Books by Zahra Ali

Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation (Cambridge Middle East Studies, Series Number 51)

by Zahra Ali

Since the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the challenges of sectarianism and militarism have weighed heavily on the women of Iraq. In this book, Zahra Ali foregrounds a wide-range of interviews with a variety of women involved in women's rights activism, showing how everyday life and intellectual life has developed since the US-led invasion. In addition to this, Ali offers detailed historical research of social, economic and political contexts since the formation of the Iraqi state in the 1920s. Through a transnational and postcolonial feminist approach, this book also considers the ways in which gender norms and practices, Iraqi feminist discourses, and activisms are shaped and developed through state politics, competing nationalisms, religious, tribal and sectarian dynamics, wars, and economic sanctions. The result is a vivid account of the everyday life in today's Iraq and an exceptional analysis of the future of Iraqi feminisms.

Feminism for the World

by Silvia Federici, Françoise Vergès, Sayak Valencia, Verónica Gago, Zahra Ali, Lola Olufemi, Rama Salla Dieng, Djamila Ribeiro

In the years since #MeToo, misogyny, sexism and gender-based violence have flooded the news and our social media timelines. Anti-privilege politics and intersectionality have entered the mainstream--systematically trolled on one end of the spectrum; embraced, to questionable ends, on the other. But what has this increased visibility entailed, other than the marketisation of the feminist struggle?

Feminism for the World argues that we have been witnessing an erasure of feminism as a long-term tradition, with its many conflicting histories and geographies of struggle elided and forgotten.

In this ground-breaking collection, eight leading international figures of contemporary feminism highlight feminist struggles and traditions from the Global South, presenting feminism as a project that is impossible without international solidarity from the West. In doing so, they revive an authentic internationalism and propose paths for present and future generations.

Authors include Lola Olufemi, Françoise Vergès, Silvia Federici, Verónica Gago, Zahra Ali, Rama Salla Dieng, Sayak Valencia and Djamila Ribeiro. Translated by Fionn Petch and Sophie Lewis.