not common in mainstream status of women reports—to bypass existing restrictions of accessing women and recording the realities of their lives. Amid UN attempts to enforce a standardized form of report on women, Third World women, through their creative methodology, challenged producing a globalized narrative of all Third World women’s experiences and demonstrated how this homogenized form of measuring women’s experiences flattens or fails to capture the realities of their lives. As an example of women’s continued efforts to undermine the form of the status of women reports, Mitra explains how images in contrast to abstract descriptions in Shirkat Gah’s 1997 report on women in Pakistan “brings to life a different view of that struggle and dream of women’s equality” (p. 109).

Although Mitra acknowledges the limits of social scientific research which relies on data and quantification of different aspects of women’s lives, she reflects on “the emancipatory promise” (p. 82) of this kind of research that Third World women recognized and invested on. While Third World women were pushing the boundaries of social scientific research through innovative methods, they still welcomed the opportunity to deploy the data-driven research in the absence of any better research alternative. This kind of research was policy-oriented and was conducted based on a tendency to implement new laws to improve the conditions of women’s lives. While policy-oriented change has its limitation, in the context of the newly formed postcolonial states, it helped bring women issues to the forefront which was unprecedented at the time.

In later chapters, Mitra introduces Third World women’s independent writing, publishing, and their organizing and participation in street protests as two other forms of knowledge production that both shaped and were shaped by their newly developed skills and strategies in research, writing, and text interpretation. As an example, Mitra focuses on different forms of women’s writing, such as memoir and autobiography, as “an act of political dissent”, that not only documented the political history of the late 20^th century but also was and still is representative of the “epistemological revolutions precipitated by the study of women as a field of inquiry”(p. 209).

Similar to memoirs written by Third World feminists, Mitra argues that women’s history of street protests in the 1980s against policy change that adversely affected their lives is another “project of transnational feminist knowledge” (p. 215). By analyzing some major political protests on International Women’s Day in the 1980s across the decolonizing world,—such as the protest against Law of Evidence in Pakistan, the protest against secret policymaking in Algeria, and the protest against injustice in rape cases in India—Mitra demonstrates how Third World women “utilized a vast transnational apparatus of women’s research to critique the technical language used in policy and procedure and to make claim to equal citizenship under multiple, overlapping systems of law”(p. 216).

Mitra’s methodology of writing this rich history is as intriguing as her layered and complex analysis. From reading UN archives against the grain to analyzing photographs, poetry, memoirs and texts of speeches written by Third World women, the book beautifully travels across diverse forms of archival documents and texts. Through this approach, while centering Third World women’s epistemology, Mitra also traces the alignment of their struggles with those of women of color in the First World.

The Future that was is a must-read history for scholars, activists, and educators in any academic discipline that engages with gender in the Global South. However, this book also serves a global audience who aspires “to undo an authoritarian biopolitics of life and death, to reimagine a feminism for living in the twenty-first century” (p. 28).

[1] The use of “Third World” here follows Durba Mitra’s reclamation of the term from its derogatory use in the context of development. This usage treats “Third World” as a historical and political designation that encompasses, but is not limited to, the term’s use within women of color feminist thought, including in Audre Lorde’s work.