{"title":"When Diane Tells Me a Story","authors":"Lashon Daley","doi":"10.1215/15366936-10637663","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-10637663","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay examines the complex relationship that developed between ethnographer Lashon Daley and her research subject, Diane Ferlatte, over the course of Daley’s master’s thesis project and the years beyond. Through storytelling and narrative prose, Daley investigates the roles that grief, death, Black motherhood, and the Black southern oral tradition play within their ever-growing bond. As their relationship progresses from researcher and respondent to mother and daughter, their bond displays the connective tissue that binds one person to another through history, memory, and the common experience of loss. By exploring the performativity of Black women who are bonded by love and not blood, this essay demonstrates how Black womanhood becomes a conduit for grieving and healing.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Picturing Herself in Africa","authors":"Grace L. Sanders Johnson","doi":"10.1215/15366936-10637681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-10637681","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay explores the relationship between imaging, archival cataloging, and African diasporic belonging through the developed and undeveloped photography of Haitian anthropologist Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain. Using her family correspondences and research on folklore to contextualize her image-based archive on Haiti, the Belgian Congo, and Nigeria, the author proposes that Comhaire-Sylvain’s visual catalog is rendered legible through her undeveloped images taken in Africa. Tracing Comhaire-Sylvain’s contortions in front of and behind the camera, the author shows that her undeveloped and unpublished imaging practices of play and experimentation exemplify a medium of scholarly and personal reflexivity that troubled the authority of her professional research practice and enlivened the range of her diasporic expression. With particular attention given to photos taken during her time in the Belgian Congo between 1943 and 1945 and her long-stay return to Haiti in 1957, the author argues that Comhaire-Sylvain’s imaging catalog is most provocatively read as an assemblage bound by her use of folklore as a unique technology for crafting meaning between overlapping sites of diasporic belonging and intellectual inquiry.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Young Afghan-Canadian Women’s Negotiations of Gendered Cultural Scripts and Hybrid Cultural Identities","authors":"Saher Ahmed, Amrita Hari","doi":"10.1215/15366936-10637627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-10637627","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A hybrid identity is neither a happy nor an undesirable mixture; it involves negotiating sometimes two contrasting cultural identities of the home and host nations. Research on post-migratory negotiations of gender identity, roles, and expectations has found that partner selection and marriage are significant cultural practices in a diasporic context. In this study, the authors contribute to two sets of literatures: studies on the lived experiences of Afghan-Canadian migrant and refugee women and postcolonial debates on cultural hybridity. The authors employ in-depth feminist interviews to reveal second-generation Afghan-Canadian women’s gendered negotiations of partner-selection practices and marital ceremonies, including their resistance and conformity to these practices through the mobilization of their hybrid diasporic identities. Overall, the study design allows the authors to situate the voices of young Afghan women at the forefront.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Black Women Undertakers of the Early Twentieth Century Were Hidden in Plain Sight","authors":"Kami Fletcher","doi":"10.1215/15366936-10637582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-10637582","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay foregrounds Black women in the very narrative of undertaking that they helped create and develop. It was the wives who helped start the country’s oldest undertaking firms, and it was the wives, sisters, and daughters who sustained and professionalized the funeral home legacy. The article follows women from the American South and mid-Atlantic regions, illustrating how, with their skills and capital, they labored not just as funeral directresses, embalmers, and undertakers but also as bookkeepers, hairdressers, accountants, caterers. These women were “race women,” college-educated Black women who were trained to uplift the race. And as race women in the death trade, they brought their skills and education to a field that created generational wealth and civic empowerment.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"115 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"American Beech","authors":"Yalie Saweda Kamara","doi":"10.1215/15366936-10637555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-10637555","url":null,"abstract":"I don’t mind when she approaches me, a strangeron North Walnut Street, who only tells me about what shesees while reaching two fingers in to retrieveit from my hair. She squints a bit, fights the menaceof hot, silver, Hoosier sun, and relieves me of a problemthat, for her, rests too close to me. A deep plunge into mycurls, I wait to see how far she goes, and because Imiss the hands of the women I know, I think I’d evenlet her hook her unfamiliar fingers into the lace of my wig, but she stops short of me feeling completely like home.It is an American Beech leaf, green as green, as opposite of red;she pulls this weightless raft from inside the crown of me.In small-town, downtown, there is a woman who doesnot know my name, but calls herself my mirror. Haptic grace.She holds the leaf to my face, then releases it to flow slowlydown the vertical river of air to the pewter concrete. I don’t mindwhen she approaches me, a stranger on North Walnut Street,taking a leaf, leaving her fingerprints, to sing and sing and singso close to our skin until I hear my own voice say: I feel you, too. Howmighty. The God portal of human touch.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When My Brown Got Colored","authors":"Sreerekha Sathi","doi":"10.1215/15366936-10637564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-10637564","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay is a testimonial of the author’s experiences, memories, and reflections about becoming a person/woman of color, discovering, and unearthing the meanings of racialization, white privilege, and white supremacy in the contemporary United States. The author gives voice to her new migrant experience as a Brown woman from India, positioning her reflections and learnings amidst the history and politics of colonialism and capitalist development, linking it to contemporary neoliberal academia in the United States. By sharing some events and encounters in her relatively short stint in Charlottesville, Virginia, between 2016 and 2019, the author reviews her attempts to critically analyze concepts like women of color, diversity, colorism, privilege, invisibility, and othering. The article further connects some of the author’s experiences of racialization in view of the growing politics of casteism and Brahmanical supremacy in India, locating and reassessing herself in the midst of Trump’s hardened propagation of white privilege in the United States and Modi’s Hindutva, both emanating a politics rooted in racialization, exploitation, and marginalization of the other.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Are Reindeer the New Buffalo? Climate Change, the Green Shift, and Manifest Destiny in Sápmi","authors":"R. Kuokkanen","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.4139428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4139428","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the nineteenth-century prairies, the buffalo was nearly exterminated as the result of the European economic and ecological invasion. Today in Scandinavia, reindeer are being threatened by the renewable energy transition, also known as the Green Shift. The Green Shift has led to an explosion of the wind industry in many countries, including Norway. Many of the onshore wind development projects have been built in areas central to reindeer herding. This article asks whether reindeer have become the new buffalo that are being sacrificed in the race to build green energies. It considers the view of reindeer herding as a vanishing livelihood and the pervasive colonial discourse of manifest destiny, which sees Indigenous peoples as disappearing in the process of natural selection and progress. The article also examines the Feminist Green New Deal (FGND) as an example of a policy framework calling for a broader intersectional approach that places race, unequal relations of power, and Indigenous rights at the heart of policy making. It considers whether the FGND is able to tackle and engage with the trajectories of settler colonialism, including manifest destiny and green colonialism. The article focuses specifically on Norway for its leading role in the energy transition and wind energy development in the Nordic countries.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"22 1","pages":"11 - 33"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47424159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"European BIPOC Feminisms","authors":"Nana Osei-Kofi, S. Tate","doi":"10.1215/15366936-10220447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-10220447","url":null,"abstract":"Scholarship and activism that center Black feminist thought, Women-ofColor feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, and Queer of Color critiques are not new in the European context. However, they are often overshadowed by white European feminist and queer theorization and political action on the one hand, and U.S.-centric scholarship and activism on the other. In one of the few edited volumes to take up Black feminism from a European perspective, Akwugo Emejulu and Francesca Sobande (2019: 5) note that “too often, when we think of Black feminist theory and activism, we look to the particular Black American experience and seek to universalize and apply it to Europe [,] . . . [a] dynamic . . . [that among other things] erase[s] . . . long histories of anti-imperialist struggles of Black feminists located across various European empires.”As coeditors of this special issue on BIPOC Europe, we feel strongly that the reality of Black feminist struggles that Emejulu and Sobande highlight, which is a reality that unequivocally extends to European BIPOC struggles as a whole, calls on us to remember that coloniality textures the current scholarly and activist landscape. These struggles have a history across European empires thatmust be acknowledged as critical to existing genealogies of Black, Women-ofColor, and Indigenous feminist epistemologies and praxes. As Black European scholars who live and work in Turtle Island, we recognize that we are situated on a site of continuing Indigenous dispossession and anti-Blackness (King 2019). From our location in North American institutions of higher education, we are keenly aware of the ways in which","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"22 1","pages":"10 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49310983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Are Reindeer the New Buffalo?","authors":"R. Kuokkanen","doi":"10.1215/15366936-10220458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-10220458","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the nineteenth-century prairies, the buffalo was nearly exterminated as the result of the European economic and ecological invasion. Today in Scandinavia, reindeer are being threatened by the renewable energy transition, also known as the Green Shift. The Green Shift has led to an explosion of the wind industry in many countries, including Norway. Many of the onshore wind development projects have been built in areas central to reindeer herding. This article asks whether reindeer have become the new buffalo that are being sacrificed in the race to build green energies. It considers the view of reindeer herding as a vanishing livelihood and the pervasive colonial discourse of manifest destiny, which sees Indigenous peoples as disappearing in the process of natural selection and progress. The article also examines the Feminist Green New Deal (FGND) as an example of a policy framework calling for a broader intersectional approach that places race, unequal relations of power, and Indigenous rights at the heart of policy making. It considers whether the FGND is able to tackle and engage with the trajectories of settler colonialism, including manifest destiny and green colonialism. The article focuses specifically on Norway for its leading role in the energy transition and wind energy development in the Nordic countries.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89461968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}