Editor's Introduction

One theme that threads through this volume of Meridians is how globalization, made possible by advances in science and technology, can also affirm antimodern practices which have particularly affected women of color. Dispersals, disturbances, and porous borders have reified nationalisms that, in liberatory moments, raise political consciousness, but then too often settle with the thud of circumscribing tradition upon the bodies of women. A number of essays reflect the effort to counter the trend through activism and re-conceptualize the role of women through the arts, memory, and the questioning of alleged remedial institutional practices and scholarship.

Sara Ahmed's "The Nonperformativity of Anti-racism" codifies how "the acts of speech" (which include visual images and writings as well as spoken words) provide identity, purpose, character, and even personality for an institution. In universities where diversity and antiracism are oft-stated goals, acts of speech construct liberal identities, but as the author reminds us, such claims are nonperformative and should not be confused with the body politic. Acts of speech are, then, poor measures of a university's commitment to act against institutional racism.

Karla FC Holloway's "'Cruel Enough to Stop the Blood,'" critiques the current trend of U.S. feminist scholarship which focuses on the status of "transnational bodies" while neglecting race politics at home. Holloway looks at what she calls "white racial disappearing," as it is articulated through the U.S. media's obsession with the disappearance of a number of white women and girls, and the displacing discourse around the transnational adoption of Asian children by white women.

The 2000 census marked the recognition of the emergent Latino/a population in the United States and the global market possibilities represented by this new group of consumers. But as dramatists Tanya Saracho and Coya Paz realized, commercialization served to consolidate rather than to diversify the representational roles of the "generic Latina" on the public stage as maids, nannies, and prostitutes. To rectify the trend, Saracho and Paz founded Teatro Luna: the first and only all-Latina theater ensemble in Chicago. In an interview conducted by Joanna L. Mitchell and Sobeira Latorre, the founders talk about the experience of establishing a theater ensemble where Latina women write, direct, act, and manage their own work; and the interactive creative process they have developed not only to nurture their talents but to build community as well.

As the current debates around immigration remind us, no community can survive without access to the kind of work that can improve one's life chances. This issue's "from the archives" features an interview from the Sophia Smith Collection's Voices of Feminism Oral History Project with Linda Chavez-Thompson: a hero of the labor movement and the first woman and person of color to hold the office of executive vice president (the third-ranking officer) of the AFL-CIO. Before attaining the position, Chavez-Thompson, one of eight children born to first-generation parents from Mexico, worked in the cotton fields of Lubbock, Texas, at the age of ten and subsequently rose to represent all Hispanic workers within the city's local of the International Laborers' Union. In the interview, conducted by Kathleen Banks Nutter, Chavez-Thompson talks about her early life, the shaping of her political consciousness, and the challenges of union organizing in a global economy.

The exigencies of the era require frameworks of analysis that simultaneously critique external and internal developments that affect women's lives. In her essay, "Gender, Sovereignty, and the Discourse of Rights in Native Women's Activism," Joanne Barker disrupts the dominant/marginal binary in analyzing the struggle against sexism in Canada's Indian communities, which, by necessity, included both mobilizing against discriminatory laws by the broader society as well as intra-community gender practices where Indians were anything but marginal. A similar theme marks the eyewitness account of Elisabeth Armstrong, who visited northern India in the wake of the tsunami disaster in 2004. Writing about the politics of aid efforts in her "The Tsunami's Windfall," she notes how attendant charges of corruption by the donor society pathologizes recipients of color while ignoring how gendered...