Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations of Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. M. Jacqui Alexander. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005; xii +410 pages; ISBN 0-8223-3645-6; $23.95US (paper).
M. Jacqui Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations of Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred is a com prehensive, extensive exploration of Alexander's journey through migration stories (including her own), through academe, the academy and teaching, and through African and Caribbean colonized identities and sexualized politics. Her collection contributes a great deal to the fem inist exam ination of the need to rem em ber, to communicate the experiences of wom en of colour, including the spiritual survival of wom en of colour by finding room for the inclusion the Sacred and sacred experiences, as she steps away from the secularized view of experience and power that post-modernism has brought about.
Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing is an incredibly ambitious undertaking as she pulls together a decade of her writing (her critiques and reflections) into this one collection. Alexander's theoretical approach brings together intersections of fem inist, queer and critical race theory while also strongly contributing to a critique of colonialism , neo-im perialism and m odern em pires. Throughout Pedagogies of Crossing Alexander relies on a radical feminism influenced by fem inist activists and critical theorists such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, and especially Gloria Anzaldùa, among many others who the reader can recognize as inspiring her efforts.
Alexander's collection weaves together themes ranging from the need to teach for justice - that teaching the life stories of wom en of colour is essential to understanding the oppression of colonialist forces - to the need to question the control of empires, including corporate empires, and their violent traditions pressed upon

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people of colour. Alexander's chapters combine her critical analyses on race, sexuality and citizenship/colonialism .
One main theme throughout Pedagogies of Crossing is Alexander's inclusion of stories about "The Crossing," which she defines in her introduction. To Alexander, "The Crossing" of Africans to the Em pires functions as a m etaphor for how to understand oppression - state and corporate oppression by em pires - both historical and present. She maintains throughout her collection that empires (including that of the predominantly white academy) have lim ited our knowledge and she provides an approach to understand this lim iting force by way of rem aining critical of colonial power and domination. She does this by finding spaces to teach difference; she provides examples of her own experiences in teaching justice and rights.
Alexander fram es her collection with three interlocking themes, developed in three parts in her book. Part One, which includes 2 chapters, confronts sexuality and subjectivity and how heterosexism and patriarchal power governs neocolonial states. Chapter 1 examines how citizenship is rooted in heterosexual terms. This chapter deals specifically with the Caribbean example and she enters her argument by dealing with domestic violence and the crim inalization of hom osexuality. Chapter 2, quite different from the first, confronts the markets of "gay capital" - "gay corporate tourism and neocolonialism " (12). Part One puts forth a strong argument to unite questions of colonialism , racial form ation and political economy under the banner of queer critical studies/queer m ovem ents. Alexander states we must recognize that "racialization and im m igration do matter for an alternative politics of sexual identity" (88).
Part Two, comprised of three chapters, exam ines how our global world and the State are affected by the political economies of corporate capital and that the academy is also controlled by these forces. Chapter 2 utilizes heterosexism and the enforcement of heterosexuality in the

defence of the nation by neo-imperial states (for example, the United States of America) as the launch pad for her critique. W hile Chapter 3 focuses on the State, Chapter 4 focuses on her experiences in the Academy, specifically the New School University, and how she found that the knowledges of wom en of colour were being erased. Alexander advocates most strongly for, as seen in her fifth chapter - which she explains as her analytic grounding and m ethodological approach for her first four chapters - the need for "ideological traffic" to critique and question social formations such as those that include the colonial and neocolonial (13).
The third part of Alexander's collection, made up of the two final chapters, deals specifically with reflection and memory. Alexander m aintains throughout that "mem ory [is] an antidote to alienation, separation and the am nesia that domination produces" (14). Chapter 6 is her reflection on The Bridge Called My Back, its im pact and im passioned narrative to wom en of colour. It is her dedication to Gloria Anzaldùa specifically, and to women of colour in general, who work this world. Alexander was influenced by a belief in the urgency to remain true to "wholeness as a necessary part of the pedagogy of Crossing" and the "need for spirit in the process of decolonization" (281). The final chapter deals with the question of transgenerational m em ory. For Alexander, memory is a sacred dim ension of the self. Her feminism and her politics create new spaces for the Sacred, which she believes emerges from m em ory.
Readers of this collection should be well versed in the theoretical assumptions and approaches of third wave feminism and critiques of the modernist project whereby the m ultiple intersections of oppression m eaning how race, gender, sexuality and colonial powers intersect - undergo critical analysis. W hile Pedagogies of Crossing would not be easily accessible to all, it is, however, an intense critical analysis of colonial and corporate power and the need

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for queer and fem inist approaches to our nation states, constructed sexualities and racialized identities.
Laure E. Lafrance Halifax