Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society Feminist Imagination

Vikki Bell explores the ways in which oppression must be understood outside feminist boundaries and why the history of 'race' came to be thought of as parallel to the history of feminism. Reading feminist theory as a complex imaginative achievement, Feminist Imagination considers feminist commitment through the interrogation of its philosophical, political and affective connections with the past, and especially with the `race′ trials of the twentieth century. The book looks at: the ′directionlessness′ of contemporary feminist thought; the question of essentialism and embodiment; the racial tensions in the work of Simone de Beauvoir; the totalitarian character in Hannah Arendt; the ′mimetic Jew′ and the concept of mimesis in the work of Judith Butler. Vikki Bell provides a compelling rethinking of feminist theory as bound up with attempts to understand oppression outside a focus on ′women′. She affirms feminism as a site and mode of making these connections.