SOCIAL SCIENTIST lie to hegemonic and oppressive understandings of either history or the present. Behind each and every essay in this book is the political need to work towards more interrelated histories all of whose components and genealogies must be respected. The essays have a political urgency, they appear as though hot off the press, rewritten till the moment they went to press, responding almost immediately to every new manipulation by reactionary and rightwing forces, pressed into the service of a more progressive politics. What is remarkable about Sangari's work is that it is never short of intellectual rigour and excitement. Even when one disagrees with her, as I sometimes do (for example, with her unilinear reading of Jane Austen), she is still mindblowingly stimulating and persuasive. Finally, some comment must be made about her style which many find difficult and about which there has been some tinkering talk. Admittedly, Sangari's is not an easy style. Her sentences can often be a concatenation of clauses strung together by a chain of commas and colons, her language is dense and borrows generously from contemporary theory and her arguments can appear to get too cluttered together and often remain far too implicit (as in 'Women against women'), but she demands patient reading. The trick is to read Sangari slowly and in parts and the insights she offers will stagger you. Her prose actually gets more lucid on closer inspection and rereading and no reading of her work is ever unproductive. The cluttered arguments aren't it in fact cluttered but just point to close and simultaneous processes that she attempts to record in the moment of their conjuncture. AshleyTellis