{"title":"Matter and Memory","authors":"Ayasha Guerin","doi":"10.1215/15366936-10220513","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-10220513","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This three-part essay first introduces Berlin’s anticolonial, Black feminist poetics through the work of May Ayim and Audre Lorde, whose poems “Blues in Black-and-White” and “East Berlin 1989” were written shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in response to racial attacks in a “reunited” Germany. Part I explores how these poetics and politics have influenced ongoing efforts to engage with the memory of German colonialism, xenophobia, and memorialization in public spaces. Part II moves the reader into close studies of two contemporary performance works by Afro-diasporic artists in Berlin who build on the Black feminist poetics explored in Part I. The first, Wayward Dust by Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, was an invited performance at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in August 2020. The second, untitled performance, by the group Black Art Action Berlin (BAAB), was uninvited, and took place in Berlin’s Humboldt Forum in October 2021. In Part III, the author discusses how these performance artists in Berlin have responded to institutional pledges to “decolonize” museums, by inverting expectations of Black performance and white spectatorship in this space. The author argues that they are important interventions for this contemporary moment of institutional reckoning that challenge expectations of Black labor and white leisure in the museum, and that they should be understood within the context of an ongoing creative struggle developed in transnational Black feminist praxis.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73541507","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":"Strategies of Visibilization","authors":"claudia sandoval romero*","doi":"10.1215/15366936-10220535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-10220535","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Strategies of Visibilization is a spatial installation that consists of the listings of artists who participated in exhibitions at the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien-mumok between 1998 and 2018. The installation compares proportions of participation by gender and geopolitical origin. From a subjective-critical perspective and by addressing questions about representation, positioning in the artistic field, and power relationships within the museological context, the proposal seeks to contribute to the debates about loss, mourning, and restitution of women in the Global South who have been denied a position in the art field.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72494767","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":"The Mourning of My Birth in the Wake of Grandma’s One Hundredth Year","authors":"K. M. Quick Hall","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9882064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9882064","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this essay the author describes how she orchestrates her own death for her mother’s survival and begins to travel with her dying grandmother. She shares lessons from her grandmother’s elongated, memory-less, graceless dying through a series of vignettes. While her mother accepts the author’s proclamation of her own death, the mother mourns the simultaneous loss of her daughter and mother. In the midst of her mother’s suffering, the author shares the joyous mourning of her travels with Grandma.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72473490","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":"Mourning Methods","authors":"Amanda Russhell Wallace","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9882130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9882130","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 There is no encapsulated decisive moment in mourning. Rather, it manifests as time based and time oriented collaging amalgamated from broad notions of the archive. Particularly, the author’s practice of historical collaging interlaces the past and present with a hopeful thread of futures reliant upon her performing as an artist-magician aspiring to break the mourning. Optical undoing is the point of departure that the author’s art practice often takes while running back and forth with the dead and dying. For this issue, the author discusses what could be methods of visual critical fabulation (to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s term) via the metaphorical weaving, burning, excision, and preservation as mourning methods that span her predominantly lens-based work.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78618127","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":"A Light for a Light","authors":"Sandra Ruiz","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9882141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9882141","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 How does loss tear a hole in the world and produce a collective remaking of a new social order in which grief-work is not contained singularly but is a process done in feminist, queer, and Black and Brown ensemble? Interested in how we deliberately incorporate loss into collective grief-work, this article pulls from feminist and queer theorists of color who move across social and psychical constructions of sorrow. Highlighting contemporary art by minoritarian artists such as Eva Margarita Reyes and Pedro Lopez, who embrace loss, the author argues that grief-work is a communal labor we undergo together in acts of intimate meditation, suffering, spillage, and transformation. Happening in feminist and queer ensemble, grief-work is a deliberate decision to assemble in nonlinear feelings and attachments; it is an intention to work together to defend not only the dead but also the living, tending to immaterial energies that shift the fecund terrain of both life and death.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82872394","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":"The Uses of Mourning","authors":"K. J. Brown, J. Puri","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9882053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9882053","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81629740","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":"Mothering Dead Bodies","authors":"Tiffany Caesar, Desireé R. Melonas, Tara Jones","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9882174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9882174","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Through the recounting of the narratives of two revolutionary Black mothers, Melissa Mckinnies and Yolanda McNair, this essay explores the ways in which Black mothers who have lost children to police violence have responded to Black maternal necropolitics and the ensuing historical legacy of Black maternal grief through political activism. It examines, through an engagement with global Black scholars through political theory, mothering theories, and depth psychology, how they manage to navigate maternal grief and loss into political action, thereby continuing their work of mothering and affirming the worth of their children’s lives, even when all that remains of their children are their dead bodies. In this way, the authors hope to highlight how Black mothers who embody revolutionary mothering through maternal activism enable them to imagine the possibility of an alternative future, one in which Black mothers are able to live happily with their children free from state-sanctioned violence targeting Black people.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72656253","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":"Mothers, Daughters, and the Lash","authors":"C. Baker","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9882075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9882075","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines women’s literary mourning as expressed in the trope of lashing in Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy. Structural ties, bonds, and lashes grant affective bonds in A Mercy a dangerous and sometimes lethal edge. This essay examines the fraught bonding and binding—or, to use the language of A Mercy, the lashing—that deforms the relationship between mothers and daughters and produces an archive of intergenerational mourning that struggles to be transmitted and deciphered. This essay seeks to understand how language and affective bonds influence the narrative management of women’s bodies and the form of the novel itself. The invitation to mourn extends beyond the book’s characters and to the reader. A Mercy disturbs the potentially stabilizing authority of the written word, expanding the practice of literary mourning from the world of the book to the world of the book’s reader. Lashed to a language that promises our undoing, the reader—like the women in the novel—confronts the originary violences of patriarchy, settler colonialism, and slavery that define the newness of the “New World.”","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81004094","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":"“Rubbed Inflections of Litany and Myth”","authors":"N. Kang","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9882097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9882097","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Ciguapas are mythical creatures, typically represented as naked, comely females with uniquely backward feet. Such anatomy renders their path virtually untraceable. Legends suggest they inhabit remote mountains and forests in the Dominican Republic, preying on men. This essay steps away from the predatory archetype, formulating a theory of women’s loss and mourning through the motif of “forward backwardness” epitomized by the ciguapa’s feet. Using selections from the work of Dominican American poet Rhina P. Espaillat (b. 1932), the author outlines the feminist paradigm of ciguapismo, a fundamentally paradoxical mode for understanding how women endure in times of personal grief, awareness of aging, and under the shadow of sexual violence. It is also a form of environmental reckoning centered on collective care. Whether set in the Caribbean or the U.S. Dominican diaspora, ciguapismo in Espaillat’s poetry offers a critical resource, an imaginative faculty, and a liminal ontology for mapping transformative feminist intimacies against a backdrop of ever-encroaching human and environmental losses.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86766040","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}