Introduction: An Intersectional Inheritance

In 1973, on a trip to Tanzania, Angela Davis noticed a group of Masai women balancing wooden boards on their heads because they were in the process of constructing new homes for their village (Davis 1981). Davis, intrigued by the central role women played in the building process, inquired further, and learned that because women in this community were responsible for all housework, building the actual homes—where they cooked their meals, raised their children, and lived their lives—was also their job. Davis notes that this labor—the job of creating a physical structure—positions them as critical and productive workers in the Masai economy. Davis records this experience as a demonstration of the value of work, and particularly of women's work. As scholars interested in the issue of inheritance, we begin with this reference because of how it literalizes the critical role of women in inheritance. Masai women are not just responsible for making a house a home but of actually building the home where the next generation will be created and reared, and where beliefs, customs, and traditions will be inculcated. Further, in addition to being the site where inheritable goods are created and housed, their homes are themselves objects to be passed down. In Masai society, women's role in world building is recognized, and thus their status is appropriately elevated. We open this issue of WSQ with the recognition and affirmation that inheritance is foremost a feminist issue.

In the most technical terms, inheritance implies the bequest of money or property from one person to another, usually from a parent to a child, to ensure that accumulated wealth is dispersed according to the wishes of the original possessor. Inheritance also relates to reproduction, specifically the passing down of genes and family traits. Beyond these primary definitions of inheritance is a deeper understanding that inheritance is not simply the transference of a past but also the possibility of a future. Bequeathing the gains of one generation to selected recipients in the next necessarily means that some parties will be excluded from the benefits of the bequest and the possibilities that come with it. Inheritance should finally be recognized as a process that is frequently beyond the control of both the originator and the recipient. Inheritance, in its broadest sense, implies the passing down of material goods, possibilities, advantages, and entitlement as well as inequity, trauma, subjugation, disadvantage, and disenfranchisement. In other words, the negative implications of inheritance must be considered in any scholarly inquiry on the subject.

The feminist implications of inheritance are complex and multifaceted, and in our Western context particularly, inheritance can never be separated from issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and national origin. Women play a complex, sometimes tension-ridden, role in inheritance. The female body (understood normatively) is often the primary site for generational transfer—even if women are frequently excluded from inheritance—yet women in positions of privilege can also be complicit in maintaining and participating in processes of exclusionary inheritance. In the aftermath of slavery, colonialism, war, and other experiences of subjugation, negative forms of inheritance are passed down through the generations and continue to limit the possibilities of descendants in contemporary society. Taken together, the collection of essays in this issue demonstrate that the study of inheritance demands the recognition of these negative resonances as well as the intersectional nature of inheritance.

We approach this special issue from a foundation of scholarly engagement exploring how contemporary society and individuals are shaped by their inheritance from previous generations and historical moments. Maria's first book (2016) extends Marianne Hirsch's paradigm of postmemory beyond its original focus on the descendants of Holocaust survivors to consider how female writers from diverse backgrounds represent the afterlife of inherited cultural and historical traumas in contemporary society. Maria recognizes, as a new genre of American literature, the preponderance of recent fiction representing negative inheritances related to marginalization and exclusion, cultural and collective trauma, war and exile, and sexual violence, among other atrocities. She argues that these narratives of postmemory function as efforts to repair the damages...