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In response to the question of whether it is ever possible to really know the "other," anthropologist Sherry Ortner offers the simple rejoinder, "try."(f.1) The spirit of that suggestion, the straightforwardness of which masks the hard work it demands, inspires Susan Stanford Friedman's Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, a rigorously optimistic analysis of what happens when feminist theory meets the politics of other progressive cultural movements such as postcolonialism, multiculturalism and poststructuralism. Tracing the development of feminist theory from a focus on a homogeneously defined "woman" to an emphasis on the plurality of women's experiences, Mappings seeks to define a new working space for feminism that moves not beyond, but between, differences to find a new singularity of perspective and purpose. A literary scholar by training, and one who has already established a significant reputation through her work on modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and H.D., Friedman here productively combines the insights of literary theory with those of anthropology and cultural geography to critically analyze the new configurations of identity, community, and power engendered, for better and for worse, by the forces of globalization. The book advocates what Friedman terms a "locational" feminism "based not upon static or abstract definition, but rather upon the assumption of changing historical and geographical specificities that produce different feminist theories, agendas and political practices" (p.5). Where her approach differs crucially from the difference-focussed feminisms of the past two decades is in her insistence on a dialectical movement between alterity and identity, conflict and communality, and localism and globalism, through which meaning is generated and -- most importantly -- through which positive political change can and does occur.