Notes from the (Non)Field: Teaching and Theorizing Women of Color

In their introduction to Feminist Genealogies, Colonial legacies, Democratic Futures, Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty call attention to their formation as women of color in a particular locationthe United States (Alexander and Mohanty 1997). Though they chart how their postcolonial feminist consciousness emerged with respect to anticolonial struggles in other parts of world (Trinidad and Tobago, and India), it was only on learning the peculiar brand of North American racism that they were confronted with identity and discourse of U.S. women of to which their own experiences were being domesticated (xiv). Though my own feminist formation has occurred primarily within educational institutions in United States, I nevertheless would echo Alexander's and Mohan ty's words in saying that I was not born a woman of color, but made so, heremeaning, even more specifically, at my home institution, ucla. Specifically, I became a woman of color, as opposed to an Asian American woman, an interpreter of literature, or even a professor of women's studies, when I was hired to teach women of color core course, WS130, at ucla.