Thurs 3/26 @ 6:00PM
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

Durba Mitra's new book explores how Third World women seized the means of knowledge production to fight against rising authoritarianism and imagine a future freer than our present.

Beginning in the 1970s, women of the decolonizing world offered new visions of liberation that centered the ideas and lives of women. Galvanized by International Women’s Year in 1975 and the UN’s Decade of Women, Third World women developed novel ideas of equality and self-determination, building a new internationalism in opposition to neocolonialism and postcolonial authoritarianism. In The Future That Was, feminist historian Durba Mitra offers a pathbreaking account of how these women wrote Third World feminism into being, catalyzing a momentous expansion of knowledge about women, gender, and sexuality that transformed emancipatory politics across the globe.

Mitra shows how women from former colonies in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and beyond envisioned a radically just world—and did so by insisting that research on the world’s women lay at the heart of debates about global inequality, development, and human rights. Women gathered at international conferences, wrote reports on the dangers facing women, and took to the streets in protest, building a world of knowledge that contested the devastating effects of patriarchy and colonialism. Yet, despite hundreds of laws, institutions, and publications created through the efforts of these women, the future they imagined was never fully realized. The Future That Was transforms the story of decolonization and its aftermath through the history and ideas of women. By excavating these vital pasts, Mitra shows how we might envision a future of our own that is freer than the present.

Durba Mitra is a feminist historian and theorist whose scholarship spans women's, gender, and sexuality studies and global intellectual history. She is the author of two books, The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton University Press, 2026) and the award-winning Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. Her scholarship has appeared in Signs, Journal of Asian Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Feminist Studies, and her public writing has appeared in Harper's Bazaar and Public Books. She is currently writing a book on the history of mutual aid.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty is Chair and Distinguished Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University.  She was a member of the Indigenous and Women of Color Feminist Solidarity delegation to Palestine in 2011. She is author of Insurgent Visions: Feminism, Justice, Solidarity (Duke University Press, 2025), Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Duke University Press, 2003),  and co-editor of  Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Indiana University Press, 1991),   Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (Routledge, 1997),  Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism, (Zed Press, 2008),  The Sage Handbook on Identities (Sage Publications, 2010), and Feminist Freedom Warriors (Haymarket Books, 2018).