Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-10220513
Ayasha Guerin
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.
{"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":"2 1","pages":""},"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}
Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-10220535
claudia sandoval romero*
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.
{"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":"283 ","pages":""},"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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9882064
K. M. Quick Hall
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.
{"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":"40 1","pages":""},"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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9882130
Amanda Russhell Wallace
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.
{"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":"62 1","pages":""},"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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9882141
Sandra Ruiz
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.
{"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":"4 1","pages":""},"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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9882053
K. J. Brown, J. Puri
{"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":"9 1","pages":""},"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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9882174
Tiffany Caesar, Desireé R. Melonas, Tara Jones
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.
{"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":"19 1","pages":""},"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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9882075
C. Baker
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.”
{"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":"33 1","pages":""},"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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9882086
Aslı Zengin
In Sunni Muslim funerals in Turkey, the state, religious actors, and members of kin and family hold the obligations and rights to the deceased, such as washing, shrouding, burying, and praying for the dead body, which the author characterizes as care for the dead. The practices of care represent the deceased body in strictly gendered ways. For instance, the coffin design, the prayers at the mosque, the washing ritual prior to burial, and the rites of inhumation are different for women and men. This article examines the intimate economies of touch that take place while preparing the deceased body for a religious afterlife. Touch, in the form of washing, kissing, and caressing the deceased by family members, is central to showing the last deeds and bidding farewell to the lost one. However, past cases demonstrate that when the deceased is a trans person, corpse washers and family members may refuse to touch the body of the deceased during the washing ritual. Theorizing touch as an essential care work for the dead, the author discusses the limits of gendered and sexual belonging in the practices and discourses of mourning and grief in Turkey.
{"title":"Caring for the Dead","authors":"Aslı Zengin","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9882086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9882086","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In Sunni Muslim funerals in Turkey, the state, religious actors, and members of kin and family hold the obligations and rights to the deceased, such as washing, shrouding, burying, and praying for the dead body, which the author characterizes as care for the dead. The practices of care represent the deceased body in strictly gendered ways. For instance, the coffin design, the prayers at the mosque, the washing ritual prior to burial, and the rites of inhumation are different for women and men. This article examines the intimate economies of touch that take place while preparing the deceased body for a religious afterlife. Touch, in the form of washing, kissing, and caressing the deceased by family members, is central to showing the last deeds and bidding farewell to the lost one. However, past cases demonstrate that when the deceased is a trans person, corpse washers and family members may refuse to touch the body of the deceased during the washing ritual. Theorizing touch as an essential care work for the dead, the author discusses the limits of gendered and sexual belonging in the practices and discourses of mourning and grief in Turkey.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79936603","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}