Project MUSE®: Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1, no. 2 (2001) through current issueLatest Articles: Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalismTWOProject MUSE®Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism1547-84241536-6936Latest articles in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Milestones and Momentum: The Meridians Project at Twenty-Five
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972305
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"Transnationalism thus emerges here as a relational method where different subjects, ecologies, and geographies intertwine, illuminating sites of contact across the cultural production of contemporary artists who have taken up the task of envisioning a wide range of feminist futures.""To read these projects together is to move away from models of individual scholarship and mastery and move toward collaborative ways of being together in scholarship and knowing together through scholarship."This issue of Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism marks a milestone event: the twenty-fifth anniversary of our first issue's publication in the fall of 2000. By definition, a milestone is an indicator of many things at
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallMilestones and Momentum: The Meridians Project at Twenty-Five2025-10-24text/htmlen-USMilestones and Momentum: The Meridians Project at Twenty-Five2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®443932026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24"Mother Land"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972306
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Interested in learning more about Kalamkari's revival for my research, I reached out to Mamata hoping to talk more about her work. For the last three decades, Mamata has tirelessly worked to revive hand-painted Kalamkari by supporting artist livelihoods, prioritizing the use of natural dyes, and collaborating with designers to create innovative designs.On this day, Mamata walked me through her extensive Kalamkari collection of recent and vintage pieces.Growing up in Tirupati, a sacred temple town and hub of Kalamkari, Mamata Reddy draws inspiration from the deep spiritual and cultural connections rooted in her homeland. This piece, cocreated with J. Shankaraiah, explores the intimate interaction between a devotee
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmall"Mother Land"2025-10-24text/htmlen-US"Mother Land"2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®43702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24In the Clearing: A Conversation with Karla FC Holloway
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972307
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Karla FC Holloway is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita at Duke University, a title that, like her career, contains multitudes. Her scholarly profile has explored the intersections of African American literary and cultural studies, law, bioethics, and gender studies. She has held appointments at Duke University in both the Law school and the African and African American Studies, English, and Women's Studies (now Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies) Departments. Also at Duke, she has served as a board member and as affiliated faculty at both the Institute on Care at the End of Life and the Trent Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities. In addition, she has served as Dean of the Humanities and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallIn the Clearing: A Conversation with Karla FC Holloway2025-10-24text/htmlen-USIn the Clearing: A Conversation with Karla FC Holloway2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®489722026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Preserves
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972308
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Dolores slow—slow in her disposition, in movement and desire. Slow and precise, she'd iron linen dry from the clothesline and set her table for two. The tostones triple-fried and pan de Mallorca fluffy after extra proofing and she'd dress herself, too, in linen ironed to a pleat. Cafecito, of course, and often preserves she'd make from the papaya tree in her neighbor's yard. The fruit she'd pluck quick, uncharacteristic, and only when peaked over the fence. A small slice of shame would overcome Dolores when she'd hide the papaya in her bra but that shame would dispel when the preserves thickened from pectin and she'd image João spooning it into her mouth.What strange joy! This bliss with João was unexpected and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallPreserves2025-10-24text/htmlen-USPreserves2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®255932026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24In the Name of Awareness: Audience, Venue, and the Politics of Witnessing Human Rights Violations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972309
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Raising "awareness" of human rights violations has become a catchphrase in human rights contexts. The implication is that if only audiences were confronted with a certain atrocity (through documentaries, photojournalism, art exhibits, novels, etc.), effective action to redress such evil will ensue. Reality, however, often paints a different picture. First, one should consider that not all mediums are created equal when it comes to the public's response: for some critics, written narratives seem to be at a disadvantage when compared to the visual arts.1Jill Bennett (2005) suggests in Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art that the impact of written texts representing violations is always mediated
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallIn the Name of Awareness: Audience, Venue, and the Politics of Witnessing Human Rights Violations2025-10-24text/htmlen-USIn the Name of Awareness: Audience, Venue, and the Politics of Witnessing Human Rights Violations2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®1139712026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Curating Transnational Feminist Solidarities in Born in Flames: Feminist Futures
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972310
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fu·ture: noun.—time that is to be or come hereafter—something that will exist or happen in a time to come—condition, especially of success or failure, to come—Tina Campt, Listening to ImagesThe future, too, is here.—Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other StoriesFrom April to September 2021, the Bronx Museum of the Arts was transformed into the home of Born in Flames: Feminist Futures. Carefully assembled by curator Jasmine Wahi, the exhibition placed in intimate conversation contemporary works produced by a group of women, femme and nonbinary-identified artists from diverse national and cultural backgrounds.1 At the entrance of the exhibition gallery, wall text welcomed visitors with the lines "Our histories
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallCurating Transnational Feminist Solidarities in Born in Flames: Feminist Futures2025-10-24text/htmlen-USCurating Transnational Feminist Solidarities in Born in Flames: Feminist Futures2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®858962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Leaving Michoacán: My Family's Migration Ahead of the Mexican Revolution
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972311
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It was at a family gathering at my parent's house in 2017 that my uncle Mario, my mother's brother, arrived bringing gifts. Two decades into my career as a scientist and professor, I learned of my great-grandmother's journey from Mexico, of the death of her first-born child, of her father's corrido about migrants and their plights.Trinidad Hernández (left), great-grandmother of the author, and her daughter Dolores Valero (right) ca. 1910. Photo courtesy of the author.In one hand, my uncle held a bottle of tequila; in another, a thumb drive of scanned photographs that belonged to my grandmother. While my uncle wandered off to pour shots for the men on the patio, I gathered the women, keepers of our family's oral
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallLeaving Michoacán: My Family's Migration Ahead of the Mexican Revolution2025-10-24text/htmlen-USLeaving Michoacán: My Family's Migration Ahead of the Mexican Revolution2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®914052026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Black Butterfly Denied: Race and Masquerade in My Geisha
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972312
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When I first watched the Hollywood film My Geisha (1962), I was overcome by a peculiar sense of confusion at its climactic moment. The protagonist is a famous white American actress who secretly masquerades as a Japanese geisha to win the title role in her French director husband's film set in Japan. During the scene in question, the husband is examining shots that he has filmed so far, with the reel still in its film negative form. The particular color dynamics of the film negative leads him to discover the true identity of the supposedly authentic geisha: he had been used to seeing her with black hair, but in the film negative's altered coloration, the black hair appears orange-red—the actual color of his wife's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallBlack Butterfly Denied: Race and Masquerade in My Geisha2025-10-24text/htmlen-USBlack Butterfly Denied: Race and Masquerade in My Geisha2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®544222026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Being Granular About Defiant Disrobing: A Conversation with Naminata Diabate
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972313
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In your book, you briefly describe having faced objections, from some US-based African academics, regarding your research on insurgent disrobing. You also describe how you responded to one such academic, a man, who challenged you at a public lecture to explain why African scholars "needed to expose the genitalia of our mothers yet again to the voyeurism of Westerners" (Diabate 2020: 104).I was drawn to this moment in your book not just because you declare the personal and ethical motivations behind your research but also because you show part of your book's prepublication history. I would like to know more about this prepublication history. How did you first think to study insurgent disrobing? What works, if any
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallBeing Granular About Defiant Disrobing: A Conversation with Naminata Diabate2025-10-24text/htmlen-USBeing Granular About Defiant Disrobing: A Conversation with Naminata Diabate2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®571512026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24The Many Voices of Woman: Radharani/Aparajita Devi's Poems in Translation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972314
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In the winter of 1930 author and editor Swarnakumari Devi hosted a tea party for the Calcutta literati. At that event, writer and literary critic Pramatha Chaudhuri claimed that contemporary Bengali women authors had adopted a male aesthetic and lacked a "genuinely feminine" voice. Another guest at the party, the poet Radharani Datta, disagreed with him.1 She insisted on the blending of both masculine and feminine personae within the creative artist, but she was unable to persuade Chaudhuri. So, she decided to prove him wrong. Radharani2 proceeded to supply the "feminine" voice the prominent critic called for, by way of undermining his basic claim. It was the start of a successful literary experiment (see
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallThe Many Voices of Woman: Radharani/Aparajita Devi's Poems in Translation2025-10-24text/htmlen-USThe Many Voices of Woman: Radharani/Aparajita Devi's Poems in Translation2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®604492026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24What Does It Mean to Be a Woman in Afghanistan? An Exploration of the Five Senses
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972315
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In Kabul, a teenage girl sits in her room with her hands closed in fists. Her knuckles are the Naw Shakh mountains she wishes to climb if only she could escape the confines of her home.Her hands used to be the hands of a student. Her fingers held a pen in a stifling grip. It took an immense strength to hold such a powerful object. The pen was a sword wielded to her control, a weapon to fight the Taliban.Now her hands are empty, no longer armed to protect herself and to defend her fellow students. She can't help her teacher whose tears flowed into the Kunar River when the Ministry of Education suspended all classes for girls.She thinks to herself, When did learning become a crime? She remembers the day when she was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallWhat Does It Mean to Be a Woman in Afghanistan? An Exploration of the Five Senses2025-10-24text/htmlen-USWhat Does It Mean to Be a Woman in Afghanistan? An Exploration of the Five Senses2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®112272026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Erasing Race and Racing Beauty in Asia's Global City
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972316
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On May 7, 2020, Hong Kong police were summoned to Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui, where they arrested a man of South Asian descent for allegedly damaging property and possessing drugs. During the arrest, an officer of Chinese descent kneeled on the man's neck to subdue him. The man was later taken to the hospital, where he died the following day. Over two weeks later, on May 25, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a White police officer murdered George Floyd, an African American man, by kneeling on his neck during an arrest. Media outlets across the globe reported on this incident, printing George Floyd's name. The Hong Kong English-language newspaper South China Morning Post never printed the name of the Hong Kong man who
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallErasing Race and Racing Beauty in Asia's Global City2025-10-24text/htmlen-USErasing Race and Racing Beauty in Asia's Global City2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®1027612026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Policing and the Carceral State in Brazil and the United States: Conceptualizing, Tracking, and Resisting Anti-Black Violence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972317
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For centuries, Western European colonial powers relied on the forced migration and enslavement of Afrodiasporic peoples to bolster their markets and empires. Since this same period, organized resistance to the physical and symbolic violence of anti-Black racism has operated transnationally. Elaborate networks and movements have long consolidated and innovated to identify, exchange knowledge about, and organize resistance against racialized violence in its various forms at local, regional, and global levels. Language plays a crucial role in shaping the conditions of understanding, diffusion, exchange of information, and political action. Indeed, this understanding influenced many "owners" of enslaved people to avoid
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallPolicing and the Carceral State in Brazil and the United States: Conceptualizing, Tracking, and Resisting Anti-Black Violence2025-10-24text/htmlen-USPolicing and the Carceral State in Brazil and the United States: Conceptualizing, Tracking, and Resisting Anti-Black Violence2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®1134572026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24The Labial Politics of Stella Nyanzi
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972318
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Scholar, activist, and poet Stella Nyanzi has been called the "rudest woman in Uganda" (Allison 2019). Through her sexually explicit and scatological writing as well as nude protests, she executes spectacular interventions into the autocratic regime of Yoweri Museveni, one of the longest-serving heads of state in the world, with a bold and insistent fleshiness. As she herself has described her approach: "Spectre, scandal, disgust, angst, horror and shock are part of the ammunition that fires up social protest of the
Figure 1
Stella Nyanzi celebrates with supporters outside court on February 20, 2020, in Kampala, Uganda, after spending sixteen months in Luzira's Women Prison. Photo by Luke Dray/Getty Images.
A
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallThe Labial Politics of Stella Nyanzi2025-10-24text/htmlen-USThe Labial Politics of Stella Nyanzi2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®1355352026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Pride Was a Riot, but Mine Was Different
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972319
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I threw a brick / and the glass danced / the liquor shimmied out shy and almost ready / almost a full-grown girl / arrived too early to the party / bilal is swinging his shirt / a bloody scythe
        (the brick told me a secret)
all the myths are wrong // all my myths are almost gone
i've been here before / the one with the two girls in love / the girls in the bright jackets in the bright car in the bright laughter / i've been here before / in the green of madhuri's abandoned shawl / the moon was not so blued then / nor the sun so nuclear / it pulsed / and we fell in line with 9–5 jobs and turned green cards into respectable citizens / i've been here before / back when i knew three languages and spoke none /
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallPride Was a Riot, but Mine Was Different2025-10-24text/htmlen-USPride Was a Riot, but Mine Was Different2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®28152026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24Thinking With: A Letter to Feminists of Color on the Contours of Relational Research Praxis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972320
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In This Bridge Called My Back, Gloria Anzaldúa (2015b: 163) writes a letter titled, "Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers," addressing us, her readers, as "mujeres de color, companions in writing." The open letters enclosed in this essay are modeled after Anzaldúa's letter from 1980 and in many ways respond to it. Like Anzaldúa, I write to and name an imagined, collective audience—feminists of color.When I call on and out to "feminists of color," I do not mean to imply that our differences, experiences, and histories can be captured by this term. Language will always be insufficient, and violently so (Aizura 2018). For, as the Combahee River Collective (1977) cautioned us in all their wisdom
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmallThinking With: A Letter to Feminists of Color on the Contours of Relational Research Praxis2025-10-24text/htmlen-USThinking With: A Letter to Feminists of Color on the Contours of Relational Research Praxis2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®781132026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24"Dabke Is Better Than a Thousand Lectures Against Islamophobia": Palestine, Arab Mothering, and the Research Imagination
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972321
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شالت شالت شالت / وحطّت في قطنّة / سمرا يا إمّ الحنّة / ردّي العصبة مالتShālat shālat shālat / wa-ḥaṭṭat fī Qaṭnah / samra yā ʾimm el-ḥinna / riddī el-ʿaṣbe mālatShālat shālat shālat / and she landed in Qatna / dark-skinned and with henna / restore your headband, it's askewDabke is typically characterized as a stomping dance, but this description belies how much lightfootedness it requires. It is also a prancing, twirling, gliding dance with fancy footwork. Dal'unā (or 'la dal'unā) is the most basic of all dabke steps, consisting of swinging your left foot over to the right side once, repeating the cycle a second time, then kicking forward and ending with a stomp. Even if one is bumbling, stomping in unison is the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/254/image/coversmall"Dabke Is Better Than a Thousand Lectures Against Islamophobia": Palestine, Arab Mothering, and the Research Imagination2025-10-24text/htmlen-US"Dabke Is Better Than a Thousand Lectures Against Islamophobia": Palestine, Arab Mothering, and the Research Imagination2025-10-242025TWOProject MUSE®1066792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-24