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.”
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Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9882152
P. Lott
This essay analyzes Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) as a book of lamentations for its bereaved black subject’s mother loss, social death, and prematurely ended girlhood. More specifically, it examines a daughter’s devastation over her natal alienation, violent domination, and general degradation within a hurtful herstory in which white motherhood and white mistresshood are sisters in subjugation. The author literarily autopsies Nig’s raciogenesis as black, her sociopolitical genealogy as enslaved, and her etiology as melancholic. This essay conceptualizes the domestic maternal passage as her transfer from white mother to mistress, a passage that sets in motion her exile from home and entrance into the hell of slavery. This passage is procreative of her social death and an open wound in her memory of mother loss and her mother hunger. Moreover, she is plagued by racial melancholia insofar as she bewails being governed as black and covets whiteness. Nig tends to her inner wounds by mourning, but social death chokes off her measures to work through her losses. This affective asphyxiation illustrates that her psychic condition arises not from an inner inability to digest loss but from external impediments that forcibly prescribe her inconsolability. This plight delineates Nig as a figure of unweepable wounds unwept in a grievous herstory.
{"title":"Unweepable Wounds Unwept","authors":"P. Lott","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9882152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9882152","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay analyzes Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) as a book of lamentations for its bereaved black subject’s mother loss, social death, and prematurely ended girlhood. More specifically, it examines a daughter’s devastation over her natal alienation, violent domination, and general degradation within a hurtful herstory in which white motherhood and white mistresshood are sisters in subjugation. The author literarily autopsies Nig’s raciogenesis as black, her sociopolitical genealogy as enslaved, and her etiology as melancholic. This essay conceptualizes the domestic maternal passage as her transfer from white mother to mistress, a passage that sets in motion her exile from home and entrance into the hell of slavery. This passage is procreative of her social death and an open wound in her memory of mother loss and her mother hunger. Moreover, she is plagued by racial melancholia insofar as she bewails being governed as black and covets whiteness. Nig tends to her inner wounds by mourning, but social death chokes off her measures to work through her losses. This affective asphyxiation illustrates that her psychic condition arises not from an inner inability to digest loss but from external impediments that forcibly prescribe her inconsolability. This plight delineates Nig as a figure of unweepable wounds unwept in a grievous herstory.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"86 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83058208","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: 10.1215/15366936-9882119
Kelli D. Moore
This review essay discusses recent exhibitions and accompanying art books published at the threshold of Black philosophy and aesthetics in relation to feminist mourning practices: Nicole Fleetwood’s book and exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020); Grief and Grievance, an exhibition (2021); a book (2020) conceived by the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor; and Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (2020), edited by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp. These books and several others elucidate how relationships between transnational feminism, mourning, and Black works of art speak to Frantz Fanon’s idea of “the leap into existence,” Hortense Spillers’s “dialectics of a global new woman,” and David Marriott’s psycho-political analysis of invention.
{"title":"Techniques of Abstraction in Black Arts","authors":"Kelli D. Moore","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9882119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9882119","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This review essay discusses recent exhibitions and accompanying art books published at the threshold of Black philosophy and aesthetics in relation to feminist mourning practices: Nicole Fleetwood’s book and exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020); Grief and Grievance, an exhibition (2021); a book (2020) conceived by the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor; and Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (2020), edited by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp. These books and several others elucidate how relationships between transnational feminism, mourning, and Black works of art speak to Frantz Fanon’s idea of “the leap into existence,” Hortense Spillers’s “dialectics of a global new woman,” and David Marriott’s psycho-political analysis of invention.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74164973","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: 10.1215/15366936-9882108
Eman Ghanayem
Part memoir, part theoretical reflection, this essay offers one answer to the question “How do Palestinians grieve?” In this narration of the author’s mother’s relationship to death, her multiple displacements, and her plan for her life, the term proactive grief is used to theorize how and why her mother’s life trajectory was shaped by her strife to have a dignified death, in other words, to be able to die in Palestine. To illuminate the significance of her mother’s approach to death and its relationship to being Palestinian, being refugee, and living under colonial war conditions, this essay also reflects on the difficulty of writing about grief while being personally entangled in its complicated emotions. Ultimately, her mother’s proactiveness and commitment to home within and beyond life present an intimate narrative and a family history that could show readers what it means to be Palestinian, to live colonization, to love home, and to face constant threat with dignity.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9554189
T. Davis
Abstract:Often the narrative on dark skin in America has been dominated by Eurocentric standards of beauty. White supremacy dictated dark skin to be unattractive and lesser than light skin. This poem explores the rich beauty of darkness in the natural world, from fruit in America to fruit in Ireland, unpacking and giving new energy to the old phrase "the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice." By exploring the journey from wonderment to acceptance to love, the work is a refutation of lighter skin being the only pathway to beauty, not just in America, but globally.
{"title":"Black Berries","authors":"T. Davis","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9554189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9554189","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Often the narrative on dark skin in America has been dominated by Eurocentric standards of beauty. White supremacy dictated dark skin to be unattractive and lesser than light skin. This poem explores the rich beauty of darkness in the natural world, from fruit in America to fruit in Ireland, unpacking and giving new energy to the old phrase \"the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.\" By exploring the journey from wonderment to acceptance to love, the work is a refutation of lighter skin being the only pathway to beauty, not just in America, but globally.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"101 1","pages":"293 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85914378","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 : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9554112
Elizabeth Pérez
Forty-some years ago your father’s blonde father (my great-grand), distantly Italian, forbid his son’s marriage to a Negra in writing that few in town could read. Your parents eloped, snapping sugarcane shafts underfoot, the final crush after snubbing a compulsory harvest. As soon as your mother bore her sole child, wriggling in the heat of a legendary fall, my great-uncle (your father) leapt at a flight
{"title":"Remittances","authors":"Elizabeth Pérez","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9554112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9554112","url":null,"abstract":"Forty-some years ago your father’s blonde father (my great-grand), distantly Italian, forbid his son’s marriage to a Negra in writing that few in town could read. Your parents eloped, snapping sugarcane shafts underfoot, the final crush after snubbing a compulsory harvest. As soon as your mother bore her sole child, wriggling in the heat of a legendary fall, my great-uncle (your father) leapt at a flight","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"21 1","pages":"155 - 157"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42616617","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 : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9547885
Natasha Bakht
Bans or attempts to ban the niqab have traveled global circuits, with disastrous consequences for Muslim women who wear the face veil. These women have evoked a repugnance that insists on erasing them from public spaces. An analysis of niqab bans reveals that: (1) a transnational proliferation of racist methods of regulating Muslim women’s dress occurs through law; (2) they have been initiated by politicians to protect majoritarian values; (3) justifications for bans are based on specious logic; and (4) some are defended using gender equality on the erroneous assumption that women are universally coerced into wearing this garment despite empirical research noting that women wear the niqab as an expression of faith. The treatment of niqab-wearing women requires close attention to the transnational routes of legalized anti-Muslim racism.
{"title":"Transnational Anti-Muslim Racism","authors":"Natasha Bakht","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9547885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9547885","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Bans or attempts to ban the niqab have traveled global circuits, with disastrous consequences for Muslim women who wear the face veil. These women have evoked a repugnance that insists on erasing them from public spaces. An analysis of niqab bans reveals that: (1) a transnational proliferation of racist methods of regulating Muslim women’s dress occurs through law; (2) they have been initiated by politicians to protect majoritarian values; (3) justifications for bans are based on specious logic; and (4) some are defended using gender equality on the erroneous assumption that women are universally coerced into wearing this garment despite empirical research noting that women wear the niqab as an expression of faith. The treatment of niqab-wearing women requires close attention to the transnational routes of legalized anti-Muslim racism.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84533837","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 : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9547932
Amina Jamal
Abstract:In many Muslim-majority societies, including Pakistan, liberal progressive subjects who espouse feminism and gender equality do so through the language of universal human rights and political secularism. This brings them into conflict not only with anti-secular rightwing conservatives within their own societies but also with progressive scholarly critics of secularism in other contexts. To clear the space for a nuanced understanding of feminist secularism in Pakistan, the author examines a unique style of politics that may be described as "secular" among middle-class Muslim women interviewed by the author in Karachi and Islamabad. She argues that the espousal of secularism by feminists as a political cultural discourse in South Asia can initiate a politics that challenges hegemonic notions of self, community, and nation that are gaining strength in Pakistan. This position militates against simplistic understandings of secular feminism in this Muslim-majority society as the politics of colonized subjects or as a hegemonic nexus for reproducing the discursive power of Eurocentric and universalist discourses.
{"title":"The Entanglement of Secularism and Feminism in Pakistan","authors":"Amina Jamal","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9547932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9547932","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In many Muslim-majority societies, including Pakistan, liberal progressive subjects who espouse feminism and gender equality do so through the language of universal human rights and political secularism. This brings them into conflict not only with anti-secular rightwing conservatives within their own societies but also with progressive scholarly critics of secularism in other contexts. To clear the space for a nuanced understanding of feminist secularism in Pakistan, the author examines a unique style of politics that may be described as \"secular\" among middle-class Muslim women interviewed by the author in Karachi and Islamabad. She argues that the espousal of secularism by feminists as a political cultural discourse in South Asia can initiate a politics that challenges hegemonic notions of self, community, and nation that are gaining strength in Pakistan. This position militates against simplistic understandings of secular feminism in this Muslim-majority society as the politics of colonized subjects or as a hegemonic nexus for reproducing the discursive power of Eurocentric and universalist discourses.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"20 1","pages":"370 - 395"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49623733","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 : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9547921
Elora Shehabuddin
This article explores some of the ways in which, in the early years of the united Pakistan experiment, elite educated Muslim East Bengali women experienced and narrated their relationship to the new Pakistan nation as they navigated the international stage as citizens of a new sovereign Muslim-majority state. In the context of the nascent Cold War and the Pakistani state’s efforts to develop its own relationship with the United States, one that was distinct from that of India and yet motivated almost entirely by concerns about the greater military might of this large neighbor, Pakistani women from both wings were quickly pulled into the orbit of US- and Soviet-sponsored women’s organizations targeting women around the world. In this article, the author focuses on the relationship between Pakistani and US women in the 1950s that emerges from the memoirs, biographies, and writings of Bengali Pakistani women active in this period, as well as from the archives—housed in Smith College’s Sophia Smith Collection—of one of the first formal US women’s groups to establish contact with East Bengali women leaders: the New York-based Committee of Correspondence.
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