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29 Sw. J. Int'l L. 295 (2023)
White Feminism in Historical Perspective

handle is hein.journals/sjlta29 and id is 309 raw text is: WHITE FEMINISM IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Samuel Moyn* Rafia Zakaria's blistering and brilliant Against White Feminism is so successful on its own terms that it leaves little to add-especially for a white male who lacks the standing to do so.' But, since the book challenges ongoing attempts to rethink international history so provocatively, whether inadvertently or intentionally, it cannot hurt to share a few notes about how. The book is not trying to be a history, of course. It combines the personal and the political to extraordinary effect, while drawing on scholarship for the sake of public ends. Yet, among the other things she does in the book, Zakaria provides some hypotheses that place white feminism in historical perspective. She deserves far more than an answer from movements and thinkers; Against White Feminism also demands a rethinking of where the appalling complex came from and how it took on its current form, for the sake of imagining a different feminist solidarity beyond it. The most obvious historical thesis in Zakaria's book is that white feminism is still tethered to colonial origins. White supremacy goes back a long way, but Zakaria is right to intuit that it has to be connected to the imperial meridian of world history, roughly between 1850 and 1950, when a global color line was established just at the time feminism rose in prominence across the Atlantic with internationalist aims.2 Already, in her second chapter, Zakaria dwells on the example of Englishwoman Gertrude Bell to show that the habit of centering the white woman when talking about the emancipation of women of color has a genealogy.3 Zakaria draws on scholars of imperial history, such as Antoinette Burton and, * Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, and author of the recent book: HUMANE: HOW THE UNITED STATES ABANDONED PEACE AND REINVENTED WAR (2021). 1. RAFIA ZAKARIA, AGAINST WHITE FEMINISM: NOTES ON DISRUPTION (2021). 2. MARILYN LAKE & HENRY REYNOLDS, DRAWING THE GLOBAL COLOUR LINE: WHITE MEN'S COUNTRIES AND THE INTERNATIONAL CHALLENGE OF RACIAL EQUALITY 2 (Catherine Hall et al. eds., 2008). 3. ZAKARIA, supra note 1, at 18. 295

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