Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal focused on women of color feminist knowledge production. Dr. Candelario was appointed Editor of Meridians in 2017. She is Meridians' fourth editor. During her editorship, she has: moved the journal from Indiana University Press to Duke University Press; instituted the Paula J. Giddings Best Article Award and the Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award; celebrated Meridians' 20th anniversary with an Anniversary Reader; globalized the journal through participation in and organization of international conferences and collaborations with peer journals such as Feminist Africa and the International Journal of Feminist Politics; and transitioned Meridians out of a 20-year era of discretionary funding by securing a $1 million endowment.
Click through the issues of Meridians Dr. Candelario has edited below.
Click through the issues of Meridians Dr. Candelario has edited below.
Volume 21 Number 1 (forthcoming)
Editor's Introduction
As a scholar of Afro-Latinidades, it is a particular pleasure for me to offer Meridians readers this issue devoted to “Black Feminism in the Caribbean and the United States: Representation, Rebellion, Radicalism, and Reckoning.” This curated conversation about Black feminist liberation strategies, which vary and move across time and place, is aptly illustrated with cover art by Haitian artist Mafalda Nicolas Mondestin, Ann fè on ti pale (The Meeting). Ann fè on ti pale is a Haitian Kreyol expression that means “let’s chat about it” or “we should chat” (pers. comm., August 29, 2021), and, apropos of that invitation, we open the conversation with “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” an especially timely and insightful interview that Kyrah Malika Daniels conducted in January 2020.1 As our readers well know, a global COVID-19 pandemic emerged just after this interview took place and dramatically changed the course of all our lives, but it has been most unforgiving in much of the global South and its diaspora. Simply stated, the United States and Europe have the highest quality and most resourced health-care systems in the world, but there, as throughout society, institutional racism produces devastating and deadly outcomes for Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities. After a brief period of seeming relief due to the development of several effective vaccines, a COVID-19 mutation into
the “Delta variant” emerged in June of 2021, testing the effectiveness of the vaccines and claiming new demographics as victims, including children
who were previously largely untouched by the virus. As of this writing, more than 40 million people have contracted COVID-19 and 670,000 people have died in the United States (Worldometer 2021), with BIPOC folks disproportionately represented in both counts.
To make matters worse, US mainstream media and Republican Party elected officials such as Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick routinely blame BIPOC folks for COVID-19 surges due to their supposedly lower vaccination rates, despite recent polls indicating that BIPOC vaccination rates are higher than Whites, even with the greater structural barriers they face and their historically grounded, sociologically sound distrust of the health-care system (Starr 2021). Indeed, it is right-wing media that continues to promote anti-vaccination propaganda to its largely White audience, including bizarre claims that Ivermectin, a veterinary deworming treatment, is preferable to the now fully FDA approved vaccines as a preventative measure and/or treatment (USDA 2021). Similar ideologically driven patterns appear globally, in which right-wing and nationalist leaders and other elements across the world blame vulnerable populations for the virus’s spread and promote dangerously ineffective alternative treatments.
In Haiti, if these universal pandemic-related challenges weren’t difficult enough, the summer of 2021 also brought the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse on July 7, another devastating earthquake on August 14 that took two thousand lives, and the brutal tropical storm Grace on August 17. With this context in mind, Edwidge Danticat’s reflections on the perennial assaults on sovereignty, peace, and well-being that Haiti and
Haitians have suffered and overcome thanks to their spiritual traditions and practices are critical counters to persistent anti-Haitian attitudes and discourses in the media and public sphere. This engaging and focused
Interview—conversation, really, as Daniels’s insightful comments position her more as interlocutor than interviewer—offers a rich and revealing window into Danticat’s thinking about and connection to Haitian spiritual traditions and practices and their relationship to the natural world; ruminations about various faiths’ rituals of death, dying, and honoring ancestors; and poignant comments on her own experiences of losing and keeping a connection to loved ones through dreams and creative work. As Danticat succinctly puts it in closing the interview, “We’re not just rectifying old narratives, we’re writing our own narratives, fully within ourselves.”
In her Essay “Beyond Tragedy: Black Girlhood in Marlon James’s Book of Night Women and Evelyne Trouillot’s Rosalie l’infâme,” Annette Joseph-Gabriel exemplifies Danticat’s perspective with her analysis of two novels about enslaved Black girls’ coming of age in Jamaica and Saint Domingue. These “resistive tragedies,” Joseph-Gabriel argues, narrate the chipping away at slave societies’ social orders because, “even if they do not overcome the
forces of slavery,” the girls “exceed the limitations that slavery places on their bodies, their imaginations, and their futures.” These novels also exemplify the “spiralism” characteristic of Haitian and/or Caribbean narratives. Unlike linear (read Eurocentric/White) notions of time and tragedy, spiral theories of historical and social change hold that stasis, and progressive
and regressive shifts, can—and often do—occur simultaneously, allowing for “a continuous, dynamic engagement between past and present.”
Next, we turn our attention to the U.S. context of Black girlhood and survivance beginning with Nia McAllister’s poem, “Consort of the Spirits, after Ntozake Shange.” Although the term survivance emerges from Native American Indian studies in the United States rather than from Black studies, it effectively captures the affect and vision of this richly evocative poem. “Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native sto-
ries, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (Vizenor 1999: vii). McAllister builds on Ntozake Shange’s evocative assertion that “a woman
with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits,” to narrate survivance as more than mere survival, as her repeated refrain “They call this survival”—followed by refutations to that hegemonic framing—illustrates.
Similarly eschewing hegemonic conventions and notions of survival, Kenly Brown, Lashon Daley, and Derrika Hunt’s collectively written, transdisciplinary, and multi-methodological Counterpoint essay, “Disruptive Ruptures: The Necessity of Black/Girlhood Imaginary,” coins the term “‘Black forward slash Girlhood’ to signal both an abstract configuration and a lived embodied experience of Black girlness that is in dialogue with global imaginings.” Through three different case studies, Brown, Daley, and Hunt center both fictional and real Black girls’ narratives and understandings of their girlhood experiences. By documenting the fictional Judy Winslow’s (and/or actress Jaimee Foxworth’s) unacknowledged disappearance from Family Matters, valorizing the poetry of a demonized Black girl enrolled in a California continuation school who asserts “the only demon in me is this crooked society,” and the testimony of a sixteen-year-old girl working in a Jamaican resort, this Black feminist collective text showcases “the kaleidoscopic mosaics of Black girls’ knowings . . . across time, space, and geographic boundaries."
We follow this with an In the Archives feature that departs from our usual archival document and research note. “Carlota’s Hum: An Archive Fiction” by interdisciplinary poet and scholar Alana Pérez is, as the author explains in her introduction, an attempt “to retell” the documented true story of Carlota lucumí of the Triunvirato sugar mill in the province of Matanzas, Cuba, who organized a “traveling rebellion that freed over three hundred enslaved people” in 1843. Pérez offers our readers a retelling of this story that centers the “queer relationship” between Carlota and Fermina, another enslaved woman with whom Carlota was evidently in love with, while also “referencing Yoruba and Cuban Santeria practices” from which they drew strength and support. The Cuban context of and contributions to transnational Black feminism is also taken up by Laura Lomas in her Essay “Afro-Latina Disidentification and Bridging: Lourdes Casal’s Critical Race Theory.” Lomas’s title also references the recent targeting of critical race theory by right-wing ideologues in the United States who have launched a disinformation campaign to prevent the teaching about the long history and ongoing social fact of racist interpersonal and structural violence at home and abroad.
Lomas recounts Casal’s personal and political biography, one in which
Casal elaborated a “radicalized” Cuban (im)migrant commitment to global freedom struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. This commitment was rooted in
her experiences as an Afro-Asian, tacitly lesbian, Hispanic-Black-identified feminist who moved across and through worlds and geographies recover-
ing and recounting the central role of Blackness, anti-Blackness, and Blacks in Cuban history, society, culture, and politics. Moreover, through Casal’s case, Lomas offers an important contribution to our understanding of how Black women from the “Hispanic” Caribbean played active roles in the development of transnational Black feminisms; pushed White feminist projects to address imperialism, capitalism, and racism; and held their own societies similarly accountable. This under-recognized story offers a useful contemporary reminder to be aware of the ideological framings embedded
in recent U.S. media coverage of the unprecedented mid-July protests against food and medicine shortages that broke out in Havana.
While it appears that the “leaders of this new movement are ‘a cross-section of Cuba and they are younger, darker and female’” (Ellis 2021) and that the genesis and outcome of these dramatic public challenges to the
Cuban revolutionary regime remain to be seen, what is already clear is that, as with Haiti, mainstream U.S. media readily replayed its old narratives about the island and unhesitatingly echoed the anti-revolutionary sentiments of Miami’s conservative Cuban exiles. “Propelled by the ‘#SOSCuba’ hashtag, the New York Times and other usual suspects rushed to report, aghast, on a Cuban security crackdown in response to the protests, characterised by the jailing of dissidents and alleged human rights violations,” noted Belén Fernández (2021), Jacobin Magazine contributing editor. “While such critiques are not in and of themselves invalid, they would surely hold more moral traction were they not issued by the media mouth-pieces of a country that has long operated an illegal prison-cum-torture centre on Cuban soil” (Fernández 2021). Tracing a similarly complex tangle of national history and family genealogies, Elizabeth Pérez’s poem “Remittances” conveys the painful inability of those bound by blood ties—“relatives with whom they share intimate racialized and gendered histories”—to overcome the legacy and ongoing denial of Cuban anti-Blackness, and instead find themselves “debating the relevance of revenants” in post-Soviet revolutionary Cuba.
By contrast, in “La Reina de Fusión: Xiomara Fortuna Coming of Age in the Dominican Republic,” Rachel Afi Quinn helpfully contextualizes Fortuna’s Testimonio about the evolution of her leftist Black feminist race consciousness; her experiences of Blackness and anti-Blackness in the Dominican Republic and abroad; and how she made these manifest in her music and performance. Fortuna, who grew up in Monte Cristi, Dominican Republic, as the darkest child in a large light-skinned, middle-class family, had established herself early on as a “willful girl” insistent on getting the best education she could and on accessing every opportunity available to her—but these were circumscribed in a country that, despite being the “cradle of Blackness in the Americas’’ (Torres-Saillant 1999: 55), continues to promote negrophobic ideologies, policies, and practices (Candelario 2007, 2016). Nonetheless, “rather than a story of childhood trauma and marginalization because of her blackness,” a trip to Jamaica and revolutionary Cuba fostered a clearly articulated antiracist feminist consciousness in Fortuna whose “clear-eyed take on what it has meant for her to navigate Dominican society as a rebellious AfroDominican woman of her generation” infuses her culture work.
This was most recently exemplified in Fortuna’s decision to perform and receive the Medalla al Mérito en el Área de las Artes (Medal of Merit in the
Arts) barefoot. This powerful symbolic gesture evokes not only another transnational Black queen of world music who signaled class-consciousness similarly—Cape Verde’s “Barefoot Diva” and “Queen of Morna,” Cesária Évora (August 27, 1941–December 17, 2011)—but also Fortuna’s identity as a Black Dominican woman who rejects the racism, classism, sexism, and heteronormativity of Dominican power elites, even, perhaps especially, when receiving presidentially bestowed awards of national recognition. As one supportive commentator put it, “Es una mujer de la raza negra que se ha caracterizado por defender las causas sociales y tener siempre presentes sus antecedentes y el sufrimiento a que fueron sometidos los esclavos traídos de África” (Quiñones 2017). Arguably, Fortuna’s cheeky response to elite outrage—that she lacked the appropriate footwear for the event, a fact belied by her meticulously styled hair and attire—also exemplifies what Constance Bailey brings to our attention in “Signifying Sistas: Black Women’s Humor and Intersectional Poetics."
In this Cultureworks essay, Bailey examines texts that range across time from the eighteenth century to the present, and across genres—from poetry to speeches, and novels to television comedy show—to argue that these exemplify “black comediennes’ intersectional consciousness” and use of “wit to subtly differentiate their lived experiences from those of White women” and Black men. Whether signifying and satirizing White women’s racism, or “symbolically castrating” Black male aggressors, Bailey argues that Black women’s comedy moves beyond documenting their “specific bodily experiences of racism” to metabolizing them critically and defanging their perpetrators publicly, even if to an “audience [that is] often oblivious to the intensity of their critique.” This oblique yet powerful signifying strategy is also evident in the visual poem by S. Erin Batiste, “Longer, Love,” which mocks (up) an advertisement for hair products featuring a light-skinned Black woman with smooth, wavy hair above whom the rhetorical question “do you want love” floats. The poet rejects the original advertisement’s misogynoirist (Bailey 2013: 26) message that natural Black women’s hair must be made to conform to White aesthetics by visibly erasing/whiting out text such that the anti-Black message is transformed to one affirming Black women’s self-love, asserting, “You are . . . your mirror” so “reflect love.” As I read them, together the title, visuals, and text of “Longer, Love” enact Black femme disidentification, affirming the universal human desire to be loved, while rejecting the racist-sexist basis on which Black women’s lovableness is premised and creating something new for those who want it: “Mail coupon now.”
Also concerned with the complex politics and poetics of Black femme self-love, Jennifer Williams’s Media Matters essay, “Apologizing to Chavers: #Blackgirlmagic’s Resilience Discourse and the Fear of Melancholy Black Femme Digital Subjectivity,” delves into the contentious debate unleashed
when Linda Chavers’s 2016 article criticizing the #BlackGirlMagic hashtag was published in Elle magazine. Chavers (2016) argued that, rather than
empowering Black girls and women, the hashtag not only reproduces the trope of Black women’s superhuman strength and imperviousness to pain
but also harms them by disavowing their flawed humanity, imperfect bodies, and abjection. Simply stated, Chavers argued that “#Blackgirlmagic does
not change the regularity of Black death and destruction.” This did not sit well with many Black women who took to social media to reject Chavers’s
argument and to attack Chavers herself, going even so far as to question her Black identity and her mental health. Williams explains that, although she
too initially joined the chorus of “vitriolic” critics, she now stands with Chavers in noting that, while there is an understandable appeal to the hashtag’s celebration of “the overcoming actions of ” individuals, that cele-
bration implicitly reinforces contemporary respectability ideologies and allows “the misdeeds of the state and society” to remain unexamined and naturalized. Thus, Williams concludes, “Black people must envision other
techniques and tools” that “generate Black liberatory possibilities” by allowing Black women to “identify with the whole of their humanity and emotions—including the sacred, the profane, and the abject.”
Along these lines of saying one thing and doing another, Malia Lee Womack’s In the Trenches essay, “An Intersectional Approach to Interrogating Rights: How the United States Does Not Comply with the Racial Equality Treaty,” carefully narrates and analyzes the contradictory facts of the United States’ participation in international movements to articulate and promote human rights policies, on the one hand, and its long history of violating its residents’ human rights on the other. Specifically, Womack analyzes how United States’ reservations, understandings, and declarations (RUDs) about the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) claim that “US policies and government institutions are fully consistent with the” ICERD yet fail to acknowledge “that its institutions are systematically racist.” Moreover, the United States routinely fails to ratify human rights conventions, exempts itself from norms and obligations that contravene its interests, and refuses to proactively pursue and/or promote its residents’ economic, social, and cultural rights as required by the ICERD. It does so because ICERD notions of rights contravene normative US ideologies of freedom and equal opportunity that frame outcomes as resulting from personal decision making by individuals and deny the role played by White supremacist, patriarchal, settler-colonial, and capitalist social structures and systems in producing those outcomes for individuals and communities alike. By contrast, Womack deploys intersectionality theory to narrate how the “profoundly racist/sexist design of US legal and policy frameworks . . . assure[s that] women who are Black experience profound oppression” in
and through the health, education, and housing system in explicit and implicit violation of the ICERD. Womack argues hopefully that “applying an intersectional analysis to ICERD holds the United States more account-
able to the treaty, which can maximize its effects.”
Taking a related but different tack on addressing the legacy and ongoing fact of intersectional violence experienced by “racially minoritized” people internally and relationally, “Sisterhood Birthed through Colonialism: Using Love Letters to Connect, Heal, and Transform” is a joint memoir by Jamaican Raquel Wright-Mair and Puerto Rican Milagros Castillo-Montoya
that exemplifies the listen, affirm, respond, and affirming inquiry method for “reckoning with this being a part of our personal history, whether we like it or not.” These US-based colleague-friends, who both identify as racialized minority women, took part in a Black heritage tour of the Netherlands presenting their research on global racial equity in education. The tour included a visit to the Museum Van Loon, which showcased “a powerful exhibit on Suriname” that elicited powerfully disturbing emotions in the authors even months after their encounter with it. In response, they decided to “unpack this experience with [one] another in the form of love
letters” that movingly model “witnessing ourselves in each other.”
Finally, apropos of this call to draw on the power of diasporic (self ) love to foment decolonial politics and practices large and small, we close this issue with a poem by Teri Ellen Cross Davis, “Black Berries.” Drawing on the Black anti-colorism adage “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” this poem’s narrator travels from the United States to Ireland and Kenya, “exploring the journey from wonderment to acceptance to love” of Black(er) and dark skin. As with “Longer, Love,” this poem affirms that Black beauty must be appreciated on its own terms, and that sometimes means leaving the United States behind. Freed from the U.S. context, in Mombasa, Kenya, the narrator “chased [her] color, taunted it to come out and play,” sharing her joy and wonder that “melanin [is] a blessing,” a sweet experience indeed. And in keeping with that celebratory sentiment, this issue also features the announcement of the 2021 Paula J. Giddings Best Article Award Winners, Robert J. Patterson for “Between Protest and Politics: Black Lives Matter Movement(s) for Black Lives,” published in volume 19, number 2. Also, for the first time since the award was initiated in 2018, the Editorial Advisory Board awarded an Honorable Mention to Leigh- Anne Francis for her essay “Playing the Lady Sambo: Poor Black Women’s Legal Strategies in the Post–Civil War South’s Civil Courts,” also published in volume 19, number 2. Serendipitously resonant with this issue’s theme, both of these award-winning essays address Black activism and resistance in the United States, historically and contemporarily. Congratulations to both Patterson and Francis!
As a scholar of Afro-Latinidades, it is a particular pleasure for me to offer Meridians readers this issue devoted to “Black Feminism in the Caribbean and the United States: Representation, Rebellion, Radicalism, and Reckoning.” This curated conversation about Black feminist liberation strategies, which vary and move across time and place, is aptly illustrated with cover art by Haitian artist Mafalda Nicolas Mondestin, Ann fè on ti pale (The Meeting). Ann fè on ti pale is a Haitian Kreyol expression that means “let’s chat about it” or “we should chat” (pers. comm., August 29, 2021), and, apropos of that invitation, we open the conversation with “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” an especially timely and insightful interview that Kyrah Malika Daniels conducted in January 2020.1 As our readers well know, a global COVID-19 pandemic emerged just after this interview took place and dramatically changed the course of all our lives, but it has been most unforgiving in much of the global South and its diaspora. Simply stated, the United States and Europe have the highest quality and most resourced health-care systems in the world, but there, as throughout society, institutional racism produces devastating and deadly outcomes for Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities. After a brief period of seeming relief due to the development of several effective vaccines, a COVID-19 mutation into
the “Delta variant” emerged in June of 2021, testing the effectiveness of the vaccines and claiming new demographics as victims, including children
who were previously largely untouched by the virus. As of this writing, more than 40 million people have contracted COVID-19 and 670,000 people have died in the United States (Worldometer 2021), with BIPOC folks disproportionately represented in both counts.
To make matters worse, US mainstream media and Republican Party elected officials such as Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick routinely blame BIPOC folks for COVID-19 surges due to their supposedly lower vaccination rates, despite recent polls indicating that BIPOC vaccination rates are higher than Whites, even with the greater structural barriers they face and their historically grounded, sociologically sound distrust of the health-care system (Starr 2021). Indeed, it is right-wing media that continues to promote anti-vaccination propaganda to its largely White audience, including bizarre claims that Ivermectin, a veterinary deworming treatment, is preferable to the now fully FDA approved vaccines as a preventative measure and/or treatment (USDA 2021). Similar ideologically driven patterns appear globally, in which right-wing and nationalist leaders and other elements across the world blame vulnerable populations for the virus’s spread and promote dangerously ineffective alternative treatments.
In Haiti, if these universal pandemic-related challenges weren’t difficult enough, the summer of 2021 also brought the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse on July 7, another devastating earthquake on August 14 that took two thousand lives, and the brutal tropical storm Grace on August 17. With this context in mind, Edwidge Danticat’s reflections on the perennial assaults on sovereignty, peace, and well-being that Haiti and
Haitians have suffered and overcome thanks to their spiritual traditions and practices are critical counters to persistent anti-Haitian attitudes and discourses in the media and public sphere. This engaging and focused
Interview—conversation, really, as Daniels’s insightful comments position her more as interlocutor than interviewer—offers a rich and revealing window into Danticat’s thinking about and connection to Haitian spiritual traditions and practices and their relationship to the natural world; ruminations about various faiths’ rituals of death, dying, and honoring ancestors; and poignant comments on her own experiences of losing and keeping a connection to loved ones through dreams and creative work. As Danticat succinctly puts it in closing the interview, “We’re not just rectifying old narratives, we’re writing our own narratives, fully within ourselves.”
In her Essay “Beyond Tragedy: Black Girlhood in Marlon James’s Book of Night Women and Evelyne Trouillot’s Rosalie l’infâme,” Annette Joseph-Gabriel exemplifies Danticat’s perspective with her analysis of two novels about enslaved Black girls’ coming of age in Jamaica and Saint Domingue. These “resistive tragedies,” Joseph-Gabriel argues, narrate the chipping away at slave societies’ social orders because, “even if they do not overcome the
forces of slavery,” the girls “exceed the limitations that slavery places on their bodies, their imaginations, and their futures.” These novels also exemplify the “spiralism” characteristic of Haitian and/or Caribbean narratives. Unlike linear (read Eurocentric/White) notions of time and tragedy, spiral theories of historical and social change hold that stasis, and progressive
and regressive shifts, can—and often do—occur simultaneously, allowing for “a continuous, dynamic engagement between past and present.”
Next, we turn our attention to the U.S. context of Black girlhood and survivance beginning with Nia McAllister’s poem, “Consort of the Spirits, after Ntozake Shange.” Although the term survivance emerges from Native American Indian studies in the United States rather than from Black studies, it effectively captures the affect and vision of this richly evocative poem. “Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native sto-
ries, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (Vizenor 1999: vii). McAllister builds on Ntozake Shange’s evocative assertion that “a woman
with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits,” to narrate survivance as more than mere survival, as her repeated refrain “They call this survival”—followed by refutations to that hegemonic framing—illustrates.
Similarly eschewing hegemonic conventions and notions of survival, Kenly Brown, Lashon Daley, and Derrika Hunt’s collectively written, transdisciplinary, and multi-methodological Counterpoint essay, “Disruptive Ruptures: The Necessity of Black/Girlhood Imaginary,” coins the term “‘Black forward slash Girlhood’ to signal both an abstract configuration and a lived embodied experience of Black girlness that is in dialogue with global imaginings.” Through three different case studies, Brown, Daley, and Hunt center both fictional and real Black girls’ narratives and understandings of their girlhood experiences. By documenting the fictional Judy Winslow’s (and/or actress Jaimee Foxworth’s) unacknowledged disappearance from Family Matters, valorizing the poetry of a demonized Black girl enrolled in a California continuation school who asserts “the only demon in me is this crooked society,” and the testimony of a sixteen-year-old girl working in a Jamaican resort, this Black feminist collective text showcases “the kaleidoscopic mosaics of Black girls’ knowings . . . across time, space, and geographic boundaries."
We follow this with an In the Archives feature that departs from our usual archival document and research note. “Carlota’s Hum: An Archive Fiction” by interdisciplinary poet and scholar Alana Pérez is, as the author explains in her introduction, an attempt “to retell” the documented true story of Carlota lucumí of the Triunvirato sugar mill in the province of Matanzas, Cuba, who organized a “traveling rebellion that freed over three hundred enslaved people” in 1843. Pérez offers our readers a retelling of this story that centers the “queer relationship” between Carlota and Fermina, another enslaved woman with whom Carlota was evidently in love with, while also “referencing Yoruba and Cuban Santeria practices” from which they drew strength and support. The Cuban context of and contributions to transnational Black feminism is also taken up by Laura Lomas in her Essay “Afro-Latina Disidentification and Bridging: Lourdes Casal’s Critical Race Theory.” Lomas’s title also references the recent targeting of critical race theory by right-wing ideologues in the United States who have launched a disinformation campaign to prevent the teaching about the long history and ongoing social fact of racist interpersonal and structural violence at home and abroad.
Lomas recounts Casal’s personal and political biography, one in which
Casal elaborated a “radicalized” Cuban (im)migrant commitment to global freedom struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. This commitment was rooted in
her experiences as an Afro-Asian, tacitly lesbian, Hispanic-Black-identified feminist who moved across and through worlds and geographies recover-
ing and recounting the central role of Blackness, anti-Blackness, and Blacks in Cuban history, society, culture, and politics. Moreover, through Casal’s case, Lomas offers an important contribution to our understanding of how Black women from the “Hispanic” Caribbean played active roles in the development of transnational Black feminisms; pushed White feminist projects to address imperialism, capitalism, and racism; and held their own societies similarly accountable. This under-recognized story offers a useful contemporary reminder to be aware of the ideological framings embedded
in recent U.S. media coverage of the unprecedented mid-July protests against food and medicine shortages that broke out in Havana.
While it appears that the “leaders of this new movement are ‘a cross-section of Cuba and they are younger, darker and female’” (Ellis 2021) and that the genesis and outcome of these dramatic public challenges to the
Cuban revolutionary regime remain to be seen, what is already clear is that, as with Haiti, mainstream U.S. media readily replayed its old narratives about the island and unhesitatingly echoed the anti-revolutionary sentiments of Miami’s conservative Cuban exiles. “Propelled by the ‘#SOSCuba’ hashtag, the New York Times and other usual suspects rushed to report, aghast, on a Cuban security crackdown in response to the protests, characterised by the jailing of dissidents and alleged human rights violations,” noted Belén Fernández (2021), Jacobin Magazine contributing editor. “While such critiques are not in and of themselves invalid, they would surely hold more moral traction were they not issued by the media mouth-pieces of a country that has long operated an illegal prison-cum-torture centre on Cuban soil” (Fernández 2021). Tracing a similarly complex tangle of national history and family genealogies, Elizabeth Pérez’s poem “Remittances” conveys the painful inability of those bound by blood ties—“relatives with whom they share intimate racialized and gendered histories”—to overcome the legacy and ongoing denial of Cuban anti-Blackness, and instead find themselves “debating the relevance of revenants” in post-Soviet revolutionary Cuba.
By contrast, in “La Reina de Fusión: Xiomara Fortuna Coming of Age in the Dominican Republic,” Rachel Afi Quinn helpfully contextualizes Fortuna’s Testimonio about the evolution of her leftist Black feminist race consciousness; her experiences of Blackness and anti-Blackness in the Dominican Republic and abroad; and how she made these manifest in her music and performance. Fortuna, who grew up in Monte Cristi, Dominican Republic, as the darkest child in a large light-skinned, middle-class family, had established herself early on as a “willful girl” insistent on getting the best education she could and on accessing every opportunity available to her—but these were circumscribed in a country that, despite being the “cradle of Blackness in the Americas’’ (Torres-Saillant 1999: 55), continues to promote negrophobic ideologies, policies, and practices (Candelario 2007, 2016). Nonetheless, “rather than a story of childhood trauma and marginalization because of her blackness,” a trip to Jamaica and revolutionary Cuba fostered a clearly articulated antiracist feminist consciousness in Fortuna whose “clear-eyed take on what it has meant for her to navigate Dominican society as a rebellious AfroDominican woman of her generation” infuses her culture work.
This was most recently exemplified in Fortuna’s decision to perform and receive the Medalla al Mérito en el Área de las Artes (Medal of Merit in the
Arts) barefoot. This powerful symbolic gesture evokes not only another transnational Black queen of world music who signaled class-consciousness similarly—Cape Verde’s “Barefoot Diva” and “Queen of Morna,” Cesária Évora (August 27, 1941–December 17, 2011)—but also Fortuna’s identity as a Black Dominican woman who rejects the racism, classism, sexism, and heteronormativity of Dominican power elites, even, perhaps especially, when receiving presidentially bestowed awards of national recognition. As one supportive commentator put it, “Es una mujer de la raza negra que se ha caracterizado por defender las causas sociales y tener siempre presentes sus antecedentes y el sufrimiento a que fueron sometidos los esclavos traídos de África” (Quiñones 2017). Arguably, Fortuna’s cheeky response to elite outrage—that she lacked the appropriate footwear for the event, a fact belied by her meticulously styled hair and attire—also exemplifies what Constance Bailey brings to our attention in “Signifying Sistas: Black Women’s Humor and Intersectional Poetics."
In this Cultureworks essay, Bailey examines texts that range across time from the eighteenth century to the present, and across genres—from poetry to speeches, and novels to television comedy show—to argue that these exemplify “black comediennes’ intersectional consciousness” and use of “wit to subtly differentiate their lived experiences from those of White women” and Black men. Whether signifying and satirizing White women’s racism, or “symbolically castrating” Black male aggressors, Bailey argues that Black women’s comedy moves beyond documenting their “specific bodily experiences of racism” to metabolizing them critically and defanging their perpetrators publicly, even if to an “audience [that is] often oblivious to the intensity of their critique.” This oblique yet powerful signifying strategy is also evident in the visual poem by S. Erin Batiste, “Longer, Love,” which mocks (up) an advertisement for hair products featuring a light-skinned Black woman with smooth, wavy hair above whom the rhetorical question “do you want love” floats. The poet rejects the original advertisement’s misogynoirist (Bailey 2013: 26) message that natural Black women’s hair must be made to conform to White aesthetics by visibly erasing/whiting out text such that the anti-Black message is transformed to one affirming Black women’s self-love, asserting, “You are . . . your mirror” so “reflect love.” As I read them, together the title, visuals, and text of “Longer, Love” enact Black femme disidentification, affirming the universal human desire to be loved, while rejecting the racist-sexist basis on which Black women’s lovableness is premised and creating something new for those who want it: “Mail coupon now.”
Also concerned with the complex politics and poetics of Black femme self-love, Jennifer Williams’s Media Matters essay, “Apologizing to Chavers: #Blackgirlmagic’s Resilience Discourse and the Fear of Melancholy Black Femme Digital Subjectivity,” delves into the contentious debate unleashed
when Linda Chavers’s 2016 article criticizing the #BlackGirlMagic hashtag was published in Elle magazine. Chavers (2016) argued that, rather than
empowering Black girls and women, the hashtag not only reproduces the trope of Black women’s superhuman strength and imperviousness to pain
but also harms them by disavowing their flawed humanity, imperfect bodies, and abjection. Simply stated, Chavers argued that “#Blackgirlmagic does
not change the regularity of Black death and destruction.” This did not sit well with many Black women who took to social media to reject Chavers’s
argument and to attack Chavers herself, going even so far as to question her Black identity and her mental health. Williams explains that, although she
too initially joined the chorus of “vitriolic” critics, she now stands with Chavers in noting that, while there is an understandable appeal to the hashtag’s celebration of “the overcoming actions of ” individuals, that cele-
bration implicitly reinforces contemporary respectability ideologies and allows “the misdeeds of the state and society” to remain unexamined and naturalized. Thus, Williams concludes, “Black people must envision other
techniques and tools” that “generate Black liberatory possibilities” by allowing Black women to “identify with the whole of their humanity and emotions—including the sacred, the profane, and the abject.”
Along these lines of saying one thing and doing another, Malia Lee Womack’s In the Trenches essay, “An Intersectional Approach to Interrogating Rights: How the United States Does Not Comply with the Racial Equality Treaty,” carefully narrates and analyzes the contradictory facts of the United States’ participation in international movements to articulate and promote human rights policies, on the one hand, and its long history of violating its residents’ human rights on the other. Specifically, Womack analyzes how United States’ reservations, understandings, and declarations (RUDs) about the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) claim that “US policies and government institutions are fully consistent with the” ICERD yet fail to acknowledge “that its institutions are systematically racist.” Moreover, the United States routinely fails to ratify human rights conventions, exempts itself from norms and obligations that contravene its interests, and refuses to proactively pursue and/or promote its residents’ economic, social, and cultural rights as required by the ICERD. It does so because ICERD notions of rights contravene normative US ideologies of freedom and equal opportunity that frame outcomes as resulting from personal decision making by individuals and deny the role played by White supremacist, patriarchal, settler-colonial, and capitalist social structures and systems in producing those outcomes for individuals and communities alike. By contrast, Womack deploys intersectionality theory to narrate how the “profoundly racist/sexist design of US legal and policy frameworks . . . assure[s that] women who are Black experience profound oppression” in
and through the health, education, and housing system in explicit and implicit violation of the ICERD. Womack argues hopefully that “applying an intersectional analysis to ICERD holds the United States more account-
able to the treaty, which can maximize its effects.”
Taking a related but different tack on addressing the legacy and ongoing fact of intersectional violence experienced by “racially minoritized” people internally and relationally, “Sisterhood Birthed through Colonialism: Using Love Letters to Connect, Heal, and Transform” is a joint memoir by Jamaican Raquel Wright-Mair and Puerto Rican Milagros Castillo-Montoya
that exemplifies the listen, affirm, respond, and affirming inquiry method for “reckoning with this being a part of our personal history, whether we like it or not.” These US-based colleague-friends, who both identify as racialized minority women, took part in a Black heritage tour of the Netherlands presenting their research on global racial equity in education. The tour included a visit to the Museum Van Loon, which showcased “a powerful exhibit on Suriname” that elicited powerfully disturbing emotions in the authors even months after their encounter with it. In response, they decided to “unpack this experience with [one] another in the form of love
letters” that movingly model “witnessing ourselves in each other.”
Finally, apropos of this call to draw on the power of diasporic (self ) love to foment decolonial politics and practices large and small, we close this issue with a poem by Teri Ellen Cross Davis, “Black Berries.” Drawing on the Black anti-colorism adage “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” this poem’s narrator travels from the United States to Ireland and Kenya, “exploring the journey from wonderment to acceptance to love” of Black(er) and dark skin. As with “Longer, Love,” this poem affirms that Black beauty must be appreciated on its own terms, and that sometimes means leaving the United States behind. Freed from the U.S. context, in Mombasa, Kenya, the narrator “chased [her] color, taunted it to come out and play,” sharing her joy and wonder that “melanin [is] a blessing,” a sweet experience indeed. And in keeping with that celebratory sentiment, this issue also features the announcement of the 2021 Paula J. Giddings Best Article Award Winners, Robert J. Patterson for “Between Protest and Politics: Black Lives Matter Movement(s) for Black Lives,” published in volume 19, number 2. Also, for the first time since the award was initiated in 2018, the Editorial Advisory Board awarded an Honorable Mention to Leigh- Anne Francis for her essay “Playing the Lady Sambo: Poor Black Women’s Legal Strategies in the Post–Civil War South’s Civil Courts,” also published in volume 19, number 2. Serendipitously resonant with this issue’s theme, both of these award-winning essays address Black activism and resistance in the United States, historically and contemporarily. Congratulations to both Patterson and Francis!
volume 20 issue 2
Who's Terrorizing Who?
This issue coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the United States’ initiation of the “war on terror” launched in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001. On that day, al-Qaeda operatives destroyed the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan by flying two hijacked planes into the twin towers; a third hijacked plane hit the first floor of the Pentagon’s west wall; and a fourth plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers successfully thwarted the hijackers. Ironically, that September 11 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the CIA-engineered military overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1971. Although at the time “the extent of U.S. covert action against Allende’s Popular Unity government was . . . a well-documented subject of public discussion,” this blatant violation of Chilean sovereignty was not only justified by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as “in the best interest of the people of Chile,” but summarily forgotten by a US public long taught to consider Chile as “beneath” the United States, if they consider it all (Schoultz 1998: 361). Educating the public not only into willful disregard for, but condescending racialization of the victims of US settler-colonial and imperialist political violence as inherently inferior and subordinated has obtained throughout the country’s history.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that
Even before the first of the Trade Center’s towers had collapsed, the ‘news’ media, as yet possessed of no hint as to who may have carried out the attacks, much less why they might have done so, were already and repeatedly proclaiming the whole thing ‘unprovoked’ and ‘senseless.’ Within a week, the assailants having meanwhile been presumably identified, Newsweek had recast the initial assertions of its colleagues in the form of a query bespeaking the aura of wide-eyed innocence in which the country was by then, as always, seeking to cloak itself. ‘Why,’ the magazine’s cover whined from every newsstand, ‘do they hate us so much?’ (Churchill 2003: 5).
In other words, with a few notable exceptions such as Representative Barbara Lee (2001), instead of considering the geopolitical and historical contexts for the attacks, the media, elected officials, and the general public alike deployed the well-established White supremacist logic that insists against all facticity on US (read: White) political innocence and Middle Eastern (read: Muslim) irrational barbarism. After all, was the country not founded precisely on the premise of Anglo-Americans’ God-given supremacy and their inherent entitlement to dominion over all the land, resources, and laboring BIPOC bodies that they claimed as part of their manifest destiny? Not surprisingly, therefore, when that history is called to account, whether through political violence, peaceful protest, culture work, or critical scholarship, White supremacist outrage ensues. As James Baldwin succinctly put it, “They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself” (Baldwin 1969).
To be clear, I am not arguing that the al-Qaeda attacks on US targets were in any way justified; rather, I am decrying the long-standing refusal in the United States to be held accountable for the country’s “imperial arrogance and criminality” (Churchill 2003); the steadfast unwillingness to engage in a political process of truth, reconciliation and reparations (Coates 2014); the trenchant rejection of the historical truth and social fact of White supremacist violence as the recent right-wing attacks on The 1619 Project (Messer-Kruse 2020) and Critical Race Theory exemplify (Gluckman 2021); and the decades-long racialization of Islamophobic violence, ideology, rhetoric, and policies (Razack 2008).
Thus, this guest-edited special issue of Meridians focused on “Transnational Feminist Responses to Anti-Muslim Racism” purposefully coincides with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 and is intended to counter the hegemonic Islamophobic framings that have resurged. By now well established globally, Islamophobia is not simply ethnocentrism nor discrimination based on religion, nor is it typically negative political characterization of “the enemy.” Instead, as the guest editors Zeynep Korkman and Sherene Halida Razack argue, Islamophobia is better understood as Anti-Muslim racism that is simultaneously global and local, and a type of racism that accordingly demands transnational feminist solidarities in response.
In light of that, I dedicate this issue to Egyptian feminist, activist, physician, psychiatrist, educator, and writer Nawal El Saadawi (October 27, 1931–March 21, 2021), who was a member of the Meridians Founding Advisory Board and who passed away earlier this year. I agree with El Saadawi that undoing what hegemonic “education” has done to people in the United States is the work of the people themselves as she explained in the 2018 interview excerpted above, and that our work at Meridians is to carry forward the transnational “struggle for justice, freedom.”1 Also in that spirit of searching for solidarities, both visible and subterranean but thriving, we present to you the winner of the 2021 Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award, Gwendolyn Maya Wallace’s “To Forage.” About “To Forage,” the Creative Writing Advisory Board said:
The narrator of “To Forage” is an old soul inhabiting the body of a young, black woman: a forager of mushrooms, memories and stories that when woven together promise a “self” who is culturally grounded and spiritually whole. She is a gatherer: of the mother wit of her grandmother in South Carolina; the church women whose pastel suits and kitten heels tell you who they know themselves to be; the mother wit that carries the sounds and values of home no matter where she happens to live. She may be an old soul, but she is also incontestably of this moment: a girl-child of the city whose fascination with the growth cycles of plants is part scientific, part philosophical, and entirely the worldview of a black girl whose life is “unfolding” in call-and-response with her ancestors. She foraged for mushrooms, ancestors, and memories and for the power to conjure a world into existence (Andrea Harris, pers. comm., February 22, 2021).
Finally, appropriately wrapped around these features is our beautiful cover art, “When the World Sleeps” by the Palestinian artist Malak Mattar, who explains that “this piece was created from a space of trying to find tranquility through painting and sleeping . . . hoping to achieve peace.” Like Wallace, Mattar reminds us that connecting with the peace deep within is made more difficult by the distorted “waking reality” we live in. Achieving any kind of peace requires imagining its possibility, painting it, writing it, and foraging for its traces wherever we may find ourselves. In the midst of all the deadly confluences we are currently living through simultaneously, that feels especially important to remember.
This issue coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the United States’ initiation of the “war on terror” launched in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001. On that day, al-Qaeda operatives destroyed the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan by flying two hijacked planes into the twin towers; a third hijacked plane hit the first floor of the Pentagon’s west wall; and a fourth plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers successfully thwarted the hijackers. Ironically, that September 11 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the CIA-engineered military overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1971. Although at the time “the extent of U.S. covert action against Allende’s Popular Unity government was . . . a well-documented subject of public discussion,” this blatant violation of Chilean sovereignty was not only justified by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as “in the best interest of the people of Chile,” but summarily forgotten by a US public long taught to consider Chile as “beneath” the United States, if they consider it all (Schoultz 1998: 361). Educating the public not only into willful disregard for, but condescending racialization of the victims of US settler-colonial and imperialist political violence as inherently inferior and subordinated has obtained throughout the country’s history.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that
Even before the first of the Trade Center’s towers had collapsed, the ‘news’ media, as yet possessed of no hint as to who may have carried out the attacks, much less why they might have done so, were already and repeatedly proclaiming the whole thing ‘unprovoked’ and ‘senseless.’ Within a week, the assailants having meanwhile been presumably identified, Newsweek had recast the initial assertions of its colleagues in the form of a query bespeaking the aura of wide-eyed innocence in which the country was by then, as always, seeking to cloak itself. ‘Why,’ the magazine’s cover whined from every newsstand, ‘do they hate us so much?’ (Churchill 2003: 5).
In other words, with a few notable exceptions such as Representative Barbara Lee (2001), instead of considering the geopolitical and historical contexts for the attacks, the media, elected officials, and the general public alike deployed the well-established White supremacist logic that insists against all facticity on US (read: White) political innocence and Middle Eastern (read: Muslim) irrational barbarism. After all, was the country not founded precisely on the premise of Anglo-Americans’ God-given supremacy and their inherent entitlement to dominion over all the land, resources, and laboring BIPOC bodies that they claimed as part of their manifest destiny? Not surprisingly, therefore, when that history is called to account, whether through political violence, peaceful protest, culture work, or critical scholarship, White supremacist outrage ensues. As James Baldwin succinctly put it, “They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself” (Baldwin 1969).
To be clear, I am not arguing that the al-Qaeda attacks on US targets were in any way justified; rather, I am decrying the long-standing refusal in the United States to be held accountable for the country’s “imperial arrogance and criminality” (Churchill 2003); the steadfast unwillingness to engage in a political process of truth, reconciliation and reparations (Coates 2014); the trenchant rejection of the historical truth and social fact of White supremacist violence as the recent right-wing attacks on The 1619 Project (Messer-Kruse 2020) and Critical Race Theory exemplify (Gluckman 2021); and the decades-long racialization of Islamophobic violence, ideology, rhetoric, and policies (Razack 2008).
Thus, this guest-edited special issue of Meridians focused on “Transnational Feminist Responses to Anti-Muslim Racism” purposefully coincides with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 and is intended to counter the hegemonic Islamophobic framings that have resurged. By now well established globally, Islamophobia is not simply ethnocentrism nor discrimination based on religion, nor is it typically negative political characterization of “the enemy.” Instead, as the guest editors Zeynep Korkman and Sherene Halida Razack argue, Islamophobia is better understood as Anti-Muslim racism that is simultaneously global and local, and a type of racism that accordingly demands transnational feminist solidarities in response.
In light of that, I dedicate this issue to Egyptian feminist, activist, physician, psychiatrist, educator, and writer Nawal El Saadawi (October 27, 1931–March 21, 2021), who was a member of the Meridians Founding Advisory Board and who passed away earlier this year. I agree with El Saadawi that undoing what hegemonic “education” has done to people in the United States is the work of the people themselves as she explained in the 2018 interview excerpted above, and that our work at Meridians is to carry forward the transnational “struggle for justice, freedom.”1 Also in that spirit of searching for solidarities, both visible and subterranean but thriving, we present to you the winner of the 2021 Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award, Gwendolyn Maya Wallace’s “To Forage.” About “To Forage,” the Creative Writing Advisory Board said:
The narrator of “To Forage” is an old soul inhabiting the body of a young, black woman: a forager of mushrooms, memories and stories that when woven together promise a “self” who is culturally grounded and spiritually whole. She is a gatherer: of the mother wit of her grandmother in South Carolina; the church women whose pastel suits and kitten heels tell you who they know themselves to be; the mother wit that carries the sounds and values of home no matter where she happens to live. She may be an old soul, but she is also incontestably of this moment: a girl-child of the city whose fascination with the growth cycles of plants is part scientific, part philosophical, and entirely the worldview of a black girl whose life is “unfolding” in call-and-response with her ancestors. She foraged for mushrooms, ancestors, and memories and for the power to conjure a world into existence (Andrea Harris, pers. comm., February 22, 2021).
Finally, appropriately wrapped around these features is our beautiful cover art, “When the World Sleeps” by the Palestinian artist Malak Mattar, who explains that “this piece was created from a space of trying to find tranquility through painting and sleeping . . . hoping to achieve peace.” Like Wallace, Mattar reminds us that connecting with the peace deep within is made more difficult by the distorted “waking reality” we live in. Achieving any kind of peace requires imagining its possibility, painting it, writing it, and foraging for its traces wherever we may find ourselves. In the midst of all the deadly confluences we are currently living through simultaneously, that feels especially important to remember.
volume 20 issue 1
Editor's Introduction
I write this in mid-November of 2020, after one of the most contentious presidential elections in my lifetime. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many states began allowing and even encouraging the use of absentee voting/mail-in ballots to reduce the risk of infection during in-person voting. Although he himself votes by mail, the outgoing president began a systematic and sustained campaign of maligning the legality and validity of absentee ballots, claiming without evidence that they were more vulnerable to "illegal voting" and fraud, and encouraging his constituent base to vote in person on election day. He also undermined the United States Postal Service's capacity to deliver absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots themselves by engineering the naming of one of his mega donors, Louis Dejoy, as Postmaster General. Dejoy immediately set about instituting policies that included removing mailboxes, "cuts to overtime … limiting mail delivery trips … curtailed postal hours … [and] 'mail left behind'" during a moment of heightened reliance on the postal system (Vogel et al. 2020). An angry public response decrying these changes and the seeming politicization of the postal service forced Dejoy to suspend the changes, although the removed mailboxes—many from low-income urban and rural communities—have yet to be replaced. At the same time, US intelligence agencies issued public reports alerting the public that hostile actors from Russia, China, and Iran among others were attempting to hack voting systems and were engaging in racially and politically divisive social media campaigns to undermine confidence in the mainstream media, journalists, and our election system. Followers of QAnon, this generation's most bizarre right-wing conspiracy theory monger, moved from the fringes of the World Wide Web to the campaign trail and mainstream media (Steck, McDermott, and Hickey 2020). Meanwhile, the president's re-election campaign filed dozens of lawsuits, many summarily dismissed by the courts, attempting to prevent or halt ballot counting in hotly contested swing states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada, often using contradictory logics to press whatever case would benefit their cause of preventing the counting of votes cast for Democratic candidates, many of these by people of color (Parks 2020).
Despite all of this, after a history-making election "season" that ran for several months rather than the conventional single day in November, and five days of nonstop mail-in ballot counting, on Saturday, November 7, 2020, just before noon EST, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were declared by the Associated Press to have surpassed the requisite 270 electoral college votes needed to win the election. Sadly, although unsurprising, the loser refused to concede the election and instead ramped up his false claims of electoral fraud, illegal voting, and of a multistate conspiracy to "steal" the election from him. As of this writing, the General Services Administration director who was appointed by the current president has refused to "ascertain" President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris as the winners, effectively preventing them from accessing the resources they will need to install their transition team in preparation for their January inauguration (Collins 2020). More ominously, the current president fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper via Twitter, as well as other top Pentagon officials, replacing them with his loyalists while he continues to stoke his base's anger at the election's outcome (Myers 2020). Given that the Electoral College didn't meet to vote until December 14, 2020, it was one more month before the election results were certified (Reichmann 2020). This, of course, also hampered the Biden-Harris administration's ability to operationalize their COVID-19 response, one of their stated priorities.
In the meantime, COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on thousands of people every day, and the rate of infection and death is increasing as we enter the winter season in the United States. As of this writing, 579,000 people have died, and 32.6 million have been infected, a large number of these survivors facing the prospect of long-term aftereffects (CDC 2020; Gavin 2020). Even the good news that vaccines with over 90 percent effectiveness have been developed by Pfizer and Moderna must be tempered by the fact that the previous administration did not developed a federal distribution system to get the vaccine delivered efficiently and to priority populations (D'Urbino 2020).
At the same time, despite all of this somber news and distressing state of affairs, the fact remains that Kamala Harris, a woman of color, specifically a Black-identified woman of Jamaican and Indian descent, broke through the nearly 250-year-old barrier to women occupying the highest office of the land. Vice President Kamala Harris made history, and her victory was celebrated around the world, from her father's Jamaican homeland to her mother's Tamil Nadu village of Painganadu, to the streets of villages, towns, and cities across the United States (Associated Press 2020; Loop News 2020). Over the course of weeks following the Biden-Harris win, we saw countless social media postings by girls and women of color proclaiming their joy over the fact that a woman "who looks like [them]" would become vice president of the United States. Even as we acknowledge the undeniable limits of representation politics, MERIDIANS also recognizes the psychically and spiritualy significant importance of this win for women, especially women of color, Black women, and South Asian women. Serendipitously, many of the features in this issue focus on South Asian countries, including Harris's heritage country of India, and our cover features the art of Upasana Agarwal, an artist and illustrator based in Kolkata. As Upasana explains in her artist's statement, Shazia's Dream honors her friend's ability to experience playfully "her various identities in the paradoxical South Asian space," and in so doing, they transform the wall from a quintessential aspect of a "carceral landscape" to a surmountable—perhaps even a border crossing—vantage point that embraces the "mosaic of colors" that comprise the wall (Mehta, 78).
The conflicts, violence, and spirited will to survive ever present in the "paradoxical South Asian space" is a thematic thread running through all of this issue's features. Whether "contesting," "reckoning" with, or "rethinking" the violence enacted against ethno-racial, religious, sexual, and gender minorities, especially in South and East Asia and their diasporas, all of our authors take up the work of narrating these complicated histories and their representations. By way of illustrating exactly how diverse yet coherent this terrain is, we open the issue with Ramya Sreenivasan's incredibly comprehensive and thoughtful "Diversity of Women's Studies and Women's Histories: Reflections from South Asia." This masterful "State of the Field" article considers six recently published books from four different fields that cover a broad range of topics across the vast geographic territories of South Asia and its diaspora in the United States and the United Kingdom. As Sreenivasan deftly narrates, from marriage and family to faith and religion, from political representation to the presentation of self, these texts make evident the ever-present fact of religious and ethnic heterogeneity despite nationalism's ideological insistence on homogeneity as a necessary precondition for unity and development.
Shifting from scholarship to creative writing, Sri Craven's short story "Clean and Green" neatly narrates the hidden yet crucial work done by women, often behind the scenes, to sustain the tidy fiction that is nationalism and neoliberal "progress." The protagonist, Rani, is a mother and wife who works nights as a custodian cleaning the cubicles of Indian IT workers. Most days Rani also works in the tailoring shop of a "young Muslim lady" who, although a religious minority, is better educated, lighter skinned, and financially better off than Rani. Although "Rani sees the smiling face of Modi telling India to clean up! Pick up! Get up! Up! up! up! That's where we are all going," the facts of her life as a Dalit woman/mother/wife make clear that only a very few will go "up." Instead, as happens with the two scooter-riding men whose death by lorry becomes no more than a bump on the road of Rani's commute home, the most vulnerable disappear or die with little acknowledgment. Indeed, under Modi's ultra-nationalist rule, anti-Muslim and anti-Dalit violence have increased dramatically, this pattern of ethnic cleansing violence sullying India's "clean and green" (self)image and belying its claims to democratizing modernity (DeSouza 2017).
Moving from fictional truth telling to analyzing the power of women's testimonial poetry, Brinda J. Mehta's essay, "Contesting Militarized Violence in 'Northeast India': Women Poets against Conflict," considers how women poets produce an archive of the gendered harms caused by India's neocolonial governance of eight "sister" states in the subcontinent's northeastern region. Trauma, sorrow, and eco-devastation are left in the wake of internal neocolonialism. Mehta argues that women poets such as Temsüla Ao, Monalisa Changkija, Mamang Dai, and others "have played a leading role in exposing and denouncing this violence." Uddipana Goswami is a prolific Indian sociologist whose work on Northeast India Mehta draws on; she is also a well-published creative writer. Coincidentally, last year we received and accepted Goswami's short story "Body, Bones, and All" and were awaiting the right issue in which to feature it; we are particularly pleased that we waited and are able now to include it here as a "Cultureworks" feature with Mehta's critical contextualization. Goswami's story viscerally if obliquely narrates the linked together violations women suffer—incest, rape, assault, invasion, colonization, death—at the hands of "militarized and domestic patriarchies in the region" that Mehta discusses in her essay.
Moving westward across India's northern border, our "Media Matters" feature considers the ongoing conflict in Kashmir. Sreyoshi Sarkar's "Engendering Protest and Rethinking 'Azadi' in Kashmir in Vishal Bhardwaj's Haidar" examines Haidar, a Kashmiri cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Haidar highlights "women's lived experiences in the conflict zone at [the] intersections of everyday and extraordinary violence" engendered by the Indian occupation of Kashmir. Sarkar argues that the azadi—a particularly Kashimiri notion of freedom and selfdetermination—articulated as part of a nationalist liberation project is also pursued by the nation's women as feminist contestation to patriarchal nationalism. The film documents the violence women experience at every level—geopolitical (military), categorical (gendered), and interpersonal (relational)—and through its protagonists, Ghazala and Arshia, lays claim to "nonviolence, equality, and justice" for all.
Shifting our focus to South India, Rumya S. Putcha's essay, "The Mythical Courtesan: Womanhood and Dance in Transnational India," traces how "the mythical courtesan was called into existence through film cultures in the early twentieth century to provide a counterpoint against which a modern and national Brahmanical womanhood could be articulated," arguing that the figure of the courtesan works as a powerful nationalist trope that makes visible the "affective triangle between three mutually constituting emotional points of womanhood: pleasure, shame, and disgust" within Indian modernity. Putcha, who is a self-described nonresident Indian (NRI) dancer-ethnographer of classical dance, coins the term sexual praxis as a device for capturing the mythical courtesan's sexed-gendered body as simultaneously field-site and habitus. Putcha does this to explicate the multiple worlds implicated in the courtesan's performance and her incorporation into Indian ontologies and epistemologies experienced both by particular subjects—such as Putcha—and the national body politic. In doing so, Putcha reminds us that the putatively hegemonic center of (Indian) nationalism always already relies on a mythical woman figured as its internal other.
Similarly, our second "Media Matters" feature, "Ethical Reckoning: Human Rights and National Cinema in Bangladesh" by Elora Halim Chowdhury argues that the experiences of birangonas—rape survivors considered iconographic Bangladeshi victims of the Pakistani army—paradoxically are both narratively centered and politically erased as flesh-and-blood subjects in nationalist narratives. By contrast, Chowdhury says that Muktijuddoh films ethically insist on the need to acknowledge, address, and avow the genocidal violence enacted by the Pakistani army against Bangladeshis seeking independence in 1971 and, in particular, the humanity of the women who experienced the violence in their flesh and blood. Further, contemporary films such as 2011's Guerilla that attempt to "explore the possibility of healing and reconciliation within the realm of intimate and interpersonal relations" should be considered part of broader social and political justice movements seeking redress for survivors of the 1971 crisis.
Picking up the theme of redress and solidarity, our "In the Archives" feature for this issue is the "AAPSO Presidium Committee Nairobi Preparations Draft" document. As Destiny Wiley-Yancy explains, a meeting in Cairo was held in January 1985 in advance of the United Nations General Assembly of the UN Decade on Women, which in turn purported to uplift the status of women throughout the world. Given the ongoing fact of Western colonialism and imperialism, as well as the intraregional violence discussed by this issue's authors, the AAPSO refused the notion that "women" were monolithic, opting instead to center the struggle against the aggressive and bellicose policies of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism, which are simultaneously women's, peace, and security issues.
Shifting from political to poetic solidarity across difference, Sasha A. Khan's "Letter-Poems to Shauki Masi: Diasporic Queer/Trans Desi Muslim Reflections on the Five Pillars of Islam" is at once an intensely indexical missive to a loved one who has passed on as well as a seemingly transparent meditation on the scattered identitarian traces that Shauki Masi left behind, in and through the writer. Moving seamlessly between engagement with cultural studies theories and texts, evocation of the tastes/sounds/smells of their Pakistani homeland, and idiosyncratic storytelling that gives flesh to the conceptual, Khan invites the reader to join them on this journey that is both anchored in "the five pillars of Islam" and allows for the unbound movement central to being a "diasporic queer/trans desi muslim." In Shauki Masi's ability to weave together a coherent, culturally and religiously grounded self while also allowing herself license to contradict that very ground in order to be truly her self, Khan's narrator sees a kindred queer ancestral spirit.
The challenges that accompany the critical task of acknowledging and amplifying suppressed voices—both at home and globally—are also the focus of Min Young Godley's "Feminization of Translation: Gender Politics in the Translation Controversy over Han, Kang's The Vegetarian." Godley recounts the story of the international kerfuffle triggered by the awarding of the Man Booker International Prize to Deborah Smith in 2016 for her English translation of The Vegetarian, a 2007 novel by Korean author Han Kang. Although both the author and the translator shared the prize money, a debate ensued in which Koreans decried both the translation and the fact that the award was given because of it, rather than because of the untranslated original. Godley argues that although the anticolonial nationalist political motivation of these critiques is understandable, they not only overlook but erase the central point of Han's novel—the subjectivity of the woman at the center of the story—and replicate the violence of domination in so doing.
Likewise, Alden Sajor Marte-Wood's memoir, "Filipinx Care, Social Proximity, and Social Distance," offers an invaluable contribution to the 2020 COVID-19 archive. Marte-Wood seamlessly weaves together his and his young family's first days during the March stay-at-home order due to the pandemic in Houston, where he is an assistant professor at Rice University. Now reliant on his stay-at-home clinical psychologist wife's unpaid maternal labor, he meditates on his extended family's work as part of the larger transnational diaspora of Filipina "waged reproductive laborers"—nurses and elder care providers—recently deemed essential workers but neither protected nor compensated accordingly, in addition to the commercial content moderators in the Philippines who do the dirty work of "sitting for hours in the digital muck of humanity" that is more critical than ever given our increased reliance on the virtual world for our work, social, and familial lives. That most of these workers are women whose labors—whether paid or unpaid—are made invisible, devalued, and often dangerous perhaps goes without saying. Yet, Marte-Wood reminds us—as he does himself—that it must not only be said, but centered and accounted for.
Recentering women's voices, we close the issue with our inaugural Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award Winners (2020). As we note on our website, in addition to being an internationally recognized poet and memoirist, Elizabeth Alexander was a faculty member at Smith, a founding member of the Poetry Center, and a member of the first Meridians Editorial Advisory Board. When we decided to create an award for our creative writers as a complement to our Paula J. Giddings Award for the best essay in every volume, doing so in Alexander's honor made perfect sense. As you will see from the superlatives page, our first two winners—Nancy Kang, for her poem "In Blocks of Light, She Calls Back" and Adrienne Perry, for her short story "Lamaze"—are both women of color scholars whose work was selected double-blind from a very competitive pool of submissions by our newly established Creative Writing Advisory Board. Coincidentally, both of these texts tell powerful stories about "sisters who would save the world and each other" from the ever-present threat of violence, both inside and outside our families, homes, communities, attending to one another's labors, making it back to one another alive.
Finally, although it will be long past by the time this issue is in your hands, it seems especially apropos to note that Diwali—"a holiday that celebrates the triumph of good over evil, light over darkness and the defeat of ignorance through knowledge"—is being celebrated as we await certification of our new president and vice president's election (Chabria 2020). I first learned of Diwali when I was an undergraduate at Smith and several of my closest friends and sisters-in-the-struggle, including Natasha Jafri and Asha Kilaru, who were a Pakistani Muslim international student and an NRI Hindu, respectively, were happily anticipating. Natasha and Asha both belonged to the EKTA, the South Asian students' group that organized a Diwali celebration. The EKTA's Diwali posters featured a swastika, which "has existed for 5,000 years in Asia as a symbol of good fortune" and is "a very common religious symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism" (Shah 2016). Not surprisingly, the posters immediately elicited an outraged response from those familiar only with the swastika as a Nazi symbol, which is to say, the majority of Smith College's predominantly White, Judeo-Christian campus community.
As was our way, the multicultural student group leaders organized a public event held at the Mwangi Center at which EKTA students who celebrated Diwali explained the differences between the Nazi's perversion of the swastika into a symbol of death and destruction, and its original and ongoing meaning as a symbol of hope and joy. They explained that Hitler's swastika is literally turned around, a purposeful reorientation that mirrored his racist resignification and argued that banning their Diwali symbol would be tantamount to accepting Hitler's perverse imposition. Jewish students—and indeed, the majority of those in attendance who weren't Diwali celebrants—argued vehemently that despite this new historical and cultural information, and the logic of EKTA's argument notwithstanding, the swastika was irrecuperable and irredeemable because it continues to do the viscerally provocative work of terrorizing Jewish people that Hitler intended it to do. Moved by their classmate's perspectives, EKTA agreed to take flyers down and advised the students who would have otherwise decorated their doors with the Diwali swastika not to do so, and instead to celebrate Diwali with rangolis and light diyas—or some version of these. In turn, the Jewish and other students acknowledged the empathetic accommodation. In other words, rather than create a wall between our at times incommensurate experiences, cultures, and histories, we Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish students endeavored to respect one another's boundaries, work together, and make well-considered sacrifices of some of our dearly held desires for the good of all. Simply stated, we strove to coexist in solidarity with one another and allowed ourselves the messiness and discomfort that getting there entailed. In honor of that spirit, I take the liberty here to say "Diwali Mubarak!" to my South Asian sisters. May we all bask in the light of truth and joy as we labor to banish the ever-encroaching shadows.
I write this in mid-November of 2020, after one of the most contentious presidential elections in my lifetime. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many states began allowing and even encouraging the use of absentee voting/mail-in ballots to reduce the risk of infection during in-person voting. Although he himself votes by mail, the outgoing president began a systematic and sustained campaign of maligning the legality and validity of absentee ballots, claiming without evidence that they were more vulnerable to "illegal voting" and fraud, and encouraging his constituent base to vote in person on election day. He also undermined the United States Postal Service's capacity to deliver absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots themselves by engineering the naming of one of his mega donors, Louis Dejoy, as Postmaster General. Dejoy immediately set about instituting policies that included removing mailboxes, "cuts to overtime … limiting mail delivery trips … curtailed postal hours … [and] 'mail left behind'" during a moment of heightened reliance on the postal system (Vogel et al. 2020). An angry public response decrying these changes and the seeming politicization of the postal service forced Dejoy to suspend the changes, although the removed mailboxes—many from low-income urban and rural communities—have yet to be replaced. At the same time, US intelligence agencies issued public reports alerting the public that hostile actors from Russia, China, and Iran among others were attempting to hack voting systems and were engaging in racially and politically divisive social media campaigns to undermine confidence in the mainstream media, journalists, and our election system. Followers of QAnon, this generation's most bizarre right-wing conspiracy theory monger, moved from the fringes of the World Wide Web to the campaign trail and mainstream media (Steck, McDermott, and Hickey 2020). Meanwhile, the president's re-election campaign filed dozens of lawsuits, many summarily dismissed by the courts, attempting to prevent or halt ballot counting in hotly contested swing states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada, often using contradictory logics to press whatever case would benefit their cause of preventing the counting of votes cast for Democratic candidates, many of these by people of color (Parks 2020).
Despite all of this, after a history-making election "season" that ran for several months rather than the conventional single day in November, and five days of nonstop mail-in ballot counting, on Saturday, November 7, 2020, just before noon EST, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were declared by the Associated Press to have surpassed the requisite 270 electoral college votes needed to win the election. Sadly, although unsurprising, the loser refused to concede the election and instead ramped up his false claims of electoral fraud, illegal voting, and of a multistate conspiracy to "steal" the election from him. As of this writing, the General Services Administration director who was appointed by the current president has refused to "ascertain" President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris as the winners, effectively preventing them from accessing the resources they will need to install their transition team in preparation for their January inauguration (Collins 2020). More ominously, the current president fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper via Twitter, as well as other top Pentagon officials, replacing them with his loyalists while he continues to stoke his base's anger at the election's outcome (Myers 2020). Given that the Electoral College didn't meet to vote until December 14, 2020, it was one more month before the election results were certified (Reichmann 2020). This, of course, also hampered the Biden-Harris administration's ability to operationalize their COVID-19 response, one of their stated priorities.
In the meantime, COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on thousands of people every day, and the rate of infection and death is increasing as we enter the winter season in the United States. As of this writing, 579,000 people have died, and 32.6 million have been infected, a large number of these survivors facing the prospect of long-term aftereffects (CDC 2020; Gavin 2020). Even the good news that vaccines with over 90 percent effectiveness have been developed by Pfizer and Moderna must be tempered by the fact that the previous administration did not developed a federal distribution system to get the vaccine delivered efficiently and to priority populations (D'Urbino 2020).
At the same time, despite all of this somber news and distressing state of affairs, the fact remains that Kamala Harris, a woman of color, specifically a Black-identified woman of Jamaican and Indian descent, broke through the nearly 250-year-old barrier to women occupying the highest office of the land. Vice President Kamala Harris made history, and her victory was celebrated around the world, from her father's Jamaican homeland to her mother's Tamil Nadu village of Painganadu, to the streets of villages, towns, and cities across the United States (Associated Press 2020; Loop News 2020). Over the course of weeks following the Biden-Harris win, we saw countless social media postings by girls and women of color proclaiming their joy over the fact that a woman "who looks like [them]" would become vice president of the United States. Even as we acknowledge the undeniable limits of representation politics, MERIDIANS also recognizes the psychically and spiritualy significant importance of this win for women, especially women of color, Black women, and South Asian women. Serendipitously, many of the features in this issue focus on South Asian countries, including Harris's heritage country of India, and our cover features the art of Upasana Agarwal, an artist and illustrator based in Kolkata. As Upasana explains in her artist's statement, Shazia's Dream honors her friend's ability to experience playfully "her various identities in the paradoxical South Asian space," and in so doing, they transform the wall from a quintessential aspect of a "carceral landscape" to a surmountable—perhaps even a border crossing—vantage point that embraces the "mosaic of colors" that comprise the wall (Mehta, 78).
The conflicts, violence, and spirited will to survive ever present in the "paradoxical South Asian space" is a thematic thread running through all of this issue's features. Whether "contesting," "reckoning" with, or "rethinking" the violence enacted against ethno-racial, religious, sexual, and gender minorities, especially in South and East Asia and their diasporas, all of our authors take up the work of narrating these complicated histories and their representations. By way of illustrating exactly how diverse yet coherent this terrain is, we open the issue with Ramya Sreenivasan's incredibly comprehensive and thoughtful "Diversity of Women's Studies and Women's Histories: Reflections from South Asia." This masterful "State of the Field" article considers six recently published books from four different fields that cover a broad range of topics across the vast geographic territories of South Asia and its diaspora in the United States and the United Kingdom. As Sreenivasan deftly narrates, from marriage and family to faith and religion, from political representation to the presentation of self, these texts make evident the ever-present fact of religious and ethnic heterogeneity despite nationalism's ideological insistence on homogeneity as a necessary precondition for unity and development.
Shifting from scholarship to creative writing, Sri Craven's short story "Clean and Green" neatly narrates the hidden yet crucial work done by women, often behind the scenes, to sustain the tidy fiction that is nationalism and neoliberal "progress." The protagonist, Rani, is a mother and wife who works nights as a custodian cleaning the cubicles of Indian IT workers. Most days Rani also works in the tailoring shop of a "young Muslim lady" who, although a religious minority, is better educated, lighter skinned, and financially better off than Rani. Although "Rani sees the smiling face of Modi telling India to clean up! Pick up! Get up! Up! up! up! That's where we are all going," the facts of her life as a Dalit woman/mother/wife make clear that only a very few will go "up." Instead, as happens with the two scooter-riding men whose death by lorry becomes no more than a bump on the road of Rani's commute home, the most vulnerable disappear or die with little acknowledgment. Indeed, under Modi's ultra-nationalist rule, anti-Muslim and anti-Dalit violence have increased dramatically, this pattern of ethnic cleansing violence sullying India's "clean and green" (self)image and belying its claims to democratizing modernity (DeSouza 2017).
Moving from fictional truth telling to analyzing the power of women's testimonial poetry, Brinda J. Mehta's essay, "Contesting Militarized Violence in 'Northeast India': Women Poets against Conflict," considers how women poets produce an archive of the gendered harms caused by India's neocolonial governance of eight "sister" states in the subcontinent's northeastern region. Trauma, sorrow, and eco-devastation are left in the wake of internal neocolonialism. Mehta argues that women poets such as Temsüla Ao, Monalisa Changkija, Mamang Dai, and others "have played a leading role in exposing and denouncing this violence." Uddipana Goswami is a prolific Indian sociologist whose work on Northeast India Mehta draws on; she is also a well-published creative writer. Coincidentally, last year we received and accepted Goswami's short story "Body, Bones, and All" and were awaiting the right issue in which to feature it; we are particularly pleased that we waited and are able now to include it here as a "Cultureworks" feature with Mehta's critical contextualization. Goswami's story viscerally if obliquely narrates the linked together violations women suffer—incest, rape, assault, invasion, colonization, death—at the hands of "militarized and domestic patriarchies in the region" that Mehta discusses in her essay.
Moving westward across India's northern border, our "Media Matters" feature considers the ongoing conflict in Kashmir. Sreyoshi Sarkar's "Engendering Protest and Rethinking 'Azadi' in Kashmir in Vishal Bhardwaj's Haidar" examines Haidar, a Kashmiri cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Haidar highlights "women's lived experiences in the conflict zone at [the] intersections of everyday and extraordinary violence" engendered by the Indian occupation of Kashmir. Sarkar argues that the azadi—a particularly Kashimiri notion of freedom and selfdetermination—articulated as part of a nationalist liberation project is also pursued by the nation's women as feminist contestation to patriarchal nationalism. The film documents the violence women experience at every level—geopolitical (military), categorical (gendered), and interpersonal (relational)—and through its protagonists, Ghazala and Arshia, lays claim to "nonviolence, equality, and justice" for all.
Shifting our focus to South India, Rumya S. Putcha's essay, "The Mythical Courtesan: Womanhood and Dance in Transnational India," traces how "the mythical courtesan was called into existence through film cultures in the early twentieth century to provide a counterpoint against which a modern and national Brahmanical womanhood could be articulated," arguing that the figure of the courtesan works as a powerful nationalist trope that makes visible the "affective triangle between three mutually constituting emotional points of womanhood: pleasure, shame, and disgust" within Indian modernity. Putcha, who is a self-described nonresident Indian (NRI) dancer-ethnographer of classical dance, coins the term sexual praxis as a device for capturing the mythical courtesan's sexed-gendered body as simultaneously field-site and habitus. Putcha does this to explicate the multiple worlds implicated in the courtesan's performance and her incorporation into Indian ontologies and epistemologies experienced both by particular subjects—such as Putcha—and the national body politic. In doing so, Putcha reminds us that the putatively hegemonic center of (Indian) nationalism always already relies on a mythical woman figured as its internal other.
Similarly, our second "Media Matters" feature, "Ethical Reckoning: Human Rights and National Cinema in Bangladesh" by Elora Halim Chowdhury argues that the experiences of birangonas—rape survivors considered iconographic Bangladeshi victims of the Pakistani army—paradoxically are both narratively centered and politically erased as flesh-and-blood subjects in nationalist narratives. By contrast, Chowdhury says that Muktijuddoh films ethically insist on the need to acknowledge, address, and avow the genocidal violence enacted by the Pakistani army against Bangladeshis seeking independence in 1971 and, in particular, the humanity of the women who experienced the violence in their flesh and blood. Further, contemporary films such as 2011's Guerilla that attempt to "explore the possibility of healing and reconciliation within the realm of intimate and interpersonal relations" should be considered part of broader social and political justice movements seeking redress for survivors of the 1971 crisis.
Picking up the theme of redress and solidarity, our "In the Archives" feature for this issue is the "AAPSO Presidium Committee Nairobi Preparations Draft" document. As Destiny Wiley-Yancy explains, a meeting in Cairo was held in January 1985 in advance of the United Nations General Assembly of the UN Decade on Women, which in turn purported to uplift the status of women throughout the world. Given the ongoing fact of Western colonialism and imperialism, as well as the intraregional violence discussed by this issue's authors, the AAPSO refused the notion that "women" were monolithic, opting instead to center the struggle against the aggressive and bellicose policies of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism, which are simultaneously women's, peace, and security issues.
Shifting from political to poetic solidarity across difference, Sasha A. Khan's "Letter-Poems to Shauki Masi: Diasporic Queer/Trans Desi Muslim Reflections on the Five Pillars of Islam" is at once an intensely indexical missive to a loved one who has passed on as well as a seemingly transparent meditation on the scattered identitarian traces that Shauki Masi left behind, in and through the writer. Moving seamlessly between engagement with cultural studies theories and texts, evocation of the tastes/sounds/smells of their Pakistani homeland, and idiosyncratic storytelling that gives flesh to the conceptual, Khan invites the reader to join them on this journey that is both anchored in "the five pillars of Islam" and allows for the unbound movement central to being a "diasporic queer/trans desi muslim." In Shauki Masi's ability to weave together a coherent, culturally and religiously grounded self while also allowing herself license to contradict that very ground in order to be truly her self, Khan's narrator sees a kindred queer ancestral spirit.
The challenges that accompany the critical task of acknowledging and amplifying suppressed voices—both at home and globally—are also the focus of Min Young Godley's "Feminization of Translation: Gender Politics in the Translation Controversy over Han, Kang's The Vegetarian." Godley recounts the story of the international kerfuffle triggered by the awarding of the Man Booker International Prize to Deborah Smith in 2016 for her English translation of The Vegetarian, a 2007 novel by Korean author Han Kang. Although both the author and the translator shared the prize money, a debate ensued in which Koreans decried both the translation and the fact that the award was given because of it, rather than because of the untranslated original. Godley argues that although the anticolonial nationalist political motivation of these critiques is understandable, they not only overlook but erase the central point of Han's novel—the subjectivity of the woman at the center of the story—and replicate the violence of domination in so doing.
Likewise, Alden Sajor Marte-Wood's memoir, "Filipinx Care, Social Proximity, and Social Distance," offers an invaluable contribution to the 2020 COVID-19 archive. Marte-Wood seamlessly weaves together his and his young family's first days during the March stay-at-home order due to the pandemic in Houston, where he is an assistant professor at Rice University. Now reliant on his stay-at-home clinical psychologist wife's unpaid maternal labor, he meditates on his extended family's work as part of the larger transnational diaspora of Filipina "waged reproductive laborers"—nurses and elder care providers—recently deemed essential workers but neither protected nor compensated accordingly, in addition to the commercial content moderators in the Philippines who do the dirty work of "sitting for hours in the digital muck of humanity" that is more critical than ever given our increased reliance on the virtual world for our work, social, and familial lives. That most of these workers are women whose labors—whether paid or unpaid—are made invisible, devalued, and often dangerous perhaps goes without saying. Yet, Marte-Wood reminds us—as he does himself—that it must not only be said, but centered and accounted for.
Recentering women's voices, we close the issue with our inaugural Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award Winners (2020). As we note on our website, in addition to being an internationally recognized poet and memoirist, Elizabeth Alexander was a faculty member at Smith, a founding member of the Poetry Center, and a member of the first Meridians Editorial Advisory Board. When we decided to create an award for our creative writers as a complement to our Paula J. Giddings Award for the best essay in every volume, doing so in Alexander's honor made perfect sense. As you will see from the superlatives page, our first two winners—Nancy Kang, for her poem "In Blocks of Light, She Calls Back" and Adrienne Perry, for her short story "Lamaze"—are both women of color scholars whose work was selected double-blind from a very competitive pool of submissions by our newly established Creative Writing Advisory Board. Coincidentally, both of these texts tell powerful stories about "sisters who would save the world and each other" from the ever-present threat of violence, both inside and outside our families, homes, communities, attending to one another's labors, making it back to one another alive.
Finally, although it will be long past by the time this issue is in your hands, it seems especially apropos to note that Diwali—"a holiday that celebrates the triumph of good over evil, light over darkness and the defeat of ignorance through knowledge"—is being celebrated as we await certification of our new president and vice president's election (Chabria 2020). I first learned of Diwali when I was an undergraduate at Smith and several of my closest friends and sisters-in-the-struggle, including Natasha Jafri and Asha Kilaru, who were a Pakistani Muslim international student and an NRI Hindu, respectively, were happily anticipating. Natasha and Asha both belonged to the EKTA, the South Asian students' group that organized a Diwali celebration. The EKTA's Diwali posters featured a swastika, which "has existed for 5,000 years in Asia as a symbol of good fortune" and is "a very common religious symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism" (Shah 2016). Not surprisingly, the posters immediately elicited an outraged response from those familiar only with the swastika as a Nazi symbol, which is to say, the majority of Smith College's predominantly White, Judeo-Christian campus community.
As was our way, the multicultural student group leaders organized a public event held at the Mwangi Center at which EKTA students who celebrated Diwali explained the differences between the Nazi's perversion of the swastika into a symbol of death and destruction, and its original and ongoing meaning as a symbol of hope and joy. They explained that Hitler's swastika is literally turned around, a purposeful reorientation that mirrored his racist resignification and argued that banning their Diwali symbol would be tantamount to accepting Hitler's perverse imposition. Jewish students—and indeed, the majority of those in attendance who weren't Diwali celebrants—argued vehemently that despite this new historical and cultural information, and the logic of EKTA's argument notwithstanding, the swastika was irrecuperable and irredeemable because it continues to do the viscerally provocative work of terrorizing Jewish people that Hitler intended it to do. Moved by their classmate's perspectives, EKTA agreed to take flyers down and advised the students who would have otherwise decorated their doors with the Diwali swastika not to do so, and instead to celebrate Diwali with rangolis and light diyas—or some version of these. In turn, the Jewish and other students acknowledged the empathetic accommodation. In other words, rather than create a wall between our at times incommensurate experiences, cultures, and histories, we Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish students endeavored to respect one another's boundaries, work together, and make well-considered sacrifices of some of our dearly held desires for the good of all. Simply stated, we strove to coexist in solidarity with one another and allowed ourselves the messiness and discomfort that getting there entailed. In honor of that spirit, I take the liberty here to say "Diwali Mubarak!" to my South Asian sisters. May we all bask in the light of truth and joy as we labor to banish the ever-encroaching shadows.
volume 19 special issue
Speaking Our Peace: Celebrating Twenty Years of Women of Color Feminist Transnational Knowledge Production in Meridians
It strikes me as metaphorically appropriate that 2020 has brought anti-Blackness, systemic racism, nativism, misogyny, sexism, health disparities, class violence, and quotidian police brutality into sharp focus for typically myopic mainstream media and its consumers in the United States. Yet, who could have anticipated the twists and turns that this year would take? In January, we watched a theatrical presidential impeachment trial in the Senate fail to hold a documented liar, racist, and misogynist accountable for his actions. In February, we began hearing "rumors" of a deadly virus spreading rapidly through China and Italy. In March, COVID-19's arrival in the United States was unequivocally confirmed, and suddenly our campuses, schools, workplaces, stores, restaurants, and in-person social worlds began to shut down as "shelter in place" orders were issued and our lives moved online. Millions were furloughed, laid off, and fired, and thousands began to fall sick and die nonetheless. As of this writing, more than one hundred and ninety thousand people have died in the United States, disproportionately the people of color and immigrants who are now recognized (at least rhetorically) as "essential" laborers, live in overcrowded housing, and suffer from systemic health disparities. In April, presidential primaries, congressional, and state election dates and procedures began to be affected by the pandemic, and voting required inordinate courage and perseverance as polling places were closed, voting systems failed, and the threat of contagion was ever present (Washington Post 2020). In May, a White Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd—a Black man who had calmly acquiesced to all the officer's orders during the course of an unwarranted arrest. Chauvin kneeled on Mr. Floyd's neck for nearly ten minutes in broad daylight before dozens of witnesses, including three fellow police officers who failed to intervene and even assisted Chauvin in restraining his victim. Within days, the video of Mr. Floyd's death became the spark that lit the tinderbox that the president and his nationalist supporters have been fearing yet fueling. In June, massive national and international Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality erupted, campaigns to defund the police arose in communities large and small, and Confederate, Columbian, and imperialist monuments came crashing down. Confederate flags were removed from statehouses and NASCAR; Aunt Jemima and the Land O'Lakes Indian princess were forcibly retired; racist sports team mascots and names were finally acknowledged as such; and the stories of other Black people who have been recently murdered with impunity came to the fore.
We learned that twenty-three-year-old massage therapist Elijah McClain died of cardiac arrest in August 2019, after being subjected to a choke hold by Aurora, Colorado, police officers Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt, and Randy Roedema. In October 2019, the story of Fort Worth, Texas, human resources professional, Atatiana Jefferson—who was playing video games with her eight-year-old nephew, whom she was babysitting at the time, when she heard a noise outside and looked out the window only to be shot dead by Officer Aaron Dean—garnered new media coverage. In June 2020, the Georgia vigilantes Travis McMichael and his father Gregory, who shot twenty-five-year-old jogger Ahmad Arbery in February, while their friend William "Roddie" Bryan filmed the murder, were finally charged as a result of protests. The Louisville, Kentucky, police who killed twenty-sixyear-old EMT Breonna Taylor in her home when they rained bullets into her apartment after forcing their way as part of a "no-knock" warrant in the middle of a March night were fired, and protesters continue to pursue justice until they are charged. Nineteen-year-old Black Lives Matter activist Oluwatoyin Salau and seventy-five-year-old AARP volunteer Victoria Sims were found murdered in Florida, and their likely killer, Aaron Glee Jr., was apprehended and charged in June. In Atlanta, the killing of twenty-sevenyear-old restaurant worker Rayshard Brooks by police at a Wendy's parking lot, where he had fallen asleep in the drive-through, triggered further protests and calls for justice in June as well. We add these to the long list of Black victims whose names we say in an incantation of hope and rage, and join the chorus of protests against police brutality, anti-Blackness, White supremacy, and the carceral state.
Between life and death there is the constant anti-Black racism and misogynoirism (Bailey 2010) of everyday life—whether microaggressions or overt harassment, verbal or physical assaults, or institutional and structural racism, the violence is pervasive and commonplace. In addition to the trauma of witnessing and documenting a slow death in broad daylight, Darnella Frazer, the seventeen-year-old Black girl who filmed George Floyd's murder has been subject to racist threats since then. Atlanta police officers violently assaulted twenty-year-old Spelman student Teniyah Pilgrim and twenty-two-year-old Morehouse student Messiah Young by tasing them and dragging them from their car as they were trying to return home after being caught in the protests over the Brooks killing (Green 2020). Likewise, Black people experience the weaponization of White womanhood in everyday life by women who threaten to or actually do call the police on them for the crime of going about their lives (Lang 2020). This pattern was perhaps best exemplified by Amy Cooper's threat to call the NYPD and tell them that Black birdwatcher Christian Cooper was "an African American man threatening [her] life" because his request that she leash her dog in accordance with Central Park rules enraged her. That this occurred on the same weekend that George Floyd was murdered illustrates the continuum of harm caused by the conjoined logics of anti-Blackness, White supremacy, settler-colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchal heteronormative gender norms.
Additionally, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in anti-Asian rhetoric and violence, thanks in large part to the president's racist insistence on attributing the deadly impact of COVID-19 to "the Chinese" rather than to the now undeniably evident inadequacy of our for-profit health-care system (Human Rights Watch 2020). Over fifteen hundred incidents of anti-Asian hate speech, discrimination, and physical attacks in the United States alone were documented by "Stop AAPI Hate" in an April 2020 report (Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council 2020). Anti-Semitic violence in the United States likewise saw a dramatic increase, with the Anti-Defamation League documenting over two thousand assaults, vandalizations, and hate speech acts in 2019 (Schumacher 2020). At the same time, Islamophobia, another cornerstone of the revitalized White nationalist movements stoked by the president, has also increased apace. From the President's "Muslim bans" to mosque vandalizations to physical assaults and murder, persistent violence against Muslims and those mistaken for Muslims has increased exponentially since 2017 (Alsultany 2020; Klaas 2019). These hateful patterns are global, as anti-Asian, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim violence—state-sanctioned and otherwise—has increased everywhere.
In the Americas, Latin American migrants and asylum seekers are being denied their internationally recognized human rights through the current administration's new "Remain in Mexico" policy, which has essentially made Mexico a purgatory zone (Hinojosa 2020). For those who do make it across our increasingly militarized borders, the taking and jailing of their children—thousands of whom continue to languish in over two hundred "detention centers" and dozens of whom have died while in custody—has become normalized. In 2019 alone, eight-year-old Felipe Gómez Alonzo, sixteen-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez, seven-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquín, two-year-old Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez, and one-year-old Mariee Juarez survived the arduous journey from Guatemala to the United States, only to be taken from their mothers and fathers, fall ill, and die while in detention. The trauma of forcible separation from their parents, the abysmal conditions in the centers, and the sexual violence, illness, and death will haunt these children, their families, their people—and us, for we are accountable for our government's actions (Briggs 2020). That many of these migrants are also indigenous people of the Americas who have already survived centuries of Iberian/Ladino/mestizo settler-colonial violence and U.S. imperialist violence in their homelands—violence that triggers their exodus to el norte, where they are then presumptively criminalized—adds to the outrageousness of these detentions (Asad and Hwang 2019; Davies 2019). Hate-mongering and scapegoating are intrinsically part and parcel of nationalism and settler-colonialism.
Yet simultaneously, voices decrying anti-Blackness have recently risen from many unexpected quarters—corporations, universities, the NFL, Facebook, Twitter, retailers, and sundry others—in support of the movement for Black Lives and, supposedly, to the work of dismantling systemic racism more generally. That these historically White-serving institutions are not just latecomers to the struggle but a root source of the problem perhaps goes without saying; one could reasonably respond to their "statements" with cynicism. Still, as with the Revolution of 1776, the War of 1812, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and the late 1960s, it seems that we are once again at a critical juncture in the United States, a moment of reckoning with racism in which we can do the right thing once and for all. At Meridians, we hope that the multiracial, intergenerational, and cross-class protests that erupted this year indicate that we have reached a new tipping point toward accountability in the United States and globally.
Twenty years ago, the founding Smith-Wesleyan editorial group stated unequivocally in the introduction to the journal's first issue that "fundamental to our mission is the awareness that the production of knowledge is political" (Aggarwal et al. 2000: x). Critical optimism, radical hope, and faith in the power of knowledge production from the margins to change the world are central to our political project. We believe that lending our voices to the cacophonous conversations taking place about anti-Blackness and racism more generally has the potential to shift their tenor away from empty platitudes and toward empowering platforms. As Smith College President Ruth Simmons wrote in her foreword to volume 1, number 1, at Meridians, "we believe that issues affecting the lives of women of color must be given greater attention and support and that such support, both public and private, will result in increased economic prosperity, exciting scholarly innovation, and much societal good" (Simmons 2000: vii).
To that end, Meridians has made small but meaningful contributions to growing the pipeline of women of color faculty, to supporting the work of women of color artists and activists, and to expanding the reach of intersectionality into all our fields of labor. We have successfully addressed the conflict between the norms of historically White (male)–serving institutions and the innovative and contestatory nature of women of color feminist scholarship by undertaking a double-blind peer-review process in which, rather than the gatekeepers of old, our reviewers are truly peers-- other women of color feminist scholars with expertise in the fields, debates, and questions we engage with at Meridians. Our peer reviewers know what our authors are talking about, and typically offer constructively rigorous and generative responses. Although their labors are typically latent rather than manifest in the publications that result, we are as proud of our work growing a large community of thoughtful peer reviewers as we are of our authors. In order to preserve the double-blind promise of anonymity, we have not acknowledged our reviewers by name, but I take this opportunity to thank them collectively for their generous service.
Given the entrenched nature of the "publish or perish" tenure norm, in being a venue that recognizes and supports the expertise of both the reviewer and the author of works attending to feminism, race, and trans-nationalism, with the generous assistance of our peer reviewers Meridians has become a notable contributor to the project of changing the "face of the academy." Likewise, since volume 3, Meridians has solicited and published the work of women of color visual artists on our covers and as features, a practice that simultaneously materially supports independent artists and brings joy to our readers. Finally, regardless of the vehicle, Meridians promotes the understanding, development, and expansion of intersectionality as a paradigm and a practice (Crenshaw 1991).
I believe that these contributions are being made manifest in the uprisings taking place all over the United States—on the streets, at the ballot box, in the classroom, on our screens, and at our kitchen tables. Protestors' trenchant refusals to accept subordination anymore is precisely what the contemporary White supremacist patriarchy of the United States has attempted to forestall ever since Reaganism initiated the attacks against the progressive policy initiatives won by the social justice movements of the late 1960s/early 1970s. In the world of higher education, right-wing attacks on academic freedom, faculty governance, and tenure have increased in tandem with the growing number of women, people of color, immigrants, and people of working-class origins who enter into the ranks of faculty and student bodies. We newcomers to the academy have developed and authorized new ways of knowing and being, demanded structural change, and are resourcefully transforming the ivory tower from a citadel of privilege into an accessible community resource. That is, rather than gratefully assimilate into the status quo, Black/Indigenous/people of color and progressives are slowly but surely changing the America that had been so "great" for the White nationalist misogynists to whom the current president appeals to, most recently during his hateful speech at Mt. Rushmore [End Page 6] on July 4, 2020 (Muller 2020). As editor emeritus Myriam Chancy put it in her first introduction for Meridians, it has always been our work "to plant new seeds—of hope, of rage, of insurrection, of peace—that might allow all of us to breathe more fully, to claim our ground" (Chancy 2003). This 20th Anniversary Reader is a sowing of those seeds.
Like seeds, some issues are perennial concerns for women of color feminisms. Nonetheless, deciding what to include in this anniversary reader required a set of principles by which to choose from the hundreds of essays, culture works, activist reports, memoirs, and poems that we have published over the past twenty years. I began the process by gathering impact data such as citation rates, downloads, and readings across multiple sites (Project Muse, e-Duke Journals, Academia, Research Gate, Google Scholar). Drawing from those combined sources, we identified the one hundred texts that appeared time and again on the various lists that result from this first phase.1 Reading through those thousands of pages, I was struck by how rich and broad-ranging our authors' contributions have been, how cacophonous yet symphonic our voices, how steely-eyed yet generous our visions. I would have loved to publish all one hundred. Unfortunately, the reality of budgetary constraints set fixed spending limits and, by extension, a page limit.
Thus, I asked each Editorial Advisory and Creative Writing Advisory Board member to identify their top three favorites from among the one hundred texts in phase one. Although, not surprisingly, there were some idiosyncratic favorites, there was also a helpful degree of consensus about some of the pieces that facilitated developing the second-phase list of fifty texts. Once again, I was so moved by the quality and range of work on that shorter list that I struggled to narrow the list down further. Ultimately, I chose texts that represented all the feature areas we publish—In the Archives, Counterpoints, Culturework, Essays, In the Trenches, Memoirs, Media Matters, Pedagogy, and Poetry—and that, true to the Meridians project's mission, spanned disciplines, demographics, and geographies. Thus, the original 275 pages initially proposed to Duke University Press blossomed into the 559 pages you now hold in your hands. Even so, this represents but a sampling of the innovative and critical knowledge producers that Meridians has offered a platform from which to speak.
We consider this Meridians 20th Anniversary Reader a staple text for educators who undertake social justice pedagogy from kindergarten to graduate school. Beyond the classroom, we hope that this reader becomes a resource to activists laboring in the trenches of social justice globally and the realms of cultural work, from poetry to painting to photography to performance, because empowerment through education is our raison d'être. The authors include internationally renowned U.S.-based scholar activists such as Angela Davis and independent Global South scholars such Sarah Ahmed; established poets such as Nikky Finney and younger poets such as Laurie Ann Guerrero, who after publishing in Meridians, would go on to become San Antonio's Poet Laureate a decade later; senior scholars such as the former president of the Latin American Studies Association, political scientist Sonia Álvarez, and younger scholars such as UC Berkeley lecturer in English Jennifer Cho. As a way of historicizing the journal's leadership, and also because they appeared in the lists generated in phases one and two, I also decided to include works by each of Meridians' editors—Kum-Kum Bhavnani (2001–2003), Myriam Chancy (2003–2004), Paula J. Giddings (2005–2017), and myself (2017–present).
Altogether, the texts in this reader are concerned with uncovering the gendered racialization of embodiment (Candelario 2000; Saraswati 2010); contesting the carceral state (Davis and Shaylor 2001; Palacios 2016); expanding archives and revising history (Giddings 2001; Basu et. al. 2002; May 2014); questioning the adequacy and accuracy of media representation (Bhavnani 2000; Brooks 2008; Deb 2016); memorializing resistance and organizing (Bachetta et. al. 2002; Majaj 2001; Torres 2009; Zook 2003); highlighting artivism (Calvo 2004; Mithlo 2009); documenting activism (Álvarez 2016; Barker 2006; Ferreira and Medeiros 2016; Thobani 2002); theorizing from the margins (Ahmed 2006; Cho 2011; Price 2010; Nash 2013); telling our stories in prose and poetry (Chancy 2011; Finney 2003; Guerrero 2009; Hammad 2002); and, to borrow a phrasing, teaching to transgress (May 2014; Palacios 2016; Rajgopal 2010; Wise Whitehead 2016).2
Meridians authors are largely—though not exclusively—women of color: Black diasporic, South Asian, Middle Eastern and North African, Asian American, Latin@/Latin American/Caribbean, Native American Indian/Indigenous, and multiracial. They are typically feminist interdisciplinarians whose work has helped to transform the traditional borders and boundaries of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, to decolonize ethnic and area studies, to globalize and transnationalize women/gender/sexuality/feminist studies, and to center race as a critical intellectual project and political concern. Thus, I close by dedicating this reader to recently deceased María Lugones (1944–2020), whose life work was to both theorize and materialize resistance against modernity's oppressions.
Lugones's animating questions resonate with the spirit of this 20th Anniversary Reader: "How do we learn about each other? How do we do it without harming each other but with the courage to take up a weaving of the everyday that may reveal deep betrayals? How do we cross without taking over? With whom do we do this work? … How do we practice with each other engaging in dialogue at the colonial difference? How do we know we are doing it?" (Lugones 2010: 756). As our cover art by Samanta Tello, Silenced Voices of Everyday Sheroes, illustrates beautifully, Meridians believes that the answers lie in seeking—and speaking—our peace together. A luta continua.
It strikes me as metaphorically appropriate that 2020 has brought anti-Blackness, systemic racism, nativism, misogyny, sexism, health disparities, class violence, and quotidian police brutality into sharp focus for typically myopic mainstream media and its consumers in the United States. Yet, who could have anticipated the twists and turns that this year would take? In January, we watched a theatrical presidential impeachment trial in the Senate fail to hold a documented liar, racist, and misogynist accountable for his actions. In February, we began hearing "rumors" of a deadly virus spreading rapidly through China and Italy. In March, COVID-19's arrival in the United States was unequivocally confirmed, and suddenly our campuses, schools, workplaces, stores, restaurants, and in-person social worlds began to shut down as "shelter in place" orders were issued and our lives moved online. Millions were furloughed, laid off, and fired, and thousands began to fall sick and die nonetheless. As of this writing, more than one hundred and ninety thousand people have died in the United States, disproportionately the people of color and immigrants who are now recognized (at least rhetorically) as "essential" laborers, live in overcrowded housing, and suffer from systemic health disparities. In April, presidential primaries, congressional, and state election dates and procedures began to be affected by the pandemic, and voting required inordinate courage and perseverance as polling places were closed, voting systems failed, and the threat of contagion was ever present (Washington Post 2020). In May, a White Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd—a Black man who had calmly acquiesced to all the officer's orders during the course of an unwarranted arrest. Chauvin kneeled on Mr. Floyd's neck for nearly ten minutes in broad daylight before dozens of witnesses, including three fellow police officers who failed to intervene and even assisted Chauvin in restraining his victim. Within days, the video of Mr. Floyd's death became the spark that lit the tinderbox that the president and his nationalist supporters have been fearing yet fueling. In June, massive national and international Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality erupted, campaigns to defund the police arose in communities large and small, and Confederate, Columbian, and imperialist monuments came crashing down. Confederate flags were removed from statehouses and NASCAR; Aunt Jemima and the Land O'Lakes Indian princess were forcibly retired; racist sports team mascots and names were finally acknowledged as such; and the stories of other Black people who have been recently murdered with impunity came to the fore.
We learned that twenty-three-year-old massage therapist Elijah McClain died of cardiac arrest in August 2019, after being subjected to a choke hold by Aurora, Colorado, police officers Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt, and Randy Roedema. In October 2019, the story of Fort Worth, Texas, human resources professional, Atatiana Jefferson—who was playing video games with her eight-year-old nephew, whom she was babysitting at the time, when she heard a noise outside and looked out the window only to be shot dead by Officer Aaron Dean—garnered new media coverage. In June 2020, the Georgia vigilantes Travis McMichael and his father Gregory, who shot twenty-five-year-old jogger Ahmad Arbery in February, while their friend William "Roddie" Bryan filmed the murder, were finally charged as a result of protests. The Louisville, Kentucky, police who killed twenty-sixyear-old EMT Breonna Taylor in her home when they rained bullets into her apartment after forcing their way as part of a "no-knock" warrant in the middle of a March night were fired, and protesters continue to pursue justice until they are charged. Nineteen-year-old Black Lives Matter activist Oluwatoyin Salau and seventy-five-year-old AARP volunteer Victoria Sims were found murdered in Florida, and their likely killer, Aaron Glee Jr., was apprehended and charged in June. In Atlanta, the killing of twenty-sevenyear-old restaurant worker Rayshard Brooks by police at a Wendy's parking lot, where he had fallen asleep in the drive-through, triggered further protests and calls for justice in June as well. We add these to the long list of Black victims whose names we say in an incantation of hope and rage, and join the chorus of protests against police brutality, anti-Blackness, White supremacy, and the carceral state.
Between life and death there is the constant anti-Black racism and misogynoirism (Bailey 2010) of everyday life—whether microaggressions or overt harassment, verbal or physical assaults, or institutional and structural racism, the violence is pervasive and commonplace. In addition to the trauma of witnessing and documenting a slow death in broad daylight, Darnella Frazer, the seventeen-year-old Black girl who filmed George Floyd's murder has been subject to racist threats since then. Atlanta police officers violently assaulted twenty-year-old Spelman student Teniyah Pilgrim and twenty-two-year-old Morehouse student Messiah Young by tasing them and dragging them from their car as they were trying to return home after being caught in the protests over the Brooks killing (Green 2020). Likewise, Black people experience the weaponization of White womanhood in everyday life by women who threaten to or actually do call the police on them for the crime of going about their lives (Lang 2020). This pattern was perhaps best exemplified by Amy Cooper's threat to call the NYPD and tell them that Black birdwatcher Christian Cooper was "an African American man threatening [her] life" because his request that she leash her dog in accordance with Central Park rules enraged her. That this occurred on the same weekend that George Floyd was murdered illustrates the continuum of harm caused by the conjoined logics of anti-Blackness, White supremacy, settler-colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchal heteronormative gender norms.
Additionally, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in anti-Asian rhetoric and violence, thanks in large part to the president's racist insistence on attributing the deadly impact of COVID-19 to "the Chinese" rather than to the now undeniably evident inadequacy of our for-profit health-care system (Human Rights Watch 2020). Over fifteen hundred incidents of anti-Asian hate speech, discrimination, and physical attacks in the United States alone were documented by "Stop AAPI Hate" in an April 2020 report (Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council 2020). Anti-Semitic violence in the United States likewise saw a dramatic increase, with the Anti-Defamation League documenting over two thousand assaults, vandalizations, and hate speech acts in 2019 (Schumacher 2020). At the same time, Islamophobia, another cornerstone of the revitalized White nationalist movements stoked by the president, has also increased apace. From the President's "Muslim bans" to mosque vandalizations to physical assaults and murder, persistent violence against Muslims and those mistaken for Muslims has increased exponentially since 2017 (Alsultany 2020; Klaas 2019). These hateful patterns are global, as anti-Asian, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim violence—state-sanctioned and otherwise—has increased everywhere.
In the Americas, Latin American migrants and asylum seekers are being denied their internationally recognized human rights through the current administration's new "Remain in Mexico" policy, which has essentially made Mexico a purgatory zone (Hinojosa 2020). For those who do make it across our increasingly militarized borders, the taking and jailing of their children—thousands of whom continue to languish in over two hundred "detention centers" and dozens of whom have died while in custody—has become normalized. In 2019 alone, eight-year-old Felipe Gómez Alonzo, sixteen-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez, seven-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquín, two-year-old Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez, and one-year-old Mariee Juarez survived the arduous journey from Guatemala to the United States, only to be taken from their mothers and fathers, fall ill, and die while in detention. The trauma of forcible separation from their parents, the abysmal conditions in the centers, and the sexual violence, illness, and death will haunt these children, their families, their people—and us, for we are accountable for our government's actions (Briggs 2020). That many of these migrants are also indigenous people of the Americas who have already survived centuries of Iberian/Ladino/mestizo settler-colonial violence and U.S. imperialist violence in their homelands—violence that triggers their exodus to el norte, where they are then presumptively criminalized—adds to the outrageousness of these detentions (Asad and Hwang 2019; Davies 2019). Hate-mongering and scapegoating are intrinsically part and parcel of nationalism and settler-colonialism.
Yet simultaneously, voices decrying anti-Blackness have recently risen from many unexpected quarters—corporations, universities, the NFL, Facebook, Twitter, retailers, and sundry others—in support of the movement for Black Lives and, supposedly, to the work of dismantling systemic racism more generally. That these historically White-serving institutions are not just latecomers to the struggle but a root source of the problem perhaps goes without saying; one could reasonably respond to their "statements" with cynicism. Still, as with the Revolution of 1776, the War of 1812, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and the late 1960s, it seems that we are once again at a critical juncture in the United States, a moment of reckoning with racism in which we can do the right thing once and for all. At Meridians, we hope that the multiracial, intergenerational, and cross-class protests that erupted this year indicate that we have reached a new tipping point toward accountability in the United States and globally.
Twenty years ago, the founding Smith-Wesleyan editorial group stated unequivocally in the introduction to the journal's first issue that "fundamental to our mission is the awareness that the production of knowledge is political" (Aggarwal et al. 2000: x). Critical optimism, radical hope, and faith in the power of knowledge production from the margins to change the world are central to our political project. We believe that lending our voices to the cacophonous conversations taking place about anti-Blackness and racism more generally has the potential to shift their tenor away from empty platitudes and toward empowering platforms. As Smith College President Ruth Simmons wrote in her foreword to volume 1, number 1, at Meridians, "we believe that issues affecting the lives of women of color must be given greater attention and support and that such support, both public and private, will result in increased economic prosperity, exciting scholarly innovation, and much societal good" (Simmons 2000: vii).
To that end, Meridians has made small but meaningful contributions to growing the pipeline of women of color faculty, to supporting the work of women of color artists and activists, and to expanding the reach of intersectionality into all our fields of labor. We have successfully addressed the conflict between the norms of historically White (male)–serving institutions and the innovative and contestatory nature of women of color feminist scholarship by undertaking a double-blind peer-review process in which, rather than the gatekeepers of old, our reviewers are truly peers-- other women of color feminist scholars with expertise in the fields, debates, and questions we engage with at Meridians. Our peer reviewers know what our authors are talking about, and typically offer constructively rigorous and generative responses. Although their labors are typically latent rather than manifest in the publications that result, we are as proud of our work growing a large community of thoughtful peer reviewers as we are of our authors. In order to preserve the double-blind promise of anonymity, we have not acknowledged our reviewers by name, but I take this opportunity to thank them collectively for their generous service.
Given the entrenched nature of the "publish or perish" tenure norm, in being a venue that recognizes and supports the expertise of both the reviewer and the author of works attending to feminism, race, and trans-nationalism, with the generous assistance of our peer reviewers Meridians has become a notable contributor to the project of changing the "face of the academy." Likewise, since volume 3, Meridians has solicited and published the work of women of color visual artists on our covers and as features, a practice that simultaneously materially supports independent artists and brings joy to our readers. Finally, regardless of the vehicle, Meridians promotes the understanding, development, and expansion of intersectionality as a paradigm and a practice (Crenshaw 1991).
I believe that these contributions are being made manifest in the uprisings taking place all over the United States—on the streets, at the ballot box, in the classroom, on our screens, and at our kitchen tables. Protestors' trenchant refusals to accept subordination anymore is precisely what the contemporary White supremacist patriarchy of the United States has attempted to forestall ever since Reaganism initiated the attacks against the progressive policy initiatives won by the social justice movements of the late 1960s/early 1970s. In the world of higher education, right-wing attacks on academic freedom, faculty governance, and tenure have increased in tandem with the growing number of women, people of color, immigrants, and people of working-class origins who enter into the ranks of faculty and student bodies. We newcomers to the academy have developed and authorized new ways of knowing and being, demanded structural change, and are resourcefully transforming the ivory tower from a citadel of privilege into an accessible community resource. That is, rather than gratefully assimilate into the status quo, Black/Indigenous/people of color and progressives are slowly but surely changing the America that had been so "great" for the White nationalist misogynists to whom the current president appeals to, most recently during his hateful speech at Mt. Rushmore [End Page 6] on July 4, 2020 (Muller 2020). As editor emeritus Myriam Chancy put it in her first introduction for Meridians, it has always been our work "to plant new seeds—of hope, of rage, of insurrection, of peace—that might allow all of us to breathe more fully, to claim our ground" (Chancy 2003). This 20th Anniversary Reader is a sowing of those seeds.
Like seeds, some issues are perennial concerns for women of color feminisms. Nonetheless, deciding what to include in this anniversary reader required a set of principles by which to choose from the hundreds of essays, culture works, activist reports, memoirs, and poems that we have published over the past twenty years. I began the process by gathering impact data such as citation rates, downloads, and readings across multiple sites (Project Muse, e-Duke Journals, Academia, Research Gate, Google Scholar). Drawing from those combined sources, we identified the one hundred texts that appeared time and again on the various lists that result from this first phase.1 Reading through those thousands of pages, I was struck by how rich and broad-ranging our authors' contributions have been, how cacophonous yet symphonic our voices, how steely-eyed yet generous our visions. I would have loved to publish all one hundred. Unfortunately, the reality of budgetary constraints set fixed spending limits and, by extension, a page limit.
Thus, I asked each Editorial Advisory and Creative Writing Advisory Board member to identify their top three favorites from among the one hundred texts in phase one. Although, not surprisingly, there were some idiosyncratic favorites, there was also a helpful degree of consensus about some of the pieces that facilitated developing the second-phase list of fifty texts. Once again, I was so moved by the quality and range of work on that shorter list that I struggled to narrow the list down further. Ultimately, I chose texts that represented all the feature areas we publish—In the Archives, Counterpoints, Culturework, Essays, In the Trenches, Memoirs, Media Matters, Pedagogy, and Poetry—and that, true to the Meridians project's mission, spanned disciplines, demographics, and geographies. Thus, the original 275 pages initially proposed to Duke University Press blossomed into the 559 pages you now hold in your hands. Even so, this represents but a sampling of the innovative and critical knowledge producers that Meridians has offered a platform from which to speak.
We consider this Meridians 20th Anniversary Reader a staple text for educators who undertake social justice pedagogy from kindergarten to graduate school. Beyond the classroom, we hope that this reader becomes a resource to activists laboring in the trenches of social justice globally and the realms of cultural work, from poetry to painting to photography to performance, because empowerment through education is our raison d'être. The authors include internationally renowned U.S.-based scholar activists such as Angela Davis and independent Global South scholars such Sarah Ahmed; established poets such as Nikky Finney and younger poets such as Laurie Ann Guerrero, who after publishing in Meridians, would go on to become San Antonio's Poet Laureate a decade later; senior scholars such as the former president of the Latin American Studies Association, political scientist Sonia Álvarez, and younger scholars such as UC Berkeley lecturer in English Jennifer Cho. As a way of historicizing the journal's leadership, and also because they appeared in the lists generated in phases one and two, I also decided to include works by each of Meridians' editors—Kum-Kum Bhavnani (2001–2003), Myriam Chancy (2003–2004), Paula J. Giddings (2005–2017), and myself (2017–present).
Altogether, the texts in this reader are concerned with uncovering the gendered racialization of embodiment (Candelario 2000; Saraswati 2010); contesting the carceral state (Davis and Shaylor 2001; Palacios 2016); expanding archives and revising history (Giddings 2001; Basu et. al. 2002; May 2014); questioning the adequacy and accuracy of media representation (Bhavnani 2000; Brooks 2008; Deb 2016); memorializing resistance and organizing (Bachetta et. al. 2002; Majaj 2001; Torres 2009; Zook 2003); highlighting artivism (Calvo 2004; Mithlo 2009); documenting activism (Álvarez 2016; Barker 2006; Ferreira and Medeiros 2016; Thobani 2002); theorizing from the margins (Ahmed 2006; Cho 2011; Price 2010; Nash 2013); telling our stories in prose and poetry (Chancy 2011; Finney 2003; Guerrero 2009; Hammad 2002); and, to borrow a phrasing, teaching to transgress (May 2014; Palacios 2016; Rajgopal 2010; Wise Whitehead 2016).2
Meridians authors are largely—though not exclusively—women of color: Black diasporic, South Asian, Middle Eastern and North African, Asian American, Latin@/Latin American/Caribbean, Native American Indian/Indigenous, and multiracial. They are typically feminist interdisciplinarians whose work has helped to transform the traditional borders and boundaries of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, to decolonize ethnic and area studies, to globalize and transnationalize women/gender/sexuality/feminist studies, and to center race as a critical intellectual project and political concern. Thus, I close by dedicating this reader to recently deceased María Lugones (1944–2020), whose life work was to both theorize and materialize resistance against modernity's oppressions.
Lugones's animating questions resonate with the spirit of this 20th Anniversary Reader: "How do we learn about each other? How do we do it without harming each other but with the courage to take up a weaving of the everyday that may reveal deep betrayals? How do we cross without taking over? With whom do we do this work? … How do we practice with each other engaging in dialogue at the colonial difference? How do we know we are doing it?" (Lugones 2010: 756). As our cover art by Samanta Tello, Silenced Voices of Everyday Sheroes, illustrates beautifully, Meridians believes that the answers lie in seeking—and speaking—our peace together. A luta continua.
Volume 19 issue 2
Editor's Introduction
As I began writing this introduction, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the thirty-eighth state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a milestone arriving thirty-eight years after the 1982 deadline for its ratification. Having finally met the two-thirds of the states bar, the ERA could in theory become the twenty-eighth amendment to the United States Constitution (Rankin and Crary 2020). In fact, that is politically unlikely given that the GOP’s current dominance of the Senate and utter unwillingness to sanction their president was made evident when, as I was finishing this introduction, the U.S. Senate acquitted the forty-fifth president of the United States of the impeachment charges brought against him by the House of Representatives (LeBlanc 2020; Spillar 2020). This president is the same man whom more than two dozen women have publicly accused of sexual assault, and who has a long history of bragging about “moving on [women] like a bitch,” “just kiss[ing them],” and “[not] even wait[ing]” for any indication that his desires are reciprocated (Bullock 2016). Moreover, this commander in chief is openly and unabashedly supportive of White nationalist, misogynist, settler colonialist, trans- and homophobic discourses, actors, and policy agendas. He also leads the chorus of global climate change deniers determined to roll back environmental protections in the United States and beyond. Thus, watching contemporaneous media coverage of both the Virginia victory and the president’s acquittal, I had to remind myself that this is just the latest chapter in a long history of often simultaneous progress and regression inherent to the pursuit of social justice in the United States, a fact I have witnessed personally over the course of my fifty-three years.1
When I was a child growing up in the 1970s and a young woman coming of age in the 1980s, it was completely normal for men to act publicly and privately toward, and speak about women as the current president did in the above audio-recorded quote. As Rebecca Solnit recounts about her experiences in a recent Guardian piece, for me too “so much of what shaped and scarred my younger self, and made me a solitary feminist, and then much later one among many, was the unspeakability of violence against women and all the denigration, harassment and silencing that went with it” (Solnit 2020). One of the supposed victories of the women’s liberation and feminist movements during my coming of age and young adulthood was not only stigmatizing the misogynist and sexist attitude, discourse, and behavior exemplified by the president—a victory in and of itself—but also shifting the social and political culture toward (we thought) a shared understanding that these ways of thinking, speaking, and behaving are patently wrong and, moreover, legally punishable. Likewise, among the victories of multiple antiracist/antinativist movements was making denigrating discourse verboten, at least in the public sphere and educational settings. And in fact, my first child, a millennial Latina who turns twenty-four this year, has until recently only ever known a society where she can legally access birth control and safely terminate an unwanted pregnancy; where she can expect equal treatment at school, work, and play; where she can freely assert her erotic autonomy and political rights alike; and where she can—and did—organize to replace her college president, a middle-aged White man who failed to address a public instance of discursive racial violence against a woman of color alumna, with a Latina (specifically, Dominican like us) president (Hardcollis and Bidgood 2015; Corasaniti 2017).
As importantly, my twenty-two-year-old son and his peers were taught at home and in the community at large that they are not inherently entitled to touch or otherwise interfere in women’s bodily autonomy, and that their female peers were not only entitled to every educational and athletic experience and social sphere that boys were, but that these same female classmates routinely bested them when they competed in arenas that had just a generation before been closed off to girls and women. Yet today, each of those supposedly established girls’ and women’s rights and entitlements—and the restraints to patriarchal and rape culture that make these entitlements possible—is under systematic and concerted attack. Likewise, the small but real reduction in White supremacy’s more overt forms of racist, nativist, and xenophobic violence, as well as legal protections won by civil rights and Black/Brown/Red/Yellow Power movements, are being systematically undone. Shockingly, it is the president of the United States who leads the charge to “make America great again” for racists, misogynists, nationalists, homophobes, greedy capitalists, polluters, and sundry others who apparently feel aggrieved by the minimal advances made in the pursuit of environmental justice and social justice for women, people of color, queer folks, religious minorities, and the most vulnerable workers.
Worse yet, the GOP-dominated Senate has aided and abetted the president in manifesting those agendas. From confirming two Supreme Court justices—one of whom was publicly accused of having attempted to rape a high school classmate—and filling nearly one hundred federal judiciary vacancies with radically conservative appointees at the time of this writing (American Bar Association 2020), to abetting over one hundred executive orders that attempt to attack environmental protections, labor rights, and civil and human rights (Association of Federal Government Employees 2020; Bierman and Megerian 2019), to normalizing the forced removal of children from their asylum-seeking parents at the border and housing them in cages (Briggs 2020), our elected officials have put Republican Party interests above the constitutional principles they are sworn to abide by. One could easily lose heart.
Until, that is, we remind ourselves that “we were made for these times,” as post-trauma specialist and poet Clarissa Pinkola Estés extols (Pinkola Estés 2003). That long view is an advantage conferred by fifty-three years of observing the necessarily constant struggle for justice that I did not anticipate when I was a child coming of age in the midst of the many social movements happening all around me—American Indian, antiwar, Black Power, civil rights, environmental, poor people’s, Raza, sexual and women’s liberation, among others—in the 1960s and 1970s. I vividly recall media coverage of racial justice uprisings across the country, and of “women’s liberation” activists such as Angela Davis, Billie Jean King, Bella Abzug, and Gloria Steinem, who tirelessly pursued passage not only of the ERA, but of Title IX and Title VII. I also remember the profound sense of foreboding when Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, somehow understanding even as an eighth grader that this new regime not only did not care about people like me and mine, but wanted to erase whatever small protections we had secured. And indeed, Reagan was elected into the presidency precisely to put into motion the neoliberal agenda that would devastate domestic labor and global south countries alike. Perhaps not surprisingly, two years into Reagan’s first term(1980–84), ERA proponents failed to meet the 1982 deadline for ratification by thirty-eight states. That same year also ushered in the “debt crisis”—one manufactured by the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, which put into place quintessentially neoliberal “austerity measures” that devastated economies throughout the region, buttressed repressive regimes, and triggered increasing emigration to el norte—initiating what would come to be known as “the lost decade” in Latin America.
Coincidentally, 1982 was also the year I celebrated my quinceañera.2 The celebration was a minor miracle since the Aid to Family with Dependent Children and food stamps that my divorced, immigrant Dominican mother relied on were rarely enough to feed, shelter, and clothe our two-person family adequately. Yet, contrary to Reagan’s racist “welfare queen” mythmaking, the resilience and resourcefulness that Mami used to pull off this Latina coming-of-age celebration offered evidence of her boundless work ethic, not its deficiency (Candelario and López 1995; Hancock 2004). In some ways, this was simply the latest chapter in the new life story she began in the fall of 1960 when she became one of just ten thousand exiles who escaped the U.S.-installed and U.S.-supported Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, where she was born. Leaving there as a twenty-two-year-old woman who spoke only Spanish and had no ties to the United States defied all the odds; in that instance and in every other sexist, classist, and racist obstacle she encountered before realizing her aspirations, Mami was determined and unabashed.
Thus, over the course of many months leading up to the big day that spring, Mami gathered the necessary materials and sewed my gown herself, down to the skirt hoop; she slowly purchased and stockpiled the makings of a meal for fifty guests; she searched and searched until she found a venue that would not only be appropriate and affordable, but would let her pay their nominal fee over time; she recruited my aunts to help her cook all the food she had purchased over the course of the week leading up to the big day; together, we made the floral decorations, including our corsages and boutonnieres with flowers she had purchased in bulk, and decorated the hall at the American Legion Post 18 in West New York, New Jersey on the day of the event.
Pulling off my quinceañera, while living in the belly of the beast3 that fed on the harvest of empire, was one of the happiest of many object lessons I received from my mother about the long history of Dominican transnational feminist resistance to patriarchy, racism, and imperialism. Celebrating my quinceañera in an American Legion hall was an especially exemplary lesson because the Legion’s mission is to promote a kind of nationalist patriotism that denies the facts of United States imperialism, and Mami and I were in the United States because of the country’s long history of intervention in the Dominican Republic. To celebrate a Dominican quinceañera in this particular space—despite the shortage of cash, despite a “welfare” system that Reagan and his supporters wanted desperately to be rid of, and that in the meantime prohibited recipients like us from owning televisions and other typical household items deemed too luxurious for welfare recipients, and despite the disparagement and discrimination Mami routinely faced because of her thick Spanish-accented English and her non-White appearance—exemplified my mother’s brand of Dominican feminism. Mami believed we were entitled to the same beauty, joy, celebration, well-being, and opportunities that “typical American” families with two parents, better jobs, single-family homes, savings and inheritances, unaccented English and White(r) skins had a presumptive right to claim. If the U.S. system didn’t allow for it, she would point out how and why the system was wrong, and then work to make it happen one way or another, for us and also for others like us. Moreover, Mami believed that women’s education was the key to making justice for women happen; as she would often put it, saber es poder—knowledge is power.
Two decades later, when I began to research women’s history in the Dominican Republic, I finally realized that rather than being exceptional as I had imagined during my childhood, my mother’s feminism and faith in education and perseverance as the principle vehicle for liberation and freedom were exemplary of a long history of Dominican, Caribbean, and Latin American women’s movements and feminisms. Latin American and Caribbean schoolteachers called themselves feministas at the turn of the nineteenth century, decades before women in the United States would do so,4 and they participated actively in national, international, and transnational campaigns to establish democratic civil society cultures in which women were conciudadanas (co-citizens), or alternatively, envisioned revolutionary societies in which women were vanguard leaders (Miller 1991). This is why feminists in Latin America and the Caribbean have long found U.S. feminists’—particularly but not exclusively White/Anglo feminists’—claims to vanguard and presumptive leadership roles in the hemisphere ludicrous (Candelario, Manley, and Mayes 2016).
Thus, in keeping with that legacy of autochthonous Latin American and Caribbean feminisms and transnational spirit, this issue of Meridians features essays that take up feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist politics and organizing by African American, Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Chicana, and South American diasporic activists, culture workers, and scholars working in a variety of sectors and institutional contexts. The ground we cover ranges from the postbellum southern United States courtroom to mid-twentieth-century Puerto Rican South Bronx housing projects to the twenty-first-century ivory towers of historically White-serving colleges to Cuban feminists organizing for comprehensive legislation addressing gender-based violence. As our two archival selections from the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World and the Committee on International Action of the National Women’s Party make evident, these sites have long been linked by the social networks and organizing efforts of African American, Hispanic Caribbean, Latina, and Latin American feminists.
Leigh-Anne Francis’s essay, “Playing the ‘Lady Sambo’: Poor Black Women’s Legal Strategies in the Post–Civil War South’s Civil Courts,” convincingly argues that Black women plaintiffs routinely used White people’s distorted racist perception against them by behaving in ways that seemingly verified White belief in Black inferiority in order to accomplish goals they could not openly pursue without risk of violence. In the courtroom, Black women hoisted White judges on their own ideological petards by playing to their racist and sexist paternalist sensibilities in order to win favorable judgments against White men with whom the judges shared a commitment to White patriarchal supremacy. Similarly savvy dissemblance is a strategy that Vanessa Rosa’s grandmother, Calixta Rosa (1911–2002), also used in her work as a public housing tenant organizer in Harlem’s appropriately named Ulysses S. Grant Houses. As she details in her testimonio, “Mi casa Is Not su casa: A Research Reflection,” the fraught relationship between light-skinned Calixta and her son Gilbert—”a dark-skinned Puerto Rican boy”—mapped onto the divides between the Spanish Harlem most Puerto Ricans settled in, the Black Harlem the Rosas lived in, and the White city beyond Harlem. Although the bridge called their backs was irreparably stressed by the cost of crossing the divides, Calixta left a proud legacy and archive of activism that together with Gilbert’s legacy of love for the Afro–Puerto Rican Harlem of his childhood is evident in Rosa’s own work as a sociologist of race and urban planning.
Moving from a singular to a collective testimonio, professors Sabrina F. Sembiante, Cristóbal Salinas Jr., J. Andrés Ramírez, Maria D. Vásquez-Colina, and Yamilé Silva argue in their essay, “Different When I Opened My Mouth: Experiences, Reflections, and Perspectives of Faculty Members with Foreign English Accents in Higher Education,” that the borders of Latina/o and other immigrant belonging are marked on the tongue as well as the body. This group of non-Hispanic White and White-presenting Latin American immigrants write about how their “English with an accent” marks them as racially other in the context of historically White campuses in the United States. “Differences between the privilege encountered by the White South African participant and the challenges experienced by the Latino/a faculty members point to societal bias toward faculty members’ origin, ethnicity, and ability by way of their accent” (316). In other words, while any “foreign” accents marks one as Other in the United States, a Spanish accent marks one further as racialized non- or off-White. Moving from the racial politics of language to a poetic code-switching, Shana Bulhan’s poem “a language outside” obliquely bemoans the loss of homeland and consequent “bad grammar” Hindi mother tongue, in a new love’s language.
That things are not as they first seem is also the argument that Laura Halperin makes in her essay, “Not No Rapunzel: The House on Mango Street’s Revised Ever After.” Here, Halperin deploys José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of Latino dissemblance along with “Third World feminist analysis” to make the case that Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street “engages with the fairy-tale genre while challenging its problematic bases, following and undoing the genre’s trajectory” (325). Similarly, Kristie Soares’s essay “Dominican Futurism: The Speculative Use of Negative Aesthetics in the Work of Rita Indiana” argues that Dominican artist Rita Indiana’s performances and novel enact “negative aesthetics [that] offer a way of staying with the pain and unrest of trauma” that is personal, political, and historical (401). Soares puts Indiana’s body of work within both the Dominican literary legacy of pessimism and United States Black diasporic Afrofuturism, both of which consider that the personal body is as much a site of colonial and decolonial struggle as the body politic. Crossing the Mona Canal to Puerto Rico, “The Making of Viequenses: Militarized Colonialism and Reproductive Rights” by Marie Cruz Soto, tells the story of how women from this island off of Puerto Rico’s eastern coast long occupied by the U.S. Navy were forced to travel to the main island in order to give birth. In addition to being dangerous, costly, and inconvenient, these women’s experiences of pregnancy and “travel birthing”—and the activism of women health workers like Afro–Puerto Rican Susana Centeno, in whose honor the island’s first OB-GYN facility was named—offer new insights into the everyday, gendered, classed, and racialized violence of “militarized colonialism” under U.S. rule (360).
Our “In the Trenches” selection for this issue—”Petition for a Comprehensive Law against Gender-Based Violence in Cuba,” translated by Lucía M. Suárez—comes from Cuba, where in November 2019 a group of feminists petitioned the revolutionary government to pass a comprehensive law targeting violence against women. As they explain in their petition, being citizens of a revolutionary state does not protect Cuban women and girls from gender-based violence; indeed, rates of violence against women in Cuba are greater than or on par with those of Chile, Panama, and Peru. Similarly, in his essay “Between Protest and Politics: Black Lives Matter Movement(s) for Black Lives,” Robert J. Patterson argues that the Black Lives Matter movement pursues a much more radical Black liberation project than the agenda of the civil rights movement preferred by Black middle-class and other elites who have become instruments “to enact, enforce, and reinforce an economic order that . . . cement[s] black inequality” (430).
Lastly, our cover art by Los Angeles–based Persian-German artist Shiva Tamara, Get It While You Can, alludes to Caribbean palm trees, whose strength derives from their ability to thrive and survive even regularly devastating hurricane seasons, much as the region’s nations have flourished despite ongoing colonial and imperial depredations. In many ways, the coconut palm is a tree of life in the Caribbean. Coconut palms offer entrepreneurial coconut vendors an independent livelihood; coconut fruit provides rich nourishment and thirst-quenching water, and the tree’s palm fronds are still used to roof informal housing and commercial buildings alike. As with the image, women are often hidden in plain sight in midst of these life-sustaining labors, yet are as central to them as the trunk is to the tree. En ese espiritú, this issue is dedicated to two Afro-Cuban women living in the United States whose life stories exemplify all the connections illustrated in this issue—Marta Formoso (March 22, 1943–February 25, 2020) and her daughter, my childhood best friend who danced with me at my quinceañera, Maritza Rodríguez Formoso. Fuerza mi hermana, que juntas seguimos adelante, cultivando los frutos de los esfuerzos de nuestras madres y bailando hacia el porvenir.
As I began writing this introduction, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the thirty-eighth state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a milestone arriving thirty-eight years after the 1982 deadline for its ratification. Having finally met the two-thirds of the states bar, the ERA could in theory become the twenty-eighth amendment to the United States Constitution (Rankin and Crary 2020). In fact, that is politically unlikely given that the GOP’s current dominance of the Senate and utter unwillingness to sanction their president was made evident when, as I was finishing this introduction, the U.S. Senate acquitted the forty-fifth president of the United States of the impeachment charges brought against him by the House of Representatives (LeBlanc 2020; Spillar 2020). This president is the same man whom more than two dozen women have publicly accused of sexual assault, and who has a long history of bragging about “moving on [women] like a bitch,” “just kiss[ing them],” and “[not] even wait[ing]” for any indication that his desires are reciprocated (Bullock 2016). Moreover, this commander in chief is openly and unabashedly supportive of White nationalist, misogynist, settler colonialist, trans- and homophobic discourses, actors, and policy agendas. He also leads the chorus of global climate change deniers determined to roll back environmental protections in the United States and beyond. Thus, watching contemporaneous media coverage of both the Virginia victory and the president’s acquittal, I had to remind myself that this is just the latest chapter in a long history of often simultaneous progress and regression inherent to the pursuit of social justice in the United States, a fact I have witnessed personally over the course of my fifty-three years.1
When I was a child growing up in the 1970s and a young woman coming of age in the 1980s, it was completely normal for men to act publicly and privately toward, and speak about women as the current president did in the above audio-recorded quote. As Rebecca Solnit recounts about her experiences in a recent Guardian piece, for me too “so much of what shaped and scarred my younger self, and made me a solitary feminist, and then much later one among many, was the unspeakability of violence against women and all the denigration, harassment and silencing that went with it” (Solnit 2020). One of the supposed victories of the women’s liberation and feminist movements during my coming of age and young adulthood was not only stigmatizing the misogynist and sexist attitude, discourse, and behavior exemplified by the president—a victory in and of itself—but also shifting the social and political culture toward (we thought) a shared understanding that these ways of thinking, speaking, and behaving are patently wrong and, moreover, legally punishable. Likewise, among the victories of multiple antiracist/antinativist movements was making denigrating discourse verboten, at least in the public sphere and educational settings. And in fact, my first child, a millennial Latina who turns twenty-four this year, has until recently only ever known a society where she can legally access birth control and safely terminate an unwanted pregnancy; where she can expect equal treatment at school, work, and play; where she can freely assert her erotic autonomy and political rights alike; and where she can—and did—organize to replace her college president, a middle-aged White man who failed to address a public instance of discursive racial violence against a woman of color alumna, with a Latina (specifically, Dominican like us) president (Hardcollis and Bidgood 2015; Corasaniti 2017).
As importantly, my twenty-two-year-old son and his peers were taught at home and in the community at large that they are not inherently entitled to touch or otherwise interfere in women’s bodily autonomy, and that their female peers were not only entitled to every educational and athletic experience and social sphere that boys were, but that these same female classmates routinely bested them when they competed in arenas that had just a generation before been closed off to girls and women. Yet today, each of those supposedly established girls’ and women’s rights and entitlements—and the restraints to patriarchal and rape culture that make these entitlements possible—is under systematic and concerted attack. Likewise, the small but real reduction in White supremacy’s more overt forms of racist, nativist, and xenophobic violence, as well as legal protections won by civil rights and Black/Brown/Red/Yellow Power movements, are being systematically undone. Shockingly, it is the president of the United States who leads the charge to “make America great again” for racists, misogynists, nationalists, homophobes, greedy capitalists, polluters, and sundry others who apparently feel aggrieved by the minimal advances made in the pursuit of environmental justice and social justice for women, people of color, queer folks, religious minorities, and the most vulnerable workers.
Worse yet, the GOP-dominated Senate has aided and abetted the president in manifesting those agendas. From confirming two Supreme Court justices—one of whom was publicly accused of having attempted to rape a high school classmate—and filling nearly one hundred federal judiciary vacancies with radically conservative appointees at the time of this writing (American Bar Association 2020), to abetting over one hundred executive orders that attempt to attack environmental protections, labor rights, and civil and human rights (Association of Federal Government Employees 2020; Bierman and Megerian 2019), to normalizing the forced removal of children from their asylum-seeking parents at the border and housing them in cages (Briggs 2020), our elected officials have put Republican Party interests above the constitutional principles they are sworn to abide by. One could easily lose heart.
Until, that is, we remind ourselves that “we were made for these times,” as post-trauma specialist and poet Clarissa Pinkola Estés extols (Pinkola Estés 2003). That long view is an advantage conferred by fifty-three years of observing the necessarily constant struggle for justice that I did not anticipate when I was a child coming of age in the midst of the many social movements happening all around me—American Indian, antiwar, Black Power, civil rights, environmental, poor people’s, Raza, sexual and women’s liberation, among others—in the 1960s and 1970s. I vividly recall media coverage of racial justice uprisings across the country, and of “women’s liberation” activists such as Angela Davis, Billie Jean King, Bella Abzug, and Gloria Steinem, who tirelessly pursued passage not only of the ERA, but of Title IX and Title VII. I also remember the profound sense of foreboding when Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, somehow understanding even as an eighth grader that this new regime not only did not care about people like me and mine, but wanted to erase whatever small protections we had secured. And indeed, Reagan was elected into the presidency precisely to put into motion the neoliberal agenda that would devastate domestic labor and global south countries alike. Perhaps not surprisingly, two years into Reagan’s first term(1980–84), ERA proponents failed to meet the 1982 deadline for ratification by thirty-eight states. That same year also ushered in the “debt crisis”—one manufactured by the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, which put into place quintessentially neoliberal “austerity measures” that devastated economies throughout the region, buttressed repressive regimes, and triggered increasing emigration to el norte—initiating what would come to be known as “the lost decade” in Latin America.
Coincidentally, 1982 was also the year I celebrated my quinceañera.2 The celebration was a minor miracle since the Aid to Family with Dependent Children and food stamps that my divorced, immigrant Dominican mother relied on were rarely enough to feed, shelter, and clothe our two-person family adequately. Yet, contrary to Reagan’s racist “welfare queen” mythmaking, the resilience and resourcefulness that Mami used to pull off this Latina coming-of-age celebration offered evidence of her boundless work ethic, not its deficiency (Candelario and López 1995; Hancock 2004). In some ways, this was simply the latest chapter in the new life story she began in the fall of 1960 when she became one of just ten thousand exiles who escaped the U.S.-installed and U.S.-supported Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, where she was born. Leaving there as a twenty-two-year-old woman who spoke only Spanish and had no ties to the United States defied all the odds; in that instance and in every other sexist, classist, and racist obstacle she encountered before realizing her aspirations, Mami was determined and unabashed.
Thus, over the course of many months leading up to the big day that spring, Mami gathered the necessary materials and sewed my gown herself, down to the skirt hoop; she slowly purchased and stockpiled the makings of a meal for fifty guests; she searched and searched until she found a venue that would not only be appropriate and affordable, but would let her pay their nominal fee over time; she recruited my aunts to help her cook all the food she had purchased over the course of the week leading up to the big day; together, we made the floral decorations, including our corsages and boutonnieres with flowers she had purchased in bulk, and decorated the hall at the American Legion Post 18 in West New York, New Jersey on the day of the event.
Pulling off my quinceañera, while living in the belly of the beast3 that fed on the harvest of empire, was one of the happiest of many object lessons I received from my mother about the long history of Dominican transnational feminist resistance to patriarchy, racism, and imperialism. Celebrating my quinceañera in an American Legion hall was an especially exemplary lesson because the Legion’s mission is to promote a kind of nationalist patriotism that denies the facts of United States imperialism, and Mami and I were in the United States because of the country’s long history of intervention in the Dominican Republic. To celebrate a Dominican quinceañera in this particular space—despite the shortage of cash, despite a “welfare” system that Reagan and his supporters wanted desperately to be rid of, and that in the meantime prohibited recipients like us from owning televisions and other typical household items deemed too luxurious for welfare recipients, and despite the disparagement and discrimination Mami routinely faced because of her thick Spanish-accented English and her non-White appearance—exemplified my mother’s brand of Dominican feminism. Mami believed we were entitled to the same beauty, joy, celebration, well-being, and opportunities that “typical American” families with two parents, better jobs, single-family homes, savings and inheritances, unaccented English and White(r) skins had a presumptive right to claim. If the U.S. system didn’t allow for it, she would point out how and why the system was wrong, and then work to make it happen one way or another, for us and also for others like us. Moreover, Mami believed that women’s education was the key to making justice for women happen; as she would often put it, saber es poder—knowledge is power.
Two decades later, when I began to research women’s history in the Dominican Republic, I finally realized that rather than being exceptional as I had imagined during my childhood, my mother’s feminism and faith in education and perseverance as the principle vehicle for liberation and freedom were exemplary of a long history of Dominican, Caribbean, and Latin American women’s movements and feminisms. Latin American and Caribbean schoolteachers called themselves feministas at the turn of the nineteenth century, decades before women in the United States would do so,4 and they participated actively in national, international, and transnational campaigns to establish democratic civil society cultures in which women were conciudadanas (co-citizens), or alternatively, envisioned revolutionary societies in which women were vanguard leaders (Miller 1991). This is why feminists in Latin America and the Caribbean have long found U.S. feminists’—particularly but not exclusively White/Anglo feminists’—claims to vanguard and presumptive leadership roles in the hemisphere ludicrous (Candelario, Manley, and Mayes 2016).
Thus, in keeping with that legacy of autochthonous Latin American and Caribbean feminisms and transnational spirit, this issue of Meridians features essays that take up feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist politics and organizing by African American, Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Chicana, and South American diasporic activists, culture workers, and scholars working in a variety of sectors and institutional contexts. The ground we cover ranges from the postbellum southern United States courtroom to mid-twentieth-century Puerto Rican South Bronx housing projects to the twenty-first-century ivory towers of historically White-serving colleges to Cuban feminists organizing for comprehensive legislation addressing gender-based violence. As our two archival selections from the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World and the Committee on International Action of the National Women’s Party make evident, these sites have long been linked by the social networks and organizing efforts of African American, Hispanic Caribbean, Latina, and Latin American feminists.
Leigh-Anne Francis’s essay, “Playing the ‘Lady Sambo’: Poor Black Women’s Legal Strategies in the Post–Civil War South’s Civil Courts,” convincingly argues that Black women plaintiffs routinely used White people’s distorted racist perception against them by behaving in ways that seemingly verified White belief in Black inferiority in order to accomplish goals they could not openly pursue without risk of violence. In the courtroom, Black women hoisted White judges on their own ideological petards by playing to their racist and sexist paternalist sensibilities in order to win favorable judgments against White men with whom the judges shared a commitment to White patriarchal supremacy. Similarly savvy dissemblance is a strategy that Vanessa Rosa’s grandmother, Calixta Rosa (1911–2002), also used in her work as a public housing tenant organizer in Harlem’s appropriately named Ulysses S. Grant Houses. As she details in her testimonio, “Mi casa Is Not su casa: A Research Reflection,” the fraught relationship between light-skinned Calixta and her son Gilbert—”a dark-skinned Puerto Rican boy”—mapped onto the divides between the Spanish Harlem most Puerto Ricans settled in, the Black Harlem the Rosas lived in, and the White city beyond Harlem. Although the bridge called their backs was irreparably stressed by the cost of crossing the divides, Calixta left a proud legacy and archive of activism that together with Gilbert’s legacy of love for the Afro–Puerto Rican Harlem of his childhood is evident in Rosa’s own work as a sociologist of race and urban planning.
Moving from a singular to a collective testimonio, professors Sabrina F. Sembiante, Cristóbal Salinas Jr., J. Andrés Ramírez, Maria D. Vásquez-Colina, and Yamilé Silva argue in their essay, “Different When I Opened My Mouth: Experiences, Reflections, and Perspectives of Faculty Members with Foreign English Accents in Higher Education,” that the borders of Latina/o and other immigrant belonging are marked on the tongue as well as the body. This group of non-Hispanic White and White-presenting Latin American immigrants write about how their “English with an accent” marks them as racially other in the context of historically White campuses in the United States. “Differences between the privilege encountered by the White South African participant and the challenges experienced by the Latino/a faculty members point to societal bias toward faculty members’ origin, ethnicity, and ability by way of their accent” (316). In other words, while any “foreign” accents marks one as Other in the United States, a Spanish accent marks one further as racialized non- or off-White. Moving from the racial politics of language to a poetic code-switching, Shana Bulhan’s poem “a language outside” obliquely bemoans the loss of homeland and consequent “bad grammar” Hindi mother tongue, in a new love’s language.
That things are not as they first seem is also the argument that Laura Halperin makes in her essay, “Not No Rapunzel: The House on Mango Street’s Revised Ever After.” Here, Halperin deploys José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of Latino dissemblance along with “Third World feminist analysis” to make the case that Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street “engages with the fairy-tale genre while challenging its problematic bases, following and undoing the genre’s trajectory” (325). Similarly, Kristie Soares’s essay “Dominican Futurism: The Speculative Use of Negative Aesthetics in the Work of Rita Indiana” argues that Dominican artist Rita Indiana’s performances and novel enact “negative aesthetics [that] offer a way of staying with the pain and unrest of trauma” that is personal, political, and historical (401). Soares puts Indiana’s body of work within both the Dominican literary legacy of pessimism and United States Black diasporic Afrofuturism, both of which consider that the personal body is as much a site of colonial and decolonial struggle as the body politic. Crossing the Mona Canal to Puerto Rico, “The Making of Viequenses: Militarized Colonialism and Reproductive Rights” by Marie Cruz Soto, tells the story of how women from this island off of Puerto Rico’s eastern coast long occupied by the U.S. Navy were forced to travel to the main island in order to give birth. In addition to being dangerous, costly, and inconvenient, these women’s experiences of pregnancy and “travel birthing”—and the activism of women health workers like Afro–Puerto Rican Susana Centeno, in whose honor the island’s first OB-GYN facility was named—offer new insights into the everyday, gendered, classed, and racialized violence of “militarized colonialism” under U.S. rule (360).
Our “In the Trenches” selection for this issue—”Petition for a Comprehensive Law against Gender-Based Violence in Cuba,” translated by Lucía M. Suárez—comes from Cuba, where in November 2019 a group of feminists petitioned the revolutionary government to pass a comprehensive law targeting violence against women. As they explain in their petition, being citizens of a revolutionary state does not protect Cuban women and girls from gender-based violence; indeed, rates of violence against women in Cuba are greater than or on par with those of Chile, Panama, and Peru. Similarly, in his essay “Between Protest and Politics: Black Lives Matter Movement(s) for Black Lives,” Robert J. Patterson argues that the Black Lives Matter movement pursues a much more radical Black liberation project than the agenda of the civil rights movement preferred by Black middle-class and other elites who have become instruments “to enact, enforce, and reinforce an economic order that . . . cement[s] black inequality” (430).
Lastly, our cover art by Los Angeles–based Persian-German artist Shiva Tamara, Get It While You Can, alludes to Caribbean palm trees, whose strength derives from their ability to thrive and survive even regularly devastating hurricane seasons, much as the region’s nations have flourished despite ongoing colonial and imperial depredations. In many ways, the coconut palm is a tree of life in the Caribbean. Coconut palms offer entrepreneurial coconut vendors an independent livelihood; coconut fruit provides rich nourishment and thirst-quenching water, and the tree’s palm fronds are still used to roof informal housing and commercial buildings alike. As with the image, women are often hidden in plain sight in midst of these life-sustaining labors, yet are as central to them as the trunk is to the tree. En ese espiritú, this issue is dedicated to two Afro-Cuban women living in the United States whose life stories exemplify all the connections illustrated in this issue—Marta Formoso (March 22, 1943–February 25, 2020) and her daughter, my childhood best friend who danced with me at my quinceañera, Maritza Rodríguez Formoso. Fuerza mi hermana, que juntas seguimos adelante, cultivando los frutos de los esfuerzos de nuestras madres y bailando hacia el porvenir.
volume 19 issue 1
Editor's Introduction
This volume's publication coincides with the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which Meridians readers likely know was the culmination of nearly a century of women's organizing for political and civil rights. However, as our cover art "Layers" by Preetika Rajgariah alludes, the "long fetch"1 of this "first wave" of U.S. feminist history is often hidden in plain sight, and the racism within suffragist organizing and in "the waves rubric" deployed by white feminists periodizing the history of their activism "remains hidden from view" (Lipsitz 2007: viii; Hewitt 2010). Yet "historical knowledge reveals that events that we perceive as immediate and proximate have causes and consequences that span great distances" (Lipsitz 2007: viii). Likewise, world-systems analysis reminds us that just as tides rise and recede, "progress is … possible, but so is regression" (Wallerstein 2009: 19). As the selections in this issue illustrate, when the state allocates rights on the basis of a hierarchically organized social order, women and racialized minorities pursuing self-determination must navigate dangerous waters, moving between participating in, complying with, contesting, resisting, and/or undermining their nation's agendas.
Thus, despite its removal of the supposedly final barrier to women's political rights and its appreciable improvement of White women's life chances, the Nineteenth Amendment arguably changed the lives of women of color for the worse due to the White supremacist violence that ensued following its passage. This was so notwithstanding the Fourteenth Amendment's earlier promise of equal treatment under the law without regard to race or national origin which, together with the Nineteenth Amendment, should have ostensibly removed the final legal barrier to all citizen's participation in the formal political system (Dudden 2014; Newman 1999; Sneider 2008; Terborg-Penn 1998). Instead, the facts on the ground varied dramatically for different women based on their place in the racial, settler-colonial, and/or geopolitical order still in place. For example, despite the promises of the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments, it was not until the 1965 Voting Rights Act unequivocally removed legal racial barriers to the franchise that Black women and men alike would continue to be disenfranchised de jure by Jim Crow laws, and de facto by White supremacist racial terrorism that ran the gamut from lynching to sexual violence to mob-led massacres of entire Black communities.
We open this issue, therefore, with Rachel Marie-Crane Williams's "Elegy for Mary Turner." This epic poem is part of a larger performance art piece that Williams debuted online on October 31, 2016, and performed live at Iowa City's Englert Theater in August 2018 with an accompanying dance choreography and exhibit of linoleum block prints—some of which we are pleased to include here. As Williams explains in her blog, The Red Magpie, the performance coincided with the one hundredth anniversary of a historic days-long rampage of white racial violence in Brooks County, Georgia (Bright 2017). During the final days of May 1918, mobs of White men identified, hunted, kidnapped, murdered, and lynched over a dozen Black men with impunity, including Mary Turner's husband, Hayes. When Mary Turner—who was eight months pregnant—publicly protested his lynching, she too was hunted down, viciously tortured, and ultimately murdered, along with her unborn child.2 Most White suffragists were silent about this instance of racist and misogynist terrorism, as they were about the thousands murdered before and after Mary Turner.
In fact, in June of 1919 as White suffragists were celebrating the Senate's passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, Black women such as Ida B. Wells—who had labored ceaselessly for universal suffrage both alongside patriarchal Black activist men and racist White suffragists—were coping with the wake of devastation left by the "Red Summer" of 1919. The Red Summer began with the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas and culminated in nine additional White-led massacres of hundreds of Black men, women, and children by the end of that year. In every case, mobs of White people outraged at Black economic success and political claims-making murdered, raped, tortured, and set fire to anything and anyone in their path with impunity, and at times with the open support and participation of local and federal authorities. Likewise, the following year when White women were marking the Nineteenth Amendment's final ratification by voting in the presidential election of 1920, their Black peers were subjected to a new wave of terror when yet another White mob massacred dozens of Black men and women who had the temerity to exercise their right to vote on Election Day in Ocoee, Florida. This was followed in May 1921 by the utter destruction of the "Black Wall Street" community of Tulsa, Oklahoma, again by White mobs that murdered three hundred Black people and leveled forty square blocks of Black-owned businesses and residences without compunction. In other words, time and again the whiteness of the "universal" franchise was viciously and unequivocally asserted by White men and complicit White women, including suffragists and feminists (Feimster 2011; Giddings 2009; Hunter 1998; Madigan 2003; McWhirter 2011; Ortiz 2010; Woodruff 2019).
The context that saw Mary Turner lynched, an era subsequently considered "the nadir" of American race relations (Logan 1954), must have deeply affected the coming of age experience of a Black woman named Elmira "Toosweet" Moody Davis. Her daughter, iconic civil rights movement activist Anne Moody, wrote a now famous memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi. In this memoir Moody contrasts her life as an empowered Black woman with her mother's life of struggle, fearfulness, and pain, and concludes that the notable differences between them are due to her mother's weakness of character. However, in her essay analyzing the younger Moody's memoir, Tracey Jean Boisseau argues that Toosweet's resignation and Moody's "empowered sense of self ownership" were due less to their respective inherent character traits than to Moody's benefiting from the long fetch of Black organizing and community development that followed the nadir. Thus, the historically new subject-hood that Anne Moody exemplified was a latent byproduct of the segregated yet puissant educational opportunities that allowed "for the rising up of a generation of Black daughters in a celebration of life against a system that often sought their degradation if not their deaths" (36). That is, the "[segregated schools fostered] Black female subject-hood [that] … prompted civil rights activism rather than, as is often imagined, was produced wholly by it" (35).
Contemporaneously, for Latin@s—the majority of whom were structurally positioned as second-class citizens who "belonged to" but were "not a part of the United States"—the nadir meant that they too were often barred from exercising the universal right to vote supposedly also granted to them under the Nineteenth Amendment, or found that their "right" to vote was limited by virtue of their residential territory's status (Burnett and Marshall 2001). For example, the largest Latin@ subgroup, Mexicanheritage Americans,3 were prevented from actualizing their civil and political rights for over one hundred years after "the border crossed them" when the aftermath of the Mexican-American War of 1848 made what had been the northern third of Mexico part of the United States (Acuña 2014).4 Despite being categorized as "white by law" (Haney López 2006), and despite having U.S. citizenship imposed upon them in 1848 under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican Americans were also subject to racial terrorism, from lynching to torture and sexual violence, to white-mob-led destruction of their communities. Indeed, terrorizing Mexican (im)migrants was officially sanctioned, such as during the infamous Matanza of 1915 in which Texas Rangers slaughtered more than three hundred Mexican (im)migrants in the Texas borderlands (Lenthang 2019). Two decades later, during the Great Depression tens of thousands of Mexican Americans were forcibly removed to Mexico despite their birthright entitlement to remain in the United States (Alanis Encisco 2017). Together with everyday racist and nativist practices by Anglo-Americans, this massive "repatriation" and sundry other formal policies in effect made Mexican Americans citizens whose political and civil rights were guaranteed by the Constitution in theory only (Balderrama 2006; Carrigan and Webb 2017; Villanueva 2017).
Similarly, although U.S. citizenship was administratively imposed on Puerto Ricans via the Jones Act of 1917—notably nearly twenty years after the island, together with Guam and the Philippines, was made an unincorporated territory subject to U.S. rule under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1898)—Puerto Rican women on the island were not enfranchised by the Nineteenth Amendment, and did not receive the unqualified and universal right to vote until 1935.5 Moreover, regardless of that new "right" to vote and their U.S. citizenship, to this day, Puerto Ricans on the island do not vote in the presidential election, and do not have elected representatives in Congress (Azize-Vargas 1985; Barceló-Miller 1998).6 At the same time, throughout the twentieth century, Puerto Rican attempts to decolonize their island were met with swift and brutal responses from the United States that ranged from the sweeping arrests of average citizens, to the detention and torture of nationalist independentista leaders such as Pedro Albizu Campos, to the bombing of entire towns, and even to surveillance activities targeting the general population under the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) (Denis 2016; Erman 2018). The consequences of Puerto Ricans'second-class U.S. citizenship—of which "nearly half of Americans" on the U.S. mainland remain unaware (Dropp and Nyhan 2017)—were brought into sharp relief on the centennial of its imposition when Hurricane María devastated the island in 2017 and ultimately caused the death of nearly three thousand residents, largely due to a purposefully lax Federal Emergency Management Administration response (Milken Institute School of Public Health 2018).
The material destruction wrought by Hurricane María in 2017 also made visible the damage already being caused to the island's political economy in the wake of the United States federal government–imposed Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) in 2016. Despite its "promising" acronym, with its imposition of "extreme austerity measures" on an already impoverished population, PROMESA has done more harm than good for the majority of the island's people (Vega-Ramos 2019). Thus, in the context of PROMESA's failure, when the current president of the United States cavalierly tossed paper towels at the Hurricane María survivors who gathered at the Calvary Chapel to greet him during his four-hour visit to the island, he made the United States' callous disregard for Puerto Rican lives viscerally clear (Watson 2017). The long fetch of this disregard is the subject of Laura Briggs's Counterpoint, "Debates in the Field: Debt and Transnational Feminist Analysis." In this piece, Briggs offers a critical intervention that deftly puts the ongoing impact of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico into the broader Caribbean and transnational context. "It also places the current wave of debt and immiseration alongside a history of slavery, with its particular kinds of forced migration—from the depopulation of Africa in wars and raids to slave ships to the coffle that took loved ones sold away—its sexualized and racialized violences" (72).
Similar waves of conflict and collaboration between colonizers and colonized abound across world-systems as patriarchal, white supremacist, settler-colonial, and decolonizing "states all sought to become or to be thought of as nation-states. … [and, in turn,] political 'internationalism' was precisely inter-national and presumed the existence, indeed encouraged the strengthening, of the states as the loci of sovereignty" (Wallerstein 2009: 17). Lauren E. Shoemaker argues here that rather than offering the possibility of transcending these abiding conflicts as other scholars have claimed, Jamaica Kincaid's collection of nonfiction essays, ASmall Place, is a "narrative of irony and anger [that] reveals tourism as belonging to a structure of terror" (89). That structure of terror is buttressed by colonial epistemologies in which "the Caribbean must be a location of forgetting history to be enjoyed by white tourists; A Small Place interrupts this forgetting … [alluding] to the overwhelming poverty that many Antiguans suffer at the hands of not just the local banking system, but the international politics of debt and structural adjustment" (97). What is more, Shoemaker notes, Kincaid is equally critical of Antiguan peoples complicity with colonialism's erasures, writing "… they are governed by corrupt men, … [and] these corrupt men have given their country away to corrupt foreigners" (Kincaid [1988] 2001: 50). Put simply, the nation-state has long been not only an unreliable source of justice—especially for women of color, and Black women in particular—but more often than not, the source of injustice, as well as of oppression, exploitation, exclusion, and violence.
Returning to the U.S. mainland, we can thus trace the long fetch of current Islamophobic and anti-Latin@ federal immigration policy agendas back to anti-Asian policies and practices of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino (im)migrants, for over a century Asian Americans were prevented legally and extralegally from accessing the citizenship, civil, and political rights available "on arrival" to Euro/Anglo-Americans (Guglielmo 2004). For example, during the California Gold Rush (1849), Whites—whether U.S. born or recent arrivals from Europe—subjected Chinese immigrants to assault, lynching, and mob violence. Twenty years later, although Chinese men played a central role in the completion of the Pacific Railroad in 1869, they were once again subjected to extralegal Sinophobic violence that came to be known as the "driving out." In over 150 documented instances, mobs of White men lynched, murdered, tortured, and forced hundreds of Chinese men to flee the communities they had established along the rail lines in the western and midwestern states (Nokes 2006).
This "driving out" was followed by the Page Act of 1875's initiation of origins-based immigrant exclusion policy at a federal level. The Page Act, in turn, set the stage for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was followed by a series of Alien Land laws, and ultimately by Executive Order 9066 in 1942, which authorized the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps—including tens of thousands who were citizens by birth—during World War II. Adding insult to injury, all Japanese American internees were asked to declare their loyalty to the United States and men were made eligible to be drafted into the armed forces of the same country that deprived them and their families of their freedom, property, political, and civil rights. Those who refused to sign loyalty oaths or to serve in the U.S. armed forces—known as "no-no boys" because they answered "no" to two loyalty questions—were jailed in federal penitentiaries (Lee 2016; Lew-Williams 2018; Luibheid 2015; Ngai 2003; Takaki 1998). They rightly refused to abide by the federal government requirement that Japanese Americans prove the loyalty that was presumed inherent to immigrants from Europe—including those from Germany and Italy, with whom the United States was also at war at the time.
Viewed in this light, the U.S. government's Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program initiated post-9/11 illuminates the fact that current "events that seem to appear in the present from out of nowhere in actuality have a long history behind them" (Lipsitz 2007: vii). Azza Basarudin's and Khanum Shaikh's essay in this issue, "The Contours of Speaking Out: Gender, State Security, and Muslim Women's Empowerment," analyzes how the CVE program recruited Muslim American women to act as "anti-terrorist" agents because of their central roles in families and communities. Basarudin and Shiakh argue that the CVE program is part of a broader Islamophobic ideological agenda that presumptively criminalizes U.S. Muslim immigrants, refugees, and citizens alike, and requires them to proactively and repeatedly prove their allegiance to the United States while non-Muslims and their descendants are not similarly presumed traitorous. The CVE program also "reveals the easy co-optability of feminist empowerment discourse by an imperial nation" in that it "empowers" Muslim women to act as agents of a state that subjects their communities, their families, and ultimately themselves to unwarranted surveillance and the racialization of their religious faith (131).
States coopting women's empowerment agendas is evident also in the first of two In the Archives selections in this issue, "Commemoration of Kartini-Day." As the introductory notes by the former Meridians intern Callan Swaim-Fox explain, political regimes that ran the gamut from the Dutch colonial authority to those that subsequently ruled independent Indonesia freely interpreted the arguably feminist ideas and agendas of Raden Adjeng Kartini (1879–1904) so that they better aligned with their respective political agendas, rather than on Kartini's own beliefs. Regardless of whether they were Dutch colonial, nationalist, or internationalist, Indonesia's rulers shared a patriarchal commitment to circumscribing women's activities to domestic and maternal spheres, and accordingly considered Kartini a malleable icon. Moving from one Dutch colonial sphere of influence to another, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan's poem, "Minor Planet 2986," pays homage to Indian performance artivist Mrinalini Sarabhai (1918–2016), in whose honor minor planet 2986 was named by Dutch ex-patriot astronomer/scientist C. J. van Houten. Apparently van Houten visited Ahmedabad, where Sarabhai's performing arts company Darpana was founded in 1949, and was so taken with her performances that he named minor planet 2986 in Sarabhai's honor. Far from being a minor player in her universe, however, Sarabhai was "singlehandedly responsible for taking classical Indian dance beyond the shores of India and making Bharatnatyam a dance form that is revered and respected throughout the world."7 While having a star named in Sarabhai's honor can of course be interpreted in a positive light, one could also argue that colonial paternalism imbued the gesture.
Exploring the paternalism hidden even within ostensibly laudatory projects is central to Alyssa Garcia's essay, "Federada Testimonios on the Ground: Revealing the Gendered Limits in Operationalizing the Cuban Revolution's Campaign against Prostitution." Garcia considers how the Cuban revolutionary state's "gender-based identity politics [were] utilized in ways that would add legitimacy to the state's larger agenda," (156) often at women's expense. In the case of sex workers targeted for reeducation and incorporation into the new socioeconomic order, the revolutionary state developed a multistage policy that involved establishing trust and securing the cooperation of these marginalized women. To that end, members of the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (Cuban Women's Federation)--federadas—were recruited to act as "revolutionary" workers in the anti-prostitution campaigns. As Garcia explains, the federadas were typically women with class and color advantages that they were invested in sustaining in both pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba. Accordingly, while federadas who volunteered in the literacy campaigns undermined their privileged class's patriarchal gender order to a degree when they undertook literacy work with known sex workers, they simultaneously engaged in what sociologists call boundary work in order to sustain their status rank above the sex workers they were educating. In other words, the federadas' "revolutionary" work was imbued with the same state-sanctioned paternalism that sustained detrimental patriarchal rankings of good and bad women.8
A similar dynamic becomes clear in our second In the Archives selection, "The Struggles for Women's Suffrage" by Nayla Saab. As Saab recounts, upon the establishment of the newly independent state in 1943, women in Lebanon organized immediately for political rights, including suffrage, and they did so with the support of conservative and right-wing nationalists who formed part of a regional Arab Federation. The introductory notes by current Meridians student intern Emma Schubert offer a brief historical context for the activities Saab narrates, and for what Saab advisedly leaves out. As with the other national contexts explored in this issue, Lebanese feminists and women's rights activists had to navigate complicated colonial, decolonizing, nationalist, and conservative regimes in pursuit of their own agendas. At times that meant acquiescing to patriarchal ideologies that ultimately worked against women's liberation and empowerment.
Taking up the challenges inherent in pursuing empowerment within oppressive national circumstances, we close this issue with "Harvesting Hope: Building Worker Power at the Pioneer Valley Workers Center" by historian Diana Carolina Sierra Becerra. This In the Trenches report explains the political philosophy, organizing strategies, and accomplishments of the PVWC, a progressive Western Massachusetts community-based organization dedicated to fostering the empowerment of our region's most vulnerable residents—documented and undocumented immigrant workers, families, and youth. In the five years since its founding, the PVWC has organized in favor of initiatives at the local government level that address some of the worst aspects of the current U.S. president's anti-immigrant, anti-labor, racist, and misogynist agendas. They have done so "in solidarity with all victims of state violence, past and present" (214). Although there have been setbacks along the way, there have also been victories and seeds of hope planted and harvested by the PVWC. Meridians joins the PVWC in following "la estrella de la esperanza / the star of hope" (229) visible on the horizon of our "journey into a realm populated with masses of people and cultures, gathering, converging, and unifying" (Rajgariah, 237). We believe that Meridians's grano de arena / grain of sand contributes to the long fetch that turns the tide toward justice once again.
This volume's publication coincides with the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which Meridians readers likely know was the culmination of nearly a century of women's organizing for political and civil rights. However, as our cover art "Layers" by Preetika Rajgariah alludes, the "long fetch"1 of this "first wave" of U.S. feminist history is often hidden in plain sight, and the racism within suffragist organizing and in "the waves rubric" deployed by white feminists periodizing the history of their activism "remains hidden from view" (Lipsitz 2007: viii; Hewitt 2010). Yet "historical knowledge reveals that events that we perceive as immediate and proximate have causes and consequences that span great distances" (Lipsitz 2007: viii). Likewise, world-systems analysis reminds us that just as tides rise and recede, "progress is … possible, but so is regression" (Wallerstein 2009: 19). As the selections in this issue illustrate, when the state allocates rights on the basis of a hierarchically organized social order, women and racialized minorities pursuing self-determination must navigate dangerous waters, moving between participating in, complying with, contesting, resisting, and/or undermining their nation's agendas.
Thus, despite its removal of the supposedly final barrier to women's political rights and its appreciable improvement of White women's life chances, the Nineteenth Amendment arguably changed the lives of women of color for the worse due to the White supremacist violence that ensued following its passage. This was so notwithstanding the Fourteenth Amendment's earlier promise of equal treatment under the law without regard to race or national origin which, together with the Nineteenth Amendment, should have ostensibly removed the final legal barrier to all citizen's participation in the formal political system (Dudden 2014; Newman 1999; Sneider 2008; Terborg-Penn 1998). Instead, the facts on the ground varied dramatically for different women based on their place in the racial, settler-colonial, and/or geopolitical order still in place. For example, despite the promises of the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments, it was not until the 1965 Voting Rights Act unequivocally removed legal racial barriers to the franchise that Black women and men alike would continue to be disenfranchised de jure by Jim Crow laws, and de facto by White supremacist racial terrorism that ran the gamut from lynching to sexual violence to mob-led massacres of entire Black communities.
We open this issue, therefore, with Rachel Marie-Crane Williams's "Elegy for Mary Turner." This epic poem is part of a larger performance art piece that Williams debuted online on October 31, 2016, and performed live at Iowa City's Englert Theater in August 2018 with an accompanying dance choreography and exhibit of linoleum block prints—some of which we are pleased to include here. As Williams explains in her blog, The Red Magpie, the performance coincided with the one hundredth anniversary of a historic days-long rampage of white racial violence in Brooks County, Georgia (Bright 2017). During the final days of May 1918, mobs of White men identified, hunted, kidnapped, murdered, and lynched over a dozen Black men with impunity, including Mary Turner's husband, Hayes. When Mary Turner—who was eight months pregnant—publicly protested his lynching, she too was hunted down, viciously tortured, and ultimately murdered, along with her unborn child.2 Most White suffragists were silent about this instance of racist and misogynist terrorism, as they were about the thousands murdered before and after Mary Turner.
In fact, in June of 1919 as White suffragists were celebrating the Senate's passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, Black women such as Ida B. Wells—who had labored ceaselessly for universal suffrage both alongside patriarchal Black activist men and racist White suffragists—were coping with the wake of devastation left by the "Red Summer" of 1919. The Red Summer began with the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas and culminated in nine additional White-led massacres of hundreds of Black men, women, and children by the end of that year. In every case, mobs of White people outraged at Black economic success and political claims-making murdered, raped, tortured, and set fire to anything and anyone in their path with impunity, and at times with the open support and participation of local and federal authorities. Likewise, the following year when White women were marking the Nineteenth Amendment's final ratification by voting in the presidential election of 1920, their Black peers were subjected to a new wave of terror when yet another White mob massacred dozens of Black men and women who had the temerity to exercise their right to vote on Election Day in Ocoee, Florida. This was followed in May 1921 by the utter destruction of the "Black Wall Street" community of Tulsa, Oklahoma, again by White mobs that murdered three hundred Black people and leveled forty square blocks of Black-owned businesses and residences without compunction. In other words, time and again the whiteness of the "universal" franchise was viciously and unequivocally asserted by White men and complicit White women, including suffragists and feminists (Feimster 2011; Giddings 2009; Hunter 1998; Madigan 2003; McWhirter 2011; Ortiz 2010; Woodruff 2019).
The context that saw Mary Turner lynched, an era subsequently considered "the nadir" of American race relations (Logan 1954), must have deeply affected the coming of age experience of a Black woman named Elmira "Toosweet" Moody Davis. Her daughter, iconic civil rights movement activist Anne Moody, wrote a now famous memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi. In this memoir Moody contrasts her life as an empowered Black woman with her mother's life of struggle, fearfulness, and pain, and concludes that the notable differences between them are due to her mother's weakness of character. However, in her essay analyzing the younger Moody's memoir, Tracey Jean Boisseau argues that Toosweet's resignation and Moody's "empowered sense of self ownership" were due less to their respective inherent character traits than to Moody's benefiting from the long fetch of Black organizing and community development that followed the nadir. Thus, the historically new subject-hood that Anne Moody exemplified was a latent byproduct of the segregated yet puissant educational opportunities that allowed "for the rising up of a generation of Black daughters in a celebration of life against a system that often sought their degradation if not their deaths" (36). That is, the "[segregated schools fostered] Black female subject-hood [that] … prompted civil rights activism rather than, as is often imagined, was produced wholly by it" (35).
Contemporaneously, for Latin@s—the majority of whom were structurally positioned as second-class citizens who "belonged to" but were "not a part of the United States"—the nadir meant that they too were often barred from exercising the universal right to vote supposedly also granted to them under the Nineteenth Amendment, or found that their "right" to vote was limited by virtue of their residential territory's status (Burnett and Marshall 2001). For example, the largest Latin@ subgroup, Mexicanheritage Americans,3 were prevented from actualizing their civil and political rights for over one hundred years after "the border crossed them" when the aftermath of the Mexican-American War of 1848 made what had been the northern third of Mexico part of the United States (Acuña 2014).4 Despite being categorized as "white by law" (Haney López 2006), and despite having U.S. citizenship imposed upon them in 1848 under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican Americans were also subject to racial terrorism, from lynching to torture and sexual violence, to white-mob-led destruction of their communities. Indeed, terrorizing Mexican (im)migrants was officially sanctioned, such as during the infamous Matanza of 1915 in which Texas Rangers slaughtered more than three hundred Mexican (im)migrants in the Texas borderlands (Lenthang 2019). Two decades later, during the Great Depression tens of thousands of Mexican Americans were forcibly removed to Mexico despite their birthright entitlement to remain in the United States (Alanis Encisco 2017). Together with everyday racist and nativist practices by Anglo-Americans, this massive "repatriation" and sundry other formal policies in effect made Mexican Americans citizens whose political and civil rights were guaranteed by the Constitution in theory only (Balderrama 2006; Carrigan and Webb 2017; Villanueva 2017).
Similarly, although U.S. citizenship was administratively imposed on Puerto Ricans via the Jones Act of 1917—notably nearly twenty years after the island, together with Guam and the Philippines, was made an unincorporated territory subject to U.S. rule under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1898)—Puerto Rican women on the island were not enfranchised by the Nineteenth Amendment, and did not receive the unqualified and universal right to vote until 1935.5 Moreover, regardless of that new "right" to vote and their U.S. citizenship, to this day, Puerto Ricans on the island do not vote in the presidential election, and do not have elected representatives in Congress (Azize-Vargas 1985; Barceló-Miller 1998).6 At the same time, throughout the twentieth century, Puerto Rican attempts to decolonize their island were met with swift and brutal responses from the United States that ranged from the sweeping arrests of average citizens, to the detention and torture of nationalist independentista leaders such as Pedro Albizu Campos, to the bombing of entire towns, and even to surveillance activities targeting the general population under the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) (Denis 2016; Erman 2018). The consequences of Puerto Ricans'second-class U.S. citizenship—of which "nearly half of Americans" on the U.S. mainland remain unaware (Dropp and Nyhan 2017)—were brought into sharp relief on the centennial of its imposition when Hurricane María devastated the island in 2017 and ultimately caused the death of nearly three thousand residents, largely due to a purposefully lax Federal Emergency Management Administration response (Milken Institute School of Public Health 2018).
The material destruction wrought by Hurricane María in 2017 also made visible the damage already being caused to the island's political economy in the wake of the United States federal government–imposed Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) in 2016. Despite its "promising" acronym, with its imposition of "extreme austerity measures" on an already impoverished population, PROMESA has done more harm than good for the majority of the island's people (Vega-Ramos 2019). Thus, in the context of PROMESA's failure, when the current president of the United States cavalierly tossed paper towels at the Hurricane María survivors who gathered at the Calvary Chapel to greet him during his four-hour visit to the island, he made the United States' callous disregard for Puerto Rican lives viscerally clear (Watson 2017). The long fetch of this disregard is the subject of Laura Briggs's Counterpoint, "Debates in the Field: Debt and Transnational Feminist Analysis." In this piece, Briggs offers a critical intervention that deftly puts the ongoing impact of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico into the broader Caribbean and transnational context. "It also places the current wave of debt and immiseration alongside a history of slavery, with its particular kinds of forced migration—from the depopulation of Africa in wars and raids to slave ships to the coffle that took loved ones sold away—its sexualized and racialized violences" (72).
Similar waves of conflict and collaboration between colonizers and colonized abound across world-systems as patriarchal, white supremacist, settler-colonial, and decolonizing "states all sought to become or to be thought of as nation-states. … [and, in turn,] political 'internationalism' was precisely inter-national and presumed the existence, indeed encouraged the strengthening, of the states as the loci of sovereignty" (Wallerstein 2009: 17). Lauren E. Shoemaker argues here that rather than offering the possibility of transcending these abiding conflicts as other scholars have claimed, Jamaica Kincaid's collection of nonfiction essays, ASmall Place, is a "narrative of irony and anger [that] reveals tourism as belonging to a structure of terror" (89). That structure of terror is buttressed by colonial epistemologies in which "the Caribbean must be a location of forgetting history to be enjoyed by white tourists; A Small Place interrupts this forgetting … [alluding] to the overwhelming poverty that many Antiguans suffer at the hands of not just the local banking system, but the international politics of debt and structural adjustment" (97). What is more, Shoemaker notes, Kincaid is equally critical of Antiguan peoples complicity with colonialism's erasures, writing "… they are governed by corrupt men, … [and] these corrupt men have given their country away to corrupt foreigners" (Kincaid [1988] 2001: 50). Put simply, the nation-state has long been not only an unreliable source of justice—especially for women of color, and Black women in particular—but more often than not, the source of injustice, as well as of oppression, exploitation, exclusion, and violence.
Returning to the U.S. mainland, we can thus trace the long fetch of current Islamophobic and anti-Latin@ federal immigration policy agendas back to anti-Asian policies and practices of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino (im)migrants, for over a century Asian Americans were prevented legally and extralegally from accessing the citizenship, civil, and political rights available "on arrival" to Euro/Anglo-Americans (Guglielmo 2004). For example, during the California Gold Rush (1849), Whites—whether U.S. born or recent arrivals from Europe—subjected Chinese immigrants to assault, lynching, and mob violence. Twenty years later, although Chinese men played a central role in the completion of the Pacific Railroad in 1869, they were once again subjected to extralegal Sinophobic violence that came to be known as the "driving out." In over 150 documented instances, mobs of White men lynched, murdered, tortured, and forced hundreds of Chinese men to flee the communities they had established along the rail lines in the western and midwestern states (Nokes 2006).
This "driving out" was followed by the Page Act of 1875's initiation of origins-based immigrant exclusion policy at a federal level. The Page Act, in turn, set the stage for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was followed by a series of Alien Land laws, and ultimately by Executive Order 9066 in 1942, which authorized the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps—including tens of thousands who were citizens by birth—during World War II. Adding insult to injury, all Japanese American internees were asked to declare their loyalty to the United States and men were made eligible to be drafted into the armed forces of the same country that deprived them and their families of their freedom, property, political, and civil rights. Those who refused to sign loyalty oaths or to serve in the U.S. armed forces—known as "no-no boys" because they answered "no" to two loyalty questions—were jailed in federal penitentiaries (Lee 2016; Lew-Williams 2018; Luibheid 2015; Ngai 2003; Takaki 1998). They rightly refused to abide by the federal government requirement that Japanese Americans prove the loyalty that was presumed inherent to immigrants from Europe—including those from Germany and Italy, with whom the United States was also at war at the time.
Viewed in this light, the U.S. government's Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program initiated post-9/11 illuminates the fact that current "events that seem to appear in the present from out of nowhere in actuality have a long history behind them" (Lipsitz 2007: vii). Azza Basarudin's and Khanum Shaikh's essay in this issue, "The Contours of Speaking Out: Gender, State Security, and Muslim Women's Empowerment," analyzes how the CVE program recruited Muslim American women to act as "anti-terrorist" agents because of their central roles in families and communities. Basarudin and Shiakh argue that the CVE program is part of a broader Islamophobic ideological agenda that presumptively criminalizes U.S. Muslim immigrants, refugees, and citizens alike, and requires them to proactively and repeatedly prove their allegiance to the United States while non-Muslims and their descendants are not similarly presumed traitorous. The CVE program also "reveals the easy co-optability of feminist empowerment discourse by an imperial nation" in that it "empowers" Muslim women to act as agents of a state that subjects their communities, their families, and ultimately themselves to unwarranted surveillance and the racialization of their religious faith (131).
States coopting women's empowerment agendas is evident also in the first of two In the Archives selections in this issue, "Commemoration of Kartini-Day." As the introductory notes by the former Meridians intern Callan Swaim-Fox explain, political regimes that ran the gamut from the Dutch colonial authority to those that subsequently ruled independent Indonesia freely interpreted the arguably feminist ideas and agendas of Raden Adjeng Kartini (1879–1904) so that they better aligned with their respective political agendas, rather than on Kartini's own beliefs. Regardless of whether they were Dutch colonial, nationalist, or internationalist, Indonesia's rulers shared a patriarchal commitment to circumscribing women's activities to domestic and maternal spheres, and accordingly considered Kartini a malleable icon. Moving from one Dutch colonial sphere of influence to another, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan's poem, "Minor Planet 2986," pays homage to Indian performance artivist Mrinalini Sarabhai (1918–2016), in whose honor minor planet 2986 was named by Dutch ex-patriot astronomer/scientist C. J. van Houten. Apparently van Houten visited Ahmedabad, where Sarabhai's performing arts company Darpana was founded in 1949, and was so taken with her performances that he named minor planet 2986 in Sarabhai's honor. Far from being a minor player in her universe, however, Sarabhai was "singlehandedly responsible for taking classical Indian dance beyond the shores of India and making Bharatnatyam a dance form that is revered and respected throughout the world."7 While having a star named in Sarabhai's honor can of course be interpreted in a positive light, one could also argue that colonial paternalism imbued the gesture.
Exploring the paternalism hidden even within ostensibly laudatory projects is central to Alyssa Garcia's essay, "Federada Testimonios on the Ground: Revealing the Gendered Limits in Operationalizing the Cuban Revolution's Campaign against Prostitution." Garcia considers how the Cuban revolutionary state's "gender-based identity politics [were] utilized in ways that would add legitimacy to the state's larger agenda," (156) often at women's expense. In the case of sex workers targeted for reeducation and incorporation into the new socioeconomic order, the revolutionary state developed a multistage policy that involved establishing trust and securing the cooperation of these marginalized women. To that end, members of the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (Cuban Women's Federation)--federadas—were recruited to act as "revolutionary" workers in the anti-prostitution campaigns. As Garcia explains, the federadas were typically women with class and color advantages that they were invested in sustaining in both pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba. Accordingly, while federadas who volunteered in the literacy campaigns undermined their privileged class's patriarchal gender order to a degree when they undertook literacy work with known sex workers, they simultaneously engaged in what sociologists call boundary work in order to sustain their status rank above the sex workers they were educating. In other words, the federadas' "revolutionary" work was imbued with the same state-sanctioned paternalism that sustained detrimental patriarchal rankings of good and bad women.8
A similar dynamic becomes clear in our second In the Archives selection, "The Struggles for Women's Suffrage" by Nayla Saab. As Saab recounts, upon the establishment of the newly independent state in 1943, women in Lebanon organized immediately for political rights, including suffrage, and they did so with the support of conservative and right-wing nationalists who formed part of a regional Arab Federation. The introductory notes by current Meridians student intern Emma Schubert offer a brief historical context for the activities Saab narrates, and for what Saab advisedly leaves out. As with the other national contexts explored in this issue, Lebanese feminists and women's rights activists had to navigate complicated colonial, decolonizing, nationalist, and conservative regimes in pursuit of their own agendas. At times that meant acquiescing to patriarchal ideologies that ultimately worked against women's liberation and empowerment.
Taking up the challenges inherent in pursuing empowerment within oppressive national circumstances, we close this issue with "Harvesting Hope: Building Worker Power at the Pioneer Valley Workers Center" by historian Diana Carolina Sierra Becerra. This In the Trenches report explains the political philosophy, organizing strategies, and accomplishments of the PVWC, a progressive Western Massachusetts community-based organization dedicated to fostering the empowerment of our region's most vulnerable residents—documented and undocumented immigrant workers, families, and youth. In the five years since its founding, the PVWC has organized in favor of initiatives at the local government level that address some of the worst aspects of the current U.S. president's anti-immigrant, anti-labor, racist, and misogynist agendas. They have done so "in solidarity with all victims of state violence, past and present" (214). Although there have been setbacks along the way, there have also been victories and seeds of hope planted and harvested by the PVWC. Meridians joins the PVWC in following "la estrella de la esperanza / the star of hope" (229) visible on the horizon of our "journey into a realm populated with masses of people and cultures, gathering, converging, and unifying" (Rajgariah, 237). We believe that Meridians's grano de arena / grain of sand contributes to the long fetch that turns the tide toward justice once again.
Volume 18 issue 1
Editor's Introduction
Exemplifying Meridians's mission to bring race and transnationalism into feminist conversation, the pieces in this issue illuminate what is at stake in our quests to grapple with settler colonial and imperialist legacies that flow through us. Like rivers, at times these legacies carry us along, at others they pull us under or require that we gather all our energies to swim against the current, and oftentimes these legacies demand that we remedy and protect them from the toxic wastes of earlier generations. As a group of indigenous midwives at the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance camps cogently explained, water—whether amniotic fluid, drinking water, or rivers and oceans—must be a core aspect of feminist freedom struggles because "we're all downriver at some point."1 From ending forced sterilization or forced pregnancy alike, to naming and preventing obstetric violence to intervening in the blithe disregard for the health of the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock nation, feminist water protectors make visible the legacies connecting birth-mothers, other-mothers, motherlands, and mother earth. Thus this issue's cover art by Elizabeth LaPensée, Our Grandmothers Carry Water from the Other World, by Elizabeth LaPensée, honors the legacy of (grand)mothers who remind us that we are "simultaneously separated and united by" water, as poignantly phrased by Lily Mabura in this issue.
Similarly, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's poetic memoir, "Whale Songs," brings together the legacies carried across the waters by her Ashanti, Shinnecock, and Irish grandmothers from their Caribbean, New York, and British island homelands. Together, these disparate legacies engender new "songs of oceanic longing" that sustain their "shipwrecked granddaughter." Here, too, in their seemingly unquenchable thirst for profits and for what they deem … "progress," settler-colonists prioritize access to oil over life-sustaining water. Along the way, Gumbs's speaker notes the cruel irony that the descendants of settler-colonists "who forced the whaling indigenous into sale instead of ceremony" later decided upon finding "other sources of oil" that "they could save the whales once they knew they didn't need them" (emphasis added, Gumbs, 10–11).
Following the ocean current across the Atlantic, we arrive at Gabeba Baderoon's poem "The Law of the Mother." In it, Baderoon presents a Moroccan speaker whose parents offer divergent maps for a sexual coming of age. The "law of the mother" calls for lovers who are "gentle with each other and take [their] time" nudging aside, rather than breaking, the membrane that stands between virginity and experience, much as a swimmer moves through and with water. In the father's world, however, loss of virginity is a "breaking" that sentences the speaker to a life of shame within a "bitter body." After a lifetime of nearly drowning in this legacy, the speaker maps a return to her body and a self that "enters again each knot and hollow" of her being with the help of a woman who loves women. (Baderoon, 16).
From one mother's "deep-souled" affirming legacy, we arrive at another much less so in Marie Sarita Gaytán's essay on the madre abnegada/selfless mother. The madre abnegada is "a martyr-like maternal figure" in Mexican culture that submerges class, ethnoracial, and gender inequities as well as violence in order to sustain the "fantasy of national unity." Gaytán argues that the madre abnegada ideal portrayed by Spanish-heritage actor Sara García was central to the development of a new postrevolutionary national identity that emphasized a "sentimental relationship between … nation and citizen" that cast mothers as vessels for, rather than members of, the Mexican body politic (Gaytán, 20). By contrast, Emily Lederman argues in "Queering the Chicana/o Archive in Felicia Luna Lemus's Like Son" that the novel's trans-man protagonist, "Frank. Born Francisca," rejects the madre abnegada's destructive legacy in a Mexican diasporic landscape (Lederman, 44). Lederman argues that in so doing, texts like Lemus's "open up space for moving toward a queer future that is nevertheless grounded and informed by messy and often traumatic inheritances from the past" (59).
Likewise, in "Illustrated Connections: Family, Memories, and Imagination in The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam," Sally McWilliams considers how graphic memoirist Ann Marie Fleming "craft[s] a family history as part of the larger Asian archive … reimagining … the Chinese diaspora by centering the tension between remembering and forgetting" (64–65). McWilliams convincingly argues that Fleming's archive of "trans-oceanic family relations" ultimately maps the legacies of racism, sexism, sinophobic colonialism, and settler-colonial violence across China, Austria, England, Hong Kong, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, and the United States and its territories. Thus, this diasporic "memory is a lot like magic" in that it allows us to "see what we [have] in common with each other" across time, space, and place even as we grapple with the toxic legacies that work to keep us on different shores (81).
Following this thread, Tina Hernandez's short memoir "Legacy Dysphoria" is "implicitly about epigenetics and explicitly about the oral tradition" of a multigenerational, matriarchal Cuban American family living across Florida's shores, from Key West to West Palm Beach, linked together in the embodied present and the ancestral past. "Heirloom stories, passed down like an inheritance" frame and showcase her maternal family's "white, white, white, white" racial identity, and like the "almost-funhouse mirror" in her grandmother's hallway, offer a preferred if inaccurate image of the author's full ancestry (Hernandez, 155). By contrast, her school pictures evidence that she looked brown not because the "photographer had done something wrong," but because her father's Afro-Cuban heritage was apparent in her looks (Hernandez, 159). The unasked yet driving question woven through the vignettes Hernandez narrates is: How does one live simultaneously with racialized unease and filial loyalty to a family legacy marked by loss of babies, flesh, and motherland? Perhaps by recognizing, as Hernandez ultimately does, that the dysphoric legacy they embody doesn't result from their mixed heritage as such, but from racist frames that not only refuse to acknowledge their black heritage but more so, violently stigmatize it.
Happily, our In the Archives feature—Joyce C. Follet's "Making Democracy Real: African American Women, Birth Control, and Social Justice, 1910–1960"—corrects these distorted understandings of Black legacies in the United States. Follet's work was born of the "Voices of Feminism Oral History Project" at the Sophia Smith Collection (SSC) and of the Steinem Initiative (SI) piloted at Smith College. Together, the SSC and the SI committed to make visible and available the extensive historical record of women of color working toward reproductive justice, class justice, and indigenous sovereignty movements in the United States. Thus, "Making Democracy Real" not only narrates a history of Black women's organizing—from access to contraception and reproductive health more broadly to their understanding of the ability to control their own bodies as fundamental to their full enactment of their citizenship rights—it also embeds primary documents as archival evidence within the piece.
A first for Meridians—and, I daresay any academic journal—this piece is being published in three formats simultaneously: in print; on-line through Duke University Press's e-Duke journals portal and Project MUSE; and as a digital repository hosted on our website so that readers and activists beyond the academy and U.S. shores can easily access the primary documents referred to and pictured in the other formats.2 "Making Democracy Real" links anti-racist feminist historians, archivists, activists, and social justice workers by projecting the archival materials themselves beyond the repositories that house them or the scholars who historicize them. Meridians is thrilled to be part of that broader project and legacy of putting "history into action." We are thankful to Duke University Press for facilitating this innovative dissemination strategy.
In our Media Matters selection, Lily Mabura and Ronak Husni's "Polemics of Love and the Family in A New Day in Old Sana'a," documents how Yemeni British filmmaker Bader Hirsi's creative blending of media forms in his 2005 feature film, A New Day in Old Sana'a, also works to recover and represent Yemen's complex heritage, including legacies from the Horn of Africa and Western colonialism. Mabura and Husani argue that the use of photography, filmography, song, and mirroring reflections allow Hirsi to ask, "what would happen if … love or desire were given a chance across race, religion, culture, and class" (169). Making visible the simultaneous proximity and distance between Arab-Yemenis, African-origin Akhdam, Indians, and Europeans in Yemen, the film "highlights the city and Yemen as a cultural contact zone with Africa and the west … to provide a more complete picture of the country and its people even within the context of its current turmoil" (177).
As Meridians readers likely know, Yemen is now in the midst of a devastating, war-induced famine that at last count has put 8.4 million people at risk of starvation. Were it not for the fact Yemen is on the strait linking the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden, "through which much of the world's oil shipments pass," one could reasonably imagine that "the rest of the world" would care little more about this genocidal crisis than it does about other ongoing conflicts fought over access to oil.3 In addition to causing some 10,000 deaths directly, four years of unrelenting US-backed war has destroyed an already weak water and sewage infrastructure system, which in turn has destroyed the food system and triggered malnutrition and unsafe drinking water crisis, one borne most brutally by women and children.4 Here too, the pursuit of control over access to oil has triggered "genocide of Mother Earth, and … the genocide of the river and the water that feeds us all, that nourishes us all, just as it did in the womb."5
Though not referring to water precisely, the theme of colonizing attempts to control life-sustaining fluids—in this case, breast milk—is central to Nicole M. Morris Johnson's, "Liquid Echoes: The Breast and Voice Transmission in Maryse Condé's Windward Heights." In this essay, Morris Johnson argues that, in the context of a story that moves across turn-of-the-century Guadeloupe and Cuba, "a clear, [white] male-led hierarchy" reigns, even postemancipation; yet breast milk "becomes a liquid catalyst which enables an ever-slippery, ever-morphing creolization, the process that … [allows] women [to] subvert and re-imagine origin myths" (183). Having suckled at the same breasts—and sometimes having emerged from the same wombs—"black" and "white" creoles shared mothers, yet were not necessarily kin. Condé's narrative asks the reader to consider what gets passed along in a/nother mother's milk? What do we take in from our own mother's body, spirit, and archive? How do we think about the other embedded in m/other?
This last question animates Moon Charania's counterpoint, "Making Way for Ghosts and Mothers: Storied Socialities, Sexual Violence, and the Figure of the Fugitive Migrant," an engaging rumination on the fraught connections between mother's and daughter's bodies, memories, and stories. Moving through homelands east and west—within Pakistan and from Pakistan, Europe, the United States—Charania excavates family stories long buried to "speak to the specter" that haunts her—"the intimacy of necropolitics in the everyday" quotidian of her mother's life, and therefore, of her own (216). Rather than reifying a clear dichotomy between living and dead, Charania points to the haunting and ghostly shadows of violence present among and within us. The dead are not actually gone, nor are the living simply alive. That is, family legacies are simultaneously past, present, and future.
Our final essay, Cheryl R. Hopson's "Breaking Silences: A Contemporary Black Feminist Reading of Rebecca Walker's Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood after a Lifetime of Ambivalence," also takes up the mother-daughter relationship as a window into larger concerns regarding the inheritance of a family legacy. Baby Love, Hopson notes, is Rebecca Walker's second memoir; the first having focused on her coming of age as the biracial daughter of a Jewish father and famous African American mother, novelist Alice Walker. Ironically, the dissolution of the younger Walker's relationship with her mother coincides with her chronicling and claiming biological motherhood as primordial over "chosen bonds (e.g., step/adoptive/other-mothers)" (229). According to Hopson, Walker reconciles this paradox by considering her own "motherhood as representing a definitive break from the infantilizing position of daughter" (230). Hopson argues that because the younger Walker underappreciates the profoundly trying social, psychological, material, political, and historical circumstances in which Alice Walker became pregnant and parented, she reads Alice Walker's memoir of the challenges of mothering while being a writer as a lack of love for her daughter, Rebecca. Although personalizing how the legacies of racism, sexism, capitalism, and heteronormativity trouble the waters of mother-daughter relationships is understandable, Hopson concludes, that drawing on a long legacy of Black feminist politics would have carried Rebecca Walker across the waters toward, rather than away from, her mother.
It is fitting, then, that we close this issue with Gabeba Baderoon's poem, "No Name." The speaker is a woman whose South African childhood is seemingly defined by her parents' intense focus on saving for the future by rejecting the seductive lure of name brands. Her mother's constant refrain of "these are only earthly things," while true, belies the fact that some have presumptive rights to these earthly things with valued "names" while others must live with "no name" brands, with "not matter[ing] at the level of what we wore and ate" (Baderoon, 244). Living under apartheid, these therefore were not just personal sacrifices; they reflected and reproduced "the power of that negative [non-white], that emptiness, against the fullness of white" (Baderoon, 244). Moving from simple inversion to a richer frame in which "Black offered a new home, a fullness," the legacies of privation live on within the speaker as lack despite her political consciousness because she, like her mother facing life's end, is nonetheless "on this earth" (Baderoon, 245).
These are the legacies that capitalism, settler colonialism, and their companion apartheid would bequeath us. But we can navigate these rough seas, mark the changing tides, drink from purer waters. From Dakota to Yemen, from China to New York, from Mexico to Flint, Michigan, we must dive in and protect our waters, our mothers, our planet. "For all future generations, for all the babies to come, we need this water, we need this earth to be healthy, to be beautiful for them to live in."6 That must be our legacy.
Exemplifying Meridians's mission to bring race and transnationalism into feminist conversation, the pieces in this issue illuminate what is at stake in our quests to grapple with settler colonial and imperialist legacies that flow through us. Like rivers, at times these legacies carry us along, at others they pull us under or require that we gather all our energies to swim against the current, and oftentimes these legacies demand that we remedy and protect them from the toxic wastes of earlier generations. As a group of indigenous midwives at the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance camps cogently explained, water—whether amniotic fluid, drinking water, or rivers and oceans—must be a core aspect of feminist freedom struggles because "we're all downriver at some point."1 From ending forced sterilization or forced pregnancy alike, to naming and preventing obstetric violence to intervening in the blithe disregard for the health of the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock nation, feminist water protectors make visible the legacies connecting birth-mothers, other-mothers, motherlands, and mother earth. Thus this issue's cover art by Elizabeth LaPensée, Our Grandmothers Carry Water from the Other World, by Elizabeth LaPensée, honors the legacy of (grand)mothers who remind us that we are "simultaneously separated and united by" water, as poignantly phrased by Lily Mabura in this issue.
Similarly, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's poetic memoir, "Whale Songs," brings together the legacies carried across the waters by her Ashanti, Shinnecock, and Irish grandmothers from their Caribbean, New York, and British island homelands. Together, these disparate legacies engender new "songs of oceanic longing" that sustain their "shipwrecked granddaughter." Here, too, in their seemingly unquenchable thirst for profits and for what they deem … "progress," settler-colonists prioritize access to oil over life-sustaining water. Along the way, Gumbs's speaker notes the cruel irony that the descendants of settler-colonists "who forced the whaling indigenous into sale instead of ceremony" later decided upon finding "other sources of oil" that "they could save the whales once they knew they didn't need them" (emphasis added, Gumbs, 10–11).
Following the ocean current across the Atlantic, we arrive at Gabeba Baderoon's poem "The Law of the Mother." In it, Baderoon presents a Moroccan speaker whose parents offer divergent maps for a sexual coming of age. The "law of the mother" calls for lovers who are "gentle with each other and take [their] time" nudging aside, rather than breaking, the membrane that stands between virginity and experience, much as a swimmer moves through and with water. In the father's world, however, loss of virginity is a "breaking" that sentences the speaker to a life of shame within a "bitter body." After a lifetime of nearly drowning in this legacy, the speaker maps a return to her body and a self that "enters again each knot and hollow" of her being with the help of a woman who loves women. (Baderoon, 16).
From one mother's "deep-souled" affirming legacy, we arrive at another much less so in Marie Sarita Gaytán's essay on the madre abnegada/selfless mother. The madre abnegada is "a martyr-like maternal figure" in Mexican culture that submerges class, ethnoracial, and gender inequities as well as violence in order to sustain the "fantasy of national unity." Gaytán argues that the madre abnegada ideal portrayed by Spanish-heritage actor Sara García was central to the development of a new postrevolutionary national identity that emphasized a "sentimental relationship between … nation and citizen" that cast mothers as vessels for, rather than members of, the Mexican body politic (Gaytán, 20). By contrast, Emily Lederman argues in "Queering the Chicana/o Archive in Felicia Luna Lemus's Like Son" that the novel's trans-man protagonist, "Frank. Born Francisca," rejects the madre abnegada's destructive legacy in a Mexican diasporic landscape (Lederman, 44). Lederman argues that in so doing, texts like Lemus's "open up space for moving toward a queer future that is nevertheless grounded and informed by messy and often traumatic inheritances from the past" (59).
Likewise, in "Illustrated Connections: Family, Memories, and Imagination in The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam," Sally McWilliams considers how graphic memoirist Ann Marie Fleming "craft[s] a family history as part of the larger Asian archive … reimagining … the Chinese diaspora by centering the tension between remembering and forgetting" (64–65). McWilliams convincingly argues that Fleming's archive of "trans-oceanic family relations" ultimately maps the legacies of racism, sexism, sinophobic colonialism, and settler-colonial violence across China, Austria, England, Hong Kong, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, and the United States and its territories. Thus, this diasporic "memory is a lot like magic" in that it allows us to "see what we [have] in common with each other" across time, space, and place even as we grapple with the toxic legacies that work to keep us on different shores (81).
Following this thread, Tina Hernandez's short memoir "Legacy Dysphoria" is "implicitly about epigenetics and explicitly about the oral tradition" of a multigenerational, matriarchal Cuban American family living across Florida's shores, from Key West to West Palm Beach, linked together in the embodied present and the ancestral past. "Heirloom stories, passed down like an inheritance" frame and showcase her maternal family's "white, white, white, white" racial identity, and like the "almost-funhouse mirror" in her grandmother's hallway, offer a preferred if inaccurate image of the author's full ancestry (Hernandez, 155). By contrast, her school pictures evidence that she looked brown not because the "photographer had done something wrong," but because her father's Afro-Cuban heritage was apparent in her looks (Hernandez, 159). The unasked yet driving question woven through the vignettes Hernandez narrates is: How does one live simultaneously with racialized unease and filial loyalty to a family legacy marked by loss of babies, flesh, and motherland? Perhaps by recognizing, as Hernandez ultimately does, that the dysphoric legacy they embody doesn't result from their mixed heritage as such, but from racist frames that not only refuse to acknowledge their black heritage but more so, violently stigmatize it.
Happily, our In the Archives feature—Joyce C. Follet's "Making Democracy Real: African American Women, Birth Control, and Social Justice, 1910–1960"—corrects these distorted understandings of Black legacies in the United States. Follet's work was born of the "Voices of Feminism Oral History Project" at the Sophia Smith Collection (SSC) and of the Steinem Initiative (SI) piloted at Smith College. Together, the SSC and the SI committed to make visible and available the extensive historical record of women of color working toward reproductive justice, class justice, and indigenous sovereignty movements in the United States. Thus, "Making Democracy Real" not only narrates a history of Black women's organizing—from access to contraception and reproductive health more broadly to their understanding of the ability to control their own bodies as fundamental to their full enactment of their citizenship rights—it also embeds primary documents as archival evidence within the piece.
A first for Meridians—and, I daresay any academic journal—this piece is being published in three formats simultaneously: in print; on-line through Duke University Press's e-Duke journals portal and Project MUSE; and as a digital repository hosted on our website so that readers and activists beyond the academy and U.S. shores can easily access the primary documents referred to and pictured in the other formats.2 "Making Democracy Real" links anti-racist feminist historians, archivists, activists, and social justice workers by projecting the archival materials themselves beyond the repositories that house them or the scholars who historicize them. Meridians is thrilled to be part of that broader project and legacy of putting "history into action." We are thankful to Duke University Press for facilitating this innovative dissemination strategy.
In our Media Matters selection, Lily Mabura and Ronak Husni's "Polemics of Love and the Family in A New Day in Old Sana'a," documents how Yemeni British filmmaker Bader Hirsi's creative blending of media forms in his 2005 feature film, A New Day in Old Sana'a, also works to recover and represent Yemen's complex heritage, including legacies from the Horn of Africa and Western colonialism. Mabura and Husani argue that the use of photography, filmography, song, and mirroring reflections allow Hirsi to ask, "what would happen if … love or desire were given a chance across race, religion, culture, and class" (169). Making visible the simultaneous proximity and distance between Arab-Yemenis, African-origin Akhdam, Indians, and Europeans in Yemen, the film "highlights the city and Yemen as a cultural contact zone with Africa and the west … to provide a more complete picture of the country and its people even within the context of its current turmoil" (177).
As Meridians readers likely know, Yemen is now in the midst of a devastating, war-induced famine that at last count has put 8.4 million people at risk of starvation. Were it not for the fact Yemen is on the strait linking the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden, "through which much of the world's oil shipments pass," one could reasonably imagine that "the rest of the world" would care little more about this genocidal crisis than it does about other ongoing conflicts fought over access to oil.3 In addition to causing some 10,000 deaths directly, four years of unrelenting US-backed war has destroyed an already weak water and sewage infrastructure system, which in turn has destroyed the food system and triggered malnutrition and unsafe drinking water crisis, one borne most brutally by women and children.4 Here too, the pursuit of control over access to oil has triggered "genocide of Mother Earth, and … the genocide of the river and the water that feeds us all, that nourishes us all, just as it did in the womb."5
Though not referring to water precisely, the theme of colonizing attempts to control life-sustaining fluids—in this case, breast milk—is central to Nicole M. Morris Johnson's, "Liquid Echoes: The Breast and Voice Transmission in Maryse Condé's Windward Heights." In this essay, Morris Johnson argues that, in the context of a story that moves across turn-of-the-century Guadeloupe and Cuba, "a clear, [white] male-led hierarchy" reigns, even postemancipation; yet breast milk "becomes a liquid catalyst which enables an ever-slippery, ever-morphing creolization, the process that … [allows] women [to] subvert and re-imagine origin myths" (183). Having suckled at the same breasts—and sometimes having emerged from the same wombs—"black" and "white" creoles shared mothers, yet were not necessarily kin. Condé's narrative asks the reader to consider what gets passed along in a/nother mother's milk? What do we take in from our own mother's body, spirit, and archive? How do we think about the other embedded in m/other?
This last question animates Moon Charania's counterpoint, "Making Way for Ghosts and Mothers: Storied Socialities, Sexual Violence, and the Figure of the Fugitive Migrant," an engaging rumination on the fraught connections between mother's and daughter's bodies, memories, and stories. Moving through homelands east and west—within Pakistan and from Pakistan, Europe, the United States—Charania excavates family stories long buried to "speak to the specter" that haunts her—"the intimacy of necropolitics in the everyday" quotidian of her mother's life, and therefore, of her own (216). Rather than reifying a clear dichotomy between living and dead, Charania points to the haunting and ghostly shadows of violence present among and within us. The dead are not actually gone, nor are the living simply alive. That is, family legacies are simultaneously past, present, and future.
Our final essay, Cheryl R. Hopson's "Breaking Silences: A Contemporary Black Feminist Reading of Rebecca Walker's Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood after a Lifetime of Ambivalence," also takes up the mother-daughter relationship as a window into larger concerns regarding the inheritance of a family legacy. Baby Love, Hopson notes, is Rebecca Walker's second memoir; the first having focused on her coming of age as the biracial daughter of a Jewish father and famous African American mother, novelist Alice Walker. Ironically, the dissolution of the younger Walker's relationship with her mother coincides with her chronicling and claiming biological motherhood as primordial over "chosen bonds (e.g., step/adoptive/other-mothers)" (229). According to Hopson, Walker reconciles this paradox by considering her own "motherhood as representing a definitive break from the infantilizing position of daughter" (230). Hopson argues that because the younger Walker underappreciates the profoundly trying social, psychological, material, political, and historical circumstances in which Alice Walker became pregnant and parented, she reads Alice Walker's memoir of the challenges of mothering while being a writer as a lack of love for her daughter, Rebecca. Although personalizing how the legacies of racism, sexism, capitalism, and heteronormativity trouble the waters of mother-daughter relationships is understandable, Hopson concludes, that drawing on a long legacy of Black feminist politics would have carried Rebecca Walker across the waters toward, rather than away from, her mother.
It is fitting, then, that we close this issue with Gabeba Baderoon's poem, "No Name." The speaker is a woman whose South African childhood is seemingly defined by her parents' intense focus on saving for the future by rejecting the seductive lure of name brands. Her mother's constant refrain of "these are only earthly things," while true, belies the fact that some have presumptive rights to these earthly things with valued "names" while others must live with "no name" brands, with "not matter[ing] at the level of what we wore and ate" (Baderoon, 244). Living under apartheid, these therefore were not just personal sacrifices; they reflected and reproduced "the power of that negative [non-white], that emptiness, against the fullness of white" (Baderoon, 244). Moving from simple inversion to a richer frame in which "Black offered a new home, a fullness," the legacies of privation live on within the speaker as lack despite her political consciousness because she, like her mother facing life's end, is nonetheless "on this earth" (Baderoon, 245).
These are the legacies that capitalism, settler colonialism, and their companion apartheid would bequeath us. But we can navigate these rough seas, mark the changing tides, drink from purer waters. From Dakota to Yemen, from China to New York, from Mexico to Flint, Michigan, we must dive in and protect our waters, our mothers, our planet. "For all future generations, for all the babies to come, we need this water, we need this earth to be healthy, to be beautiful for them to live in."6 That must be our legacy.
volume 17 issue 1
Editor's Introduction
Meridians is thrilled to announce that this is our first issue published by Duke University Press. This is also the first issue that I curate fully from submissions accepted during my first year as editor; as such, it expresses my particular vision for Meridians going forward. I am keenly interested in internationalizing our transnational frame, specifically by soliciting from scholars, culture workers, and activists living outside the United States and in languages other than English working on our core themes of feminism, race, and transnationalism. This internationalist and global turn is all the more important at this moment, when the most unabashedly violent forms of nationalism, protectionism, insularism, xenophobia, nativism, and fascism have once again become mainstreamed and part of everyday discourse and life not only in the United States but across the world. Protest and resistance have also increased apace, among feminists, antiracists, LGBTQ, environmentalists, labor, and human rights activists, and also across civil society movements and actors. Nonetheless it continues to be Black women who are both the most subject to injustice and the most courageous in the pursuit of justice.
Given that Santo Domingo is the “cradle of blackness in the Americas” (Torres-Saillant 1998, 126) and the birthplace of Black resistance and revolution, we chose the Dominican artist Iris Pérez Romero’s Corazón iluminado, de la serie Energía Vital (Illuminated Heart) as our cover for this issue. This piece from her Energía Vital/Vital Energy series is part of Pérez Romero’s broader artistic response to violence against women and girls. At once haunting and hopeful, the piece beautifully represents this collection of essays, poetry, memoir, testimonio, and culture works documenting Black women’s resistance and resilience throughout the diaspora. It is this vision and spirit of illuminated, vital resistance that also animates our opening piece, the “Testimonio” by Altagracia Jean Joseph, “El mejor regalo es ser mujer y sobre todo mujer negra.” Joseph is a prominent feminist and human rights activist in the Dominican Republic, where several hundred thousand Dominicans of Haitian descent have been informally and formally deported and denationalized through a series of court cases, legislation, and administrative acts. As Joseph explains, this twenty-first-century increase in overt anti-Haitianism has authorized gendered forms of legal and extralegal violence against women and children of Haitian descent and Black women in the Dominican Republic more generally. Written in Spanish and translated by Michelle Joffroy as “The Greatest Gift Is Being a Woman, Above All, a Black Woman,” this piece is the first full-length text Meridians has published in a language other than English.
Our first research essay is Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant’s “The New Howard Woman: Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe and the Education of a Modern Black Femininity.” Beauboeuf-Lafontant uncovers the critical role Black women’s deans played in institutionalizing co-curricular structures for women’s educational achievement at historically Black colleges and universities, structures that became part of the national coeducational landscape. Likewise, in “Panther Teacher: Sarah Webster Fabio’s Black Power,” Michael J. New reminds us of the critical role Webster Fabio played in the development of Black Studies, as a formative influence upon the students who would develop the critical intellectual and cultural bases of the Black Panthers’ political praxis. In particular, her role in the Black Arts Movement and theorization of Black Vernacular English have long been under-appreciated; this essay is a step toward correcting that misfortune.
In “Black Hair Haptics: Touch and Transgressing the Black Female Body,” Amani Morrison argues that black hair, which “has been both overdetermined and underexplored as a site of intellectual inquiry,” triggers “physical and affective registers” that offer unique insights into the nexus between Black women’s public and private racialized subjectivity. It is a similar understanding of Black women’s hair as a site of gendered racialization and necessary decolonization that inspires the “conscious head-wrapping” movement in Puerto Rico, beautifully documented by María Beatriz Serrano-Abreu in her “Culturework” photo essay “#TurbanteoConsciente: Racial Healing through Wearable Resistance.” As the earring worn by one of the women Serrano photographed openly proclaims, these everyday hairstyling strategies mark these women as guerreras, warriors in broader culture wars waged on and through women’s bodies.
Moving back in time and across the Caribbean, in her essay “Witchcrafts of Color: Suzanne Césaire, Mayotte Capécia, and the Shapeshifting Doudou in Vichy Martinique” Marina Magloire explains how anticolonial West Indian women writers understood that French colonialists were always already hoisted by their own ideological petards. She argues that misogynist colonial fantastical renderings of female shape-shifters and sorceresses unwittingly acknowledged French awareness that Martinican women of color were far less pliant and obliging than they presented themselves to be to the Vichy occupiers of the early twentieth century. Contemporaneously, across the Atlantic, Helen Yitah argues in “‘Hard-Headed and Masculine-Hearted Women’: Female Subjectivity in Mabel Dove-Danquah’s Fiction” that literature affords nationalist women writers such as Dove-Danquah a space from which to challenge colonial ideology and also to envision a “new woman” who could resist patriarchal nationalism in Ghana of the 1940s and 1950s. Through this literature, “they announced Ghana’s intellectual independence decades before the end of colonial rule.”
Linking past, present, and Afro-futurity in the Black diaspora, Jocelyn Fenton Stitt inaugurates our new “State of the Field” feature with “The Aftereffects of Slavery: A Black Feminist Genealogy.” More literature review than book review, State of the Field essays are meant to showcase and put texts of various sorts—research monograph, creative nonfiction, memoir, media, and fiction—in conversation with one another, and with the fields and debates they engage. Accordingly, Stitt weaves together an analysis of how Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Tina Campt’s Listening to Images, and Michelle D. Commander’s Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic take up Saidiya Hartman’s groundbreaking consideration of the “aftereffects of slavery.” Stitt argues that together these texts—which touch on the diaspora throughout the Americas, from Canada to Brazil, across the Black Atlantic, and in Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, and Senegal—move beyond examining and theorizing “the importance of the enslaved past to contemporary Black subjectivity” to imagining “a place and a time where antiblack racism is no longer a force constraining life outcomes.” In so doing, they too are part of a long tradition of producing the other world that is possible, a currently liberated Afro-future (Nelson 2002).
Likewise, our “Counterpoint” piece, Zoe Spencer and Olivia N. Perlow’s “Sassy Mouths, Unfettered Spirits, and the Neo-Lynching of Korryn Gaines and Sandra Bland: Conceptualizing Post-Traumatic Slave Master Syndrome and the Familiar ‘Policing’ of Black Women’s Resistance in Twenty-First-Century America” and the “Media Matters” piece by Sequoia Maner, “‘Where Do You Go When You Go Quiet?’ The Ethics of Interiority in the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Beyoncé,” together address the consequences of Black women’s speech acts. Spencer and Perlow argue that overt Black resistance to racism and misogyny triggers violent responses from the perpetrators because it articulates rejection of the master class status of whites, and especially of white men. That is, Black resistance to white supremacy and patriarchy traumatizes whites who interpret that resistance as portending white death because white life and white power are co-valent. Consequently in this mental-scape and the social order that produces it, whites believe that Black death is presumptively justifiable rather than the product of a perverse ideology and racist social order. The victimizers recast themselves as the victims in the bankrupt moral universe that is white supremacist patriarchy.
Maner, on the other hand, elaborates on how Black women’s “going quiet” and refusing to reveal their innermost thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams also is powerfully threatening to a social order that insists on unlimited access to and knowledge of the minds, bodies, and souls of Black folks. Tracing the kinship ties between Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” and the works of foremothers Hurston and Walker, Maner argues that “retreat into the wild interior [offers a] method for radical personal and social transformation.” Rather than antithetical or diametrically opposed, Black women “sassing” white power and going quiet alike are interdependent and catalyzing speech acts that assert Black women’s whole personhood and historical kinship in the struggle for Black life.
Likewise, this issue’s “Call to Action” is Zoe Spencer’s spoken word piece “Rise Up.” Fittingly, in “Rise Up” Spencer alludes to Beyoncé’s early hit “If I Were a Boy,” in which the singer laments the prerogatives of masculine freedom and the attendant discounting of women’s experiences with her own refrain, “If I were a man.” In this way, Spencer traces the continuum from the suffering in the intimate sphere caused by the generally tolerated petite misogynoirist—Beyoncé’s “boy”—to the often overlooked misogynoirist murderous violence of both a “brutal State” and, at times, a community that does not tolerate Black women’s self-defense. This, even as Black women are expected to call the state to account if the victim “were a man.” In response, Spencer exhorts Black women to rise up and “resist the all too familiar fate” (Bailey 2013, 26). We invite you to look on the redesigned Meridians website for our “In This Issue” feature of Spencer performing this piece.
Likewise, Michelle J. Pinkard’s poetry couldn’t be a better complement to the texts in this issue. In “Token Survival Guide,” five vignettes sketch the code-switching, jazzed up, and jagged landscapes navigated by its protagonist and, by extension, Black women surviving ever present attempts to tokenize the presence of Blackness in the white midst. Moving to a slower yet just as powerfully insistent rhythm, “Summer Girl” also resonates on multiple registers with Black women’s embodied, multivalent responses to the material, spiritual, and psychic constraints violently and unremittingly imposed upon them. Despite that, like the season for which she is named, “Summer Girl” is sensual, flourishing, and full of possibility. She hums with life-affirming vibes and savors the sweetness around her.
As we were heading to press, the Brazilian Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes, were murdered on March 14, 2018, in Rio de Janeiro, where Franco, a self-described Black, bisexual, feminist favelada, was a recently elected City Council member. Her death stunned and inspired outrage throughout the world. As Flávia Santos de Araújo eulogizes in the “Marielle, Presente!” talk that she offered at the Franco memorial event held at Smith College on March 21, 2018, “Marielle was a threat to so many violent, corrupt, and powerful factions” because she was an outspoken human rights advocate for and organizer of Rio’s poorest and most vulnerable. Thus this issue closes with an “In Memoriam” for Marielle Franco and is dedicated to all Black women resisters across time and place, from the early twentieth century to today, whose fields of activism range from the college campus to the world of literature, from the tips of the hair on their heads to the valleys of their interior worlds, from Texas to Puerto Rico, Rio, and Ghana. We join Araújo in honoring “you as a whole in your many selves” and in being with you for the struggle yet to come.
Meridians is thrilled to announce that this is our first issue published by Duke University Press. This is also the first issue that I curate fully from submissions accepted during my first year as editor; as such, it expresses my particular vision for Meridians going forward. I am keenly interested in internationalizing our transnational frame, specifically by soliciting from scholars, culture workers, and activists living outside the United States and in languages other than English working on our core themes of feminism, race, and transnationalism. This internationalist and global turn is all the more important at this moment, when the most unabashedly violent forms of nationalism, protectionism, insularism, xenophobia, nativism, and fascism have once again become mainstreamed and part of everyday discourse and life not only in the United States but across the world. Protest and resistance have also increased apace, among feminists, antiracists, LGBTQ, environmentalists, labor, and human rights activists, and also across civil society movements and actors. Nonetheless it continues to be Black women who are both the most subject to injustice and the most courageous in the pursuit of justice.
Given that Santo Domingo is the “cradle of blackness in the Americas” (Torres-Saillant 1998, 126) and the birthplace of Black resistance and revolution, we chose the Dominican artist Iris Pérez Romero’s Corazón iluminado, de la serie Energía Vital (Illuminated Heart) as our cover for this issue. This piece from her Energía Vital/Vital Energy series is part of Pérez Romero’s broader artistic response to violence against women and girls. At once haunting and hopeful, the piece beautifully represents this collection of essays, poetry, memoir, testimonio, and culture works documenting Black women’s resistance and resilience throughout the diaspora. It is this vision and spirit of illuminated, vital resistance that also animates our opening piece, the “Testimonio” by Altagracia Jean Joseph, “El mejor regalo es ser mujer y sobre todo mujer negra.” Joseph is a prominent feminist and human rights activist in the Dominican Republic, where several hundred thousand Dominicans of Haitian descent have been informally and formally deported and denationalized through a series of court cases, legislation, and administrative acts. As Joseph explains, this twenty-first-century increase in overt anti-Haitianism has authorized gendered forms of legal and extralegal violence against women and children of Haitian descent and Black women in the Dominican Republic more generally. Written in Spanish and translated by Michelle Joffroy as “The Greatest Gift Is Being a Woman, Above All, a Black Woman,” this piece is the first full-length text Meridians has published in a language other than English.
Our first research essay is Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant’s “The New Howard Woman: Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe and the Education of a Modern Black Femininity.” Beauboeuf-Lafontant uncovers the critical role Black women’s deans played in institutionalizing co-curricular structures for women’s educational achievement at historically Black colleges and universities, structures that became part of the national coeducational landscape. Likewise, in “Panther Teacher: Sarah Webster Fabio’s Black Power,” Michael J. New reminds us of the critical role Webster Fabio played in the development of Black Studies, as a formative influence upon the students who would develop the critical intellectual and cultural bases of the Black Panthers’ political praxis. In particular, her role in the Black Arts Movement and theorization of Black Vernacular English have long been under-appreciated; this essay is a step toward correcting that misfortune.
In “Black Hair Haptics: Touch and Transgressing the Black Female Body,” Amani Morrison argues that black hair, which “has been both overdetermined and underexplored as a site of intellectual inquiry,” triggers “physical and affective registers” that offer unique insights into the nexus between Black women’s public and private racialized subjectivity. It is a similar understanding of Black women’s hair as a site of gendered racialization and necessary decolonization that inspires the “conscious head-wrapping” movement in Puerto Rico, beautifully documented by María Beatriz Serrano-Abreu in her “Culturework” photo essay “#TurbanteoConsciente: Racial Healing through Wearable Resistance.” As the earring worn by one of the women Serrano photographed openly proclaims, these everyday hairstyling strategies mark these women as guerreras, warriors in broader culture wars waged on and through women’s bodies.
Moving back in time and across the Caribbean, in her essay “Witchcrafts of Color: Suzanne Césaire, Mayotte Capécia, and the Shapeshifting Doudou in Vichy Martinique” Marina Magloire explains how anticolonial West Indian women writers understood that French colonialists were always already hoisted by their own ideological petards. She argues that misogynist colonial fantastical renderings of female shape-shifters and sorceresses unwittingly acknowledged French awareness that Martinican women of color were far less pliant and obliging than they presented themselves to be to the Vichy occupiers of the early twentieth century. Contemporaneously, across the Atlantic, Helen Yitah argues in “‘Hard-Headed and Masculine-Hearted Women’: Female Subjectivity in Mabel Dove-Danquah’s Fiction” that literature affords nationalist women writers such as Dove-Danquah a space from which to challenge colonial ideology and also to envision a “new woman” who could resist patriarchal nationalism in Ghana of the 1940s and 1950s. Through this literature, “they announced Ghana’s intellectual independence decades before the end of colonial rule.”
Linking past, present, and Afro-futurity in the Black diaspora, Jocelyn Fenton Stitt inaugurates our new “State of the Field” feature with “The Aftereffects of Slavery: A Black Feminist Genealogy.” More literature review than book review, State of the Field essays are meant to showcase and put texts of various sorts—research monograph, creative nonfiction, memoir, media, and fiction—in conversation with one another, and with the fields and debates they engage. Accordingly, Stitt weaves together an analysis of how Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Tina Campt’s Listening to Images, and Michelle D. Commander’s Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic take up Saidiya Hartman’s groundbreaking consideration of the “aftereffects of slavery.” Stitt argues that together these texts—which touch on the diaspora throughout the Americas, from Canada to Brazil, across the Black Atlantic, and in Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, and Senegal—move beyond examining and theorizing “the importance of the enslaved past to contemporary Black subjectivity” to imagining “a place and a time where antiblack racism is no longer a force constraining life outcomes.” In so doing, they too are part of a long tradition of producing the other world that is possible, a currently liberated Afro-future (Nelson 2002).
Likewise, our “Counterpoint” piece, Zoe Spencer and Olivia N. Perlow’s “Sassy Mouths, Unfettered Spirits, and the Neo-Lynching of Korryn Gaines and Sandra Bland: Conceptualizing Post-Traumatic Slave Master Syndrome and the Familiar ‘Policing’ of Black Women’s Resistance in Twenty-First-Century America” and the “Media Matters” piece by Sequoia Maner, “‘Where Do You Go When You Go Quiet?’ The Ethics of Interiority in the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Beyoncé,” together address the consequences of Black women’s speech acts. Spencer and Perlow argue that overt Black resistance to racism and misogyny triggers violent responses from the perpetrators because it articulates rejection of the master class status of whites, and especially of white men. That is, Black resistance to white supremacy and patriarchy traumatizes whites who interpret that resistance as portending white death because white life and white power are co-valent. Consequently in this mental-scape and the social order that produces it, whites believe that Black death is presumptively justifiable rather than the product of a perverse ideology and racist social order. The victimizers recast themselves as the victims in the bankrupt moral universe that is white supremacist patriarchy.
Maner, on the other hand, elaborates on how Black women’s “going quiet” and refusing to reveal their innermost thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams also is powerfully threatening to a social order that insists on unlimited access to and knowledge of the minds, bodies, and souls of Black folks. Tracing the kinship ties between Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” and the works of foremothers Hurston and Walker, Maner argues that “retreat into the wild interior [offers a] method for radical personal and social transformation.” Rather than antithetical or diametrically opposed, Black women “sassing” white power and going quiet alike are interdependent and catalyzing speech acts that assert Black women’s whole personhood and historical kinship in the struggle for Black life.
Likewise, this issue’s “Call to Action” is Zoe Spencer’s spoken word piece “Rise Up.” Fittingly, in “Rise Up” Spencer alludes to Beyoncé’s early hit “If I Were a Boy,” in which the singer laments the prerogatives of masculine freedom and the attendant discounting of women’s experiences with her own refrain, “If I were a man.” In this way, Spencer traces the continuum from the suffering in the intimate sphere caused by the generally tolerated petite misogynoirist—Beyoncé’s “boy”—to the often overlooked misogynoirist murderous violence of both a “brutal State” and, at times, a community that does not tolerate Black women’s self-defense. This, even as Black women are expected to call the state to account if the victim “were a man.” In response, Spencer exhorts Black women to rise up and “resist the all too familiar fate” (Bailey 2013, 26). We invite you to look on the redesigned Meridians website for our “In This Issue” feature of Spencer performing this piece.
Likewise, Michelle J. Pinkard’s poetry couldn’t be a better complement to the texts in this issue. In “Token Survival Guide,” five vignettes sketch the code-switching, jazzed up, and jagged landscapes navigated by its protagonist and, by extension, Black women surviving ever present attempts to tokenize the presence of Blackness in the white midst. Moving to a slower yet just as powerfully insistent rhythm, “Summer Girl” also resonates on multiple registers with Black women’s embodied, multivalent responses to the material, spiritual, and psychic constraints violently and unremittingly imposed upon them. Despite that, like the season for which she is named, “Summer Girl” is sensual, flourishing, and full of possibility. She hums with life-affirming vibes and savors the sweetness around her.
As we were heading to press, the Brazilian Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes, were murdered on March 14, 2018, in Rio de Janeiro, where Franco, a self-described Black, bisexual, feminist favelada, was a recently elected City Council member. Her death stunned and inspired outrage throughout the world. As Flávia Santos de Araújo eulogizes in the “Marielle, Presente!” talk that she offered at the Franco memorial event held at Smith College on March 21, 2018, “Marielle was a threat to so many violent, corrupt, and powerful factions” because she was an outspoken human rights advocate for and organizer of Rio’s poorest and most vulnerable. Thus this issue closes with an “In Memoriam” for Marielle Franco and is dedicated to all Black women resisters across time and place, from the early twentieth century to today, whose fields of activism range from the college campus to the world of literature, from the tips of the hair on their heads to the valleys of their interior worlds, from Texas to Puerto Rico, Rio, and Ghana. We join Araújo in honoring “you as a whole in your many selves” and in being with you for the struggle yet to come.
Volume 16 issue 2
Editor's Introduction
It is a bittersweet pleasure to publish this special issue on Black women’s health, guest edited by Jameta Nicole Barlow and LeConté J. Dill. The serendipitous timing of a special issue focused on Black women’s health is particularly significant at this historical moment when Black women have launched and are leading movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #MeToo because Black men, women, and children continue to be disproportionately subjected to life-threatening, state-based, structural and interpersonal violence in the United States. Whether killed by police officers in the course of daily life, from Staten Island to Cleveland to St. Louis and beyond; subjected to poisonous tap water in Flint for four years and counting; evicted, redlined, and gentrified into toxic and substandard housing; dying in childbirth at two to six times the rate of white women; routinely denied pain medication or adequate health care regardless of class; pushed out of schools into prisons and the military industrial complex; legally sanctioned for having natural hair styles; or subjected to sundry other egregious assaults on Black bodies and souls, Black life is under attack, now as ever. And as always, Black women organize and respond, providing direct care, nurturing bodies and spirits, demanding reform, and launching revolutions.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the womanist philosophy and politics articulated in the early 1980s by Alice Walker are woven through this collection of essays, reflections, culture works, and archives of Black women’s pursuit of collective health and well-being. Womanism is a way of being, a way of knowing, and a practice of fostering and cultivating life-affirming spaces. A womanist is “committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health” (Walker 2003, xi). And Black health, as Walker’s definition (in part) of womanist in the epigraph above reminds us, is about living Black lives fully, sensuously, spiritedly, and politically. What’s more, Black liberation movements have historically led to social change that improves everyone’s quality of life.
For example, it was African American activist Tarana Burke who coined the powerful phrase “Me Too” when she launched a nonprofit to serve victims of sexual abuse in 2006. Burke was inspired to launch “Me Too” after a decade of reflecting on an encounter she had with a 13-year-old girl who shared her story of sexual abuse. Stunned into momentary silence, Burke later wished she had said, “me too,” so that the child would have known that she wasn’t alone—neither in the experience nor in the recovery from it—and that women like her were working to prevent sexual violence. Burke’s Just Be Inc. had already spent a decade working to build a social movement against sexual violence and harassment by the time white actress Alyssa Milano tweeted out a “#MeToo” hashtag in response to allegations of sexual assault by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in October 2017 (García 2017).
Likewise, the recent and dramatic success of the #NeverAgain movement for gun control led by Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students who survived the Valentine’s Day 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, did not simply spring up out of fallow ground. Rather, it was rooted in and nourished by the largely youth-led #HandsUpDontShoot and #SayHerName movements’ intersectional understanding of the political economy of police brutality and impunity. That is, the #NeverAgain teenagers—“with every color represented”—have come of age both subject to the regular spectacle of hundreds of school-based shootings since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre and witness to the massive protests organized across the country in the aftermath of the extrajudicial killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, and dozens of others. We may never hear about the full extent of the role #BlackLivesMatter cofounders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, Tarana Burke, and other Black women’s health activists played in establishing the national groundwork that allowed the #MeToo and #NeverAgain movements to take off as they have, but we do know that they are part of a long history of Black women’s critical insights and public health activism that continues to sow new ground. As Alicia Garza (2016) put it, “When Black people get free, everybody gets free.”
Thus, in keeping with the spirit of resistance and remembrance that it celebrates, and as a powerful counterpoint to all of the times and ways Black folks have said #ICantBreathe to no avail, we dedicate this issue to Erica Garner (May 29, 1990—December 30, 2017). In the three years between when her father Eric Garner was choked to death by NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in 2014 and her own untimely death at the age of twenty-nine, Ms. Garner transformed her personal outrage and grief into political activism against police brutality and for criminal justice reforms. Fittingly, the cover for this special issue on Black women’s health features Zahira Kelly-Cabrera’s powerful image Breathe. As Barlow and Dill remind us in their introduction, for all who have come before, and for all who will follow, breathe—for self-care “is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (Lorde 1988).
Finally, in addition to being the last issue bridging Paula Giddings’s editorship and my own, this is also the last issue to be published by Indiana University Press. We are thankful to IUP—especially Sherondra Thedford, Journals Production Manager—for ensuring that Meridians has been produced as beautifully in form as it is serious in substance. We are particularly grateful that IUP’s understanding of Meridians’ mission and vision was evidenced in its sustained commitment to vividly reproducing art by and about women of color on all of our covers. We thank also our longtime cover compositor, Rebecca Neimark, who has repeatedly brought together a wide range of contributor’s art and Meridians design aesthetic with remarkable skill, and our brilliant copyeditor Alex Kapitan for often-unheralded, yet critical, production work. Thank you one and all.
It is a bittersweet pleasure to publish this special issue on Black women’s health, guest edited by Jameta Nicole Barlow and LeConté J. Dill. The serendipitous timing of a special issue focused on Black women’s health is particularly significant at this historical moment when Black women have launched and are leading movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #MeToo because Black men, women, and children continue to be disproportionately subjected to life-threatening, state-based, structural and interpersonal violence in the United States. Whether killed by police officers in the course of daily life, from Staten Island to Cleveland to St. Louis and beyond; subjected to poisonous tap water in Flint for four years and counting; evicted, redlined, and gentrified into toxic and substandard housing; dying in childbirth at two to six times the rate of white women; routinely denied pain medication or adequate health care regardless of class; pushed out of schools into prisons and the military industrial complex; legally sanctioned for having natural hair styles; or subjected to sundry other egregious assaults on Black bodies and souls, Black life is under attack, now as ever. And as always, Black women organize and respond, providing direct care, nurturing bodies and spirits, demanding reform, and launching revolutions.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the womanist philosophy and politics articulated in the early 1980s by Alice Walker are woven through this collection of essays, reflections, culture works, and archives of Black women’s pursuit of collective health and well-being. Womanism is a way of being, a way of knowing, and a practice of fostering and cultivating life-affirming spaces. A womanist is “committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health” (Walker 2003, xi). And Black health, as Walker’s definition (in part) of womanist in the epigraph above reminds us, is about living Black lives fully, sensuously, spiritedly, and politically. What’s more, Black liberation movements have historically led to social change that improves everyone’s quality of life.
For example, it was African American activist Tarana Burke who coined the powerful phrase “Me Too” when she launched a nonprofit to serve victims of sexual abuse in 2006. Burke was inspired to launch “Me Too” after a decade of reflecting on an encounter she had with a 13-year-old girl who shared her story of sexual abuse. Stunned into momentary silence, Burke later wished she had said, “me too,” so that the child would have known that she wasn’t alone—neither in the experience nor in the recovery from it—and that women like her were working to prevent sexual violence. Burke’s Just Be Inc. had already spent a decade working to build a social movement against sexual violence and harassment by the time white actress Alyssa Milano tweeted out a “#MeToo” hashtag in response to allegations of sexual assault by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in October 2017 (García 2017).
Likewise, the recent and dramatic success of the #NeverAgain movement for gun control led by Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students who survived the Valentine’s Day 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, did not simply spring up out of fallow ground. Rather, it was rooted in and nourished by the largely youth-led #HandsUpDontShoot and #SayHerName movements’ intersectional understanding of the political economy of police brutality and impunity. That is, the #NeverAgain teenagers—“with every color represented”—have come of age both subject to the regular spectacle of hundreds of school-based shootings since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre and witness to the massive protests organized across the country in the aftermath of the extrajudicial killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, and dozens of others. We may never hear about the full extent of the role #BlackLivesMatter cofounders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, Tarana Burke, and other Black women’s health activists played in establishing the national groundwork that allowed the #MeToo and #NeverAgain movements to take off as they have, but we do know that they are part of a long history of Black women’s critical insights and public health activism that continues to sow new ground. As Alicia Garza (2016) put it, “When Black people get free, everybody gets free.”
Thus, in keeping with the spirit of resistance and remembrance that it celebrates, and as a powerful counterpoint to all of the times and ways Black folks have said #ICantBreathe to no avail, we dedicate this issue to Erica Garner (May 29, 1990—December 30, 2017). In the three years between when her father Eric Garner was choked to death by NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in 2014 and her own untimely death at the age of twenty-nine, Ms. Garner transformed her personal outrage and grief into political activism against police brutality and for criminal justice reforms. Fittingly, the cover for this special issue on Black women’s health features Zahira Kelly-Cabrera’s powerful image Breathe. As Barlow and Dill remind us in their introduction, for all who have come before, and for all who will follow, breathe—for self-care “is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (Lorde 1988).
Finally, in addition to being the last issue bridging Paula Giddings’s editorship and my own, this is also the last issue to be published by Indiana University Press. We are thankful to IUP—especially Sherondra Thedford, Journals Production Manager—for ensuring that Meridians has been produced as beautifully in form as it is serious in substance. We are particularly grateful that IUP’s understanding of Meridians’ mission and vision was evidenced in its sustained commitment to vividly reproducing art by and about women of color on all of our covers. We thank also our longtime cover compositor, Rebecca Neimark, who has repeatedly brought together a wide range of contributor’s art and Meridians design aesthetic with remarkable skill, and our brilliant copyeditor Alex Kapitan for often-unheralded, yet critical, production work. Thank you one and all.
Volume 16 Issue 1
Editor's Introduction
This issue is the product of several departures, layovers, connections, and arrivals. Paula J. Giddings retired from Smith College and Meridians as of June 30, 2017, closing a successful twelve-year run as Editor. Paula is succeeded by Ginetta E. B. Candelario, a long-time member of the Meridians editorial group, who assumed the editorship as of July 1, 2017. Sarah LaBelle, Meridians' longtime Administrative Assistant, also departed after five years of dedicated and invaluable service to the journal. Our new Editorial Assistant, Leslie Marie Aguilar, comes to us—by way of Abilene, TX—from Indiana Review, where she served as Poetry Editor. Before leaving, Paula and Sarah began putting this issue together. The timing of their departure, however, meant that seeing it through to publication would entail several layovers and carefully timed connections during the transition process. As with all departures and arrivals, we are sad to bid our colleagues farewell, yet excited to arrive at our new destination. This is in part what makes the cover art for this issue especially fitting.
Favianna Rodriguez's De Avión en Avión (From Plane to Plane) is a "self-portrait" of her feelings while flying. A collage of airline ticket stubs from flights she has taken "to wonderful places," the piece is a vivid depiction of her life as an artist. From geographic locations like "Tokyo or Berlin or Mexico City or . . . Los Angeles"1 to resonant moments in time, Rodriguez's piece aptly presages our contributors deft and surefooted navigations of complex, contradictory, and at times inhospitable intellectual terrains and questions. As we approach the end of our second decade of publishing scholarship, essays, and culture works produced by and about women of color, we have decided to return to our signature features. Similar to Volume l, Number 1, this issue includes Essays, Counterpoints, Cultureworks, Memoir, Media Matters, and In the Trenches pieces. As our founding Editorial Group outlined:
COUNTERPOINTS initiates a self-conscious examination of the analytical and political vocabulary of the fields in which feminists work . . .
IN THE TRENCHES asks where practical application and community activism take women around the world and in what forms these manifest themselves . . .
CULTUREWORKS will include creative work, interviews with artists, photo or art essays, poetry, short fiction, and drama . . .
MEMOIRS analyzes the formation of consciousness and examines the production of racial, sexual, and national subjects . . .
MEDIA MATTERS focuses on the debates, meanings, politics, and uses of visual, musical, or cybernet representations in popular culture . . .
IN THE ARCHIVES will publish documents from institutional or organizational repositories . . .
We open this issue with an essay by Barbara Tomlinson, whose intervention historicizes on-going debates about the meaning and (mis) uses of intersectionality as theory and elucidating metaphor. Tomlinson argues that "white reception of intersectional thinking" inside the academy repeatedly distorts intersectionality's explicit movement beyond accepting white women's subjectivity as the universal, fixed, and generative center of feminisms. She argues further that the geometric metaphors deployed by scholars such as Crenshaw (intersectionality) and Hill-Collins (interlocking) help to "provide insight into social relations and structures of power" that frame gender, race, and class—as well as other axes of inequality and domination—as dynamically and mutually constitutive concepts rather than being mere metaphors "caught in the vice of geometry."
Likewise, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles' piece on Marie Chauvet examines a tradition of scholars who focus their attention on Chauvet's life, rather than her work. Jean-Charles argues that the excessive focus on Chauvet's looks and repeated distortion of her biography illuminates how superficial, identitarian forms of intersectionality produce a milieu that names, claims, and frames Chauvet as a Haitian woman writer without the sort of rigorous intellectual attention that critical intersectionality affords her body of work. Interestingly, and in keeping with our theme, it is from Haiti's transnational diaspora that the first serious engagements with Chauvet's work emerges.
Continuing with this exploration of the history of claims upon and uses to which feminist writing and scholarship is put in situ and internationally, Cornelia Möser traces the connections and disconnections between US and French feminist theorizing of sex, sexuality, and gender as it traveled transatlantically and was translated back and forth from the 1970s to the present. Möser argues that the social context in which feminists and debated whether sexual liberation was possible within patriarchal and heteronormative societies—what such a liberation might look like or would require, and how it could be achieved—informed and was in turn informed by engagement with social theory (feminist or otherwise) produced in the US and France but translated and engaged with transnationally, with consequential effects all around.
Similarly Miglena S. Todorova tells the story of African American women, such as Angela Davis, who traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1970s as part of a broader history of Black internationalism and traveling US feminist theories. Todorova argues that the effect of these encounters on both the Black women and the ethno-racial minority women they met in the course of their travels was a necessary re-mapping of anti-racist, feminist transnationalism within and across the First, Second, and Third Worlds. Focusing on Muslim and Romani women in Bulgaria, Todorova illustrates how theories and activism emerged from critical intersectionality grounded in socialist and post-socialist contexts. Like critical intersectionality born of capitalist society's matrix of domination, socialist and post-socialist intersectional feminism centers and responds to interlocking oppressions and, consequently, informs transnational politics of solidarity among women of color across the world.
Finally, Julie Iromuanya explores the global black hair industry, its African immigrant iterations in the United States, and its representation in Chimamanda Adichie's novel, Americanah. Eschewing the simplistic framing of beauty work and the hair care industry as inherently structured by—and thus subservient to—patriarchal and/or white supremacist regimes, Iromuanya argues that African natural hair care agents are "nuanced" feminists who navigate gender, class, national, and neo-colonial structures. They are women who pursue economic autonomy and advancement while supporting Africentric aesthetics of women like Americanah's protagonist, Ifemelu, whose return to African hair styling presages her return to her true love in Nigeria after years living in the United States. Yet that return, while liberating in some ways, is in no way free of the costs and constraints of patriarchy's power and prerogatives.
Much like the essays in this volume, the memoir, counterpoint, media matters piece, and poetry take up themes of misperception, transformation, and dislocation while collectively inhabiting many worlds. Poems by Jacqueline Bishop, Karen An-hwie Lee, rose.elle.kiwi, and Lavinia Kumar arrive at vital junctures throughout the issue. Each resonates with questions raised by the issue's other contributors, and gives voice to its own subject and space. Traveling through China, Russia, the United States, and the transnational sphere, these poems syncopate with a rhythm that transcends borders.
Wendy Thompson Taiwo's Memoir tells of growing up and mothering as a Black Chinese American woman who rejects simplistic calculations of the causes and consequences of anti-Blackness. Our Media Matters selection from Janelle Marie Evans ruminates on how science fiction might offer the "best means for exploring and improving social inequality" because, by definition, it is outside the constraints of existing hegemony and invents a world of its own. "How to Write About Hawai'i," by Leilani Rania Ganser, is inspired by Binyavanga Wainaina's acclaimed 2005 satirical essay on colonialist writing about Africa, and captures the spirit of our In the Trenches category. Chamindra Weerawardhana, who critically interrogates feminist International Relations work and policies that sustain and produce a presumptive gender binary, explores discursive and ideological to impediments to the realization of gender equity and justice in her Counterpoint, "Profoundly Decolonizing? Reflections on a Transfeminist Perspective of International Relations."
Finally, and fittingly, we close this issue with an In the Archives piece: Paul J. Giddings' first Editor's Introduction, which appeared in Volume 5, Number 2, Spring 2005. Then, as now, Meridians was transitioning from one editor to another. Now, perhaps moreso than then, our broader national context makes our work more difficult, pressing and necessary. It is my sincere hope and aspiration to honor the legacies left by my three predecessors, each of whom has modeled deeply committed, feminist, anti-racist transnationalism within and outside the academy. Axé.
This issue is the product of several departures, layovers, connections, and arrivals. Paula J. Giddings retired from Smith College and Meridians as of June 30, 2017, closing a successful twelve-year run as Editor. Paula is succeeded by Ginetta E. B. Candelario, a long-time member of the Meridians editorial group, who assumed the editorship as of July 1, 2017. Sarah LaBelle, Meridians' longtime Administrative Assistant, also departed after five years of dedicated and invaluable service to the journal. Our new Editorial Assistant, Leslie Marie Aguilar, comes to us—by way of Abilene, TX—from Indiana Review, where she served as Poetry Editor. Before leaving, Paula and Sarah began putting this issue together. The timing of their departure, however, meant that seeing it through to publication would entail several layovers and carefully timed connections during the transition process. As with all departures and arrivals, we are sad to bid our colleagues farewell, yet excited to arrive at our new destination. This is in part what makes the cover art for this issue especially fitting.
Favianna Rodriguez's De Avión en Avión (From Plane to Plane) is a "self-portrait" of her feelings while flying. A collage of airline ticket stubs from flights she has taken "to wonderful places," the piece is a vivid depiction of her life as an artist. From geographic locations like "Tokyo or Berlin or Mexico City or . . . Los Angeles"1 to resonant moments in time, Rodriguez's piece aptly presages our contributors deft and surefooted navigations of complex, contradictory, and at times inhospitable intellectual terrains and questions. As we approach the end of our second decade of publishing scholarship, essays, and culture works produced by and about women of color, we have decided to return to our signature features. Similar to Volume l, Number 1, this issue includes Essays, Counterpoints, Cultureworks, Memoir, Media Matters, and In the Trenches pieces. As our founding Editorial Group outlined:
COUNTERPOINTS initiates a self-conscious examination of the analytical and political vocabulary of the fields in which feminists work . . .
IN THE TRENCHES asks where practical application and community activism take women around the world and in what forms these manifest themselves . . .
CULTUREWORKS will include creative work, interviews with artists, photo or art essays, poetry, short fiction, and drama . . .
MEMOIRS analyzes the formation of consciousness and examines the production of racial, sexual, and national subjects . . .
MEDIA MATTERS focuses on the debates, meanings, politics, and uses of visual, musical, or cybernet representations in popular culture . . .
IN THE ARCHIVES will publish documents from institutional or organizational repositories . . .
We open this issue with an essay by Barbara Tomlinson, whose intervention historicizes on-going debates about the meaning and (mis) uses of intersectionality as theory and elucidating metaphor. Tomlinson argues that "white reception of intersectional thinking" inside the academy repeatedly distorts intersectionality's explicit movement beyond accepting white women's subjectivity as the universal, fixed, and generative center of feminisms. She argues further that the geometric metaphors deployed by scholars such as Crenshaw (intersectionality) and Hill-Collins (interlocking) help to "provide insight into social relations and structures of power" that frame gender, race, and class—as well as other axes of inequality and domination—as dynamically and mutually constitutive concepts rather than being mere metaphors "caught in the vice of geometry."
Likewise, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles' piece on Marie Chauvet examines a tradition of scholars who focus their attention on Chauvet's life, rather than her work. Jean-Charles argues that the excessive focus on Chauvet's looks and repeated distortion of her biography illuminates how superficial, identitarian forms of intersectionality produce a milieu that names, claims, and frames Chauvet as a Haitian woman writer without the sort of rigorous intellectual attention that critical intersectionality affords her body of work. Interestingly, and in keeping with our theme, it is from Haiti's transnational diaspora that the first serious engagements with Chauvet's work emerges.
Continuing with this exploration of the history of claims upon and uses to which feminist writing and scholarship is put in situ and internationally, Cornelia Möser traces the connections and disconnections between US and French feminist theorizing of sex, sexuality, and gender as it traveled transatlantically and was translated back and forth from the 1970s to the present. Möser argues that the social context in which feminists and debated whether sexual liberation was possible within patriarchal and heteronormative societies—what such a liberation might look like or would require, and how it could be achieved—informed and was in turn informed by engagement with social theory (feminist or otherwise) produced in the US and France but translated and engaged with transnationally, with consequential effects all around.
Similarly Miglena S. Todorova tells the story of African American women, such as Angela Davis, who traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1970s as part of a broader history of Black internationalism and traveling US feminist theories. Todorova argues that the effect of these encounters on both the Black women and the ethno-racial minority women they met in the course of their travels was a necessary re-mapping of anti-racist, feminist transnationalism within and across the First, Second, and Third Worlds. Focusing on Muslim and Romani women in Bulgaria, Todorova illustrates how theories and activism emerged from critical intersectionality grounded in socialist and post-socialist contexts. Like critical intersectionality born of capitalist society's matrix of domination, socialist and post-socialist intersectional feminism centers and responds to interlocking oppressions and, consequently, informs transnational politics of solidarity among women of color across the world.
Finally, Julie Iromuanya explores the global black hair industry, its African immigrant iterations in the United States, and its representation in Chimamanda Adichie's novel, Americanah. Eschewing the simplistic framing of beauty work and the hair care industry as inherently structured by—and thus subservient to—patriarchal and/or white supremacist regimes, Iromuanya argues that African natural hair care agents are "nuanced" feminists who navigate gender, class, national, and neo-colonial structures. They are women who pursue economic autonomy and advancement while supporting Africentric aesthetics of women like Americanah's protagonist, Ifemelu, whose return to African hair styling presages her return to her true love in Nigeria after years living in the United States. Yet that return, while liberating in some ways, is in no way free of the costs and constraints of patriarchy's power and prerogatives.
Much like the essays in this volume, the memoir, counterpoint, media matters piece, and poetry take up themes of misperception, transformation, and dislocation while collectively inhabiting many worlds. Poems by Jacqueline Bishop, Karen An-hwie Lee, rose.elle.kiwi, and Lavinia Kumar arrive at vital junctures throughout the issue. Each resonates with questions raised by the issue's other contributors, and gives voice to its own subject and space. Traveling through China, Russia, the United States, and the transnational sphere, these poems syncopate with a rhythm that transcends borders.
Wendy Thompson Taiwo's Memoir tells of growing up and mothering as a Black Chinese American woman who rejects simplistic calculations of the causes and consequences of anti-Blackness. Our Media Matters selection from Janelle Marie Evans ruminates on how science fiction might offer the "best means for exploring and improving social inequality" because, by definition, it is outside the constraints of existing hegemony and invents a world of its own. "How to Write About Hawai'i," by Leilani Rania Ganser, is inspired by Binyavanga Wainaina's acclaimed 2005 satirical essay on colonialist writing about Africa, and captures the spirit of our In the Trenches category. Chamindra Weerawardhana, who critically interrogates feminist International Relations work and policies that sustain and produce a presumptive gender binary, explores discursive and ideological to impediments to the realization of gender equity and justice in her Counterpoint, "Profoundly Decolonizing? Reflections on a Transfeminist Perspective of International Relations."
Finally, and fittingly, we close this issue with an In the Archives piece: Paul J. Giddings' first Editor's Introduction, which appeared in Volume 5, Number 2, Spring 2005. Then, as now, Meridians was transitioning from one editor to another. Now, perhaps moreso than then, our broader national context makes our work more difficult, pressing and necessary. It is my sincere hope and aspiration to honor the legacies left by my three predecessors, each of whom has modeled deeply committed, feminist, anti-racist transnationalism within and outside the academy. Axé.