Meridians, an interdisciplinary feminist journal, provides a forum for the finest scholarship and creative work by and about women of color in U.S. and international contexts. The journal engages the complexity of debates around feminism, race, and transnationalism in a dialogue across ethnic, national, and disciplinary boundaries. Meridians publishes work that makes scholarship, poetry, fiction, and memoir by and about women of color central to history, economics, politics, geography, class, sexuality, and culture. The journal provokes the critical interrogation of the terms used to shape activist agendas, theoretical paradigms, and political coalitions.
Meridians received the 2020 award for Best Digital Feature from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for its On the Line component. Meridians is published by Duke University Press.
The Smith College community has full-text access to the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism through the libraries website.
Browse issues below which include the Introductions by the Editor(s).
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Meridians: 22:2 Mosaic
Ginetta Candelario
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a mosaic is “a variegated whole formed from many disparate parts,”1 which perfectly captures this issue’s geographically, historically, intellectually, and artistically wide-ranging, and diverse yet interrelated contents. Each piece—whether poetry, testimonio, essay, creative nonfiction, or interview—touches on key themes iterated in unique ways depending on the context. Featuring work focused on Afghanistan, Canada, Haiti, India, Mexico, Tunisia, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Puerto Rico, and the United States mainland, this Mosaic issue reveals a broader picture of the complex, contradictory, and challenging nature of enacting transnational or intersectional feminist solidarities within and across borders, whether physical, political, ethno-racial, or ideological....
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Meridians: 22:1 BIPOC Europe
Ginetta Candelario
This special issue, guest edited by leading scholars of BIPOC Europe Nana Osei-Kofi and Shirley Ann Tate, although focused on contemporary populations, prompts us to remember that BIPOC Europe has a long, albeit relatively underrecognized history (Ramey 2016). By definition, to speak of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in Europe implies that these populations are distinctive from the presumptively white European. Yet European whiteness is neither natural nor long-standing. Rather, it is an invention resulting from modernity’s settler colonial, colonial, and imperialist projects in Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Australia, as are the designations Black, Indigenous, of Color, and their sundry precursor labels for Europe’s targeted peoples and places.
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Meridians 21:2 Feminist Mournings
Ginetta E.B. Candelario
When the guest editors of this special issue approached me with their proposal in summer 2020, the world was just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic but we had already lost over one hundred thousand people in the United States—and nearly half a million people globally...
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Meridians: 21:1 Black Feminisms in the Caribbean and the United States: Representation, Rebellion, Radicalism, and Reckoning
Ginetta Candelario
As a scholar of Afro-Latinidades, it is a particular pleasure for me to offer Meridians readers this issue devoted to “Black Feminisms in the Caribbean and the United States: Representation, Rebellion, Radicalism, and Reckoning.” This curated conversation about Black feminist liberation strategies, which vary and move across time and place, is aptly illustrated with cover art by Haitian artist Mafalda Nicolas Mondestin, Ann fè on ti pale (The Meeting). Ann fè on ti pale is a Haitian Kreyol expression that means “let’s chat about it” or “we should chat” (pers. comm., August 29, 2021), and, apropos of that invitation, we open the conversation with “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” an especially timely and insightful interview that Kyrah Malika Daniels conducted in January 2020....
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Meridians 20:2 Transnational Feminist Approaches to Anti-Muslim Racism
Ginetta Candelario
This issue coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the United States’ initiation of the “war on terror” launched in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001. On that day, al-Qaeda operatives destroyed the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan by flying two hijacked planes into the twin towers; a third hijacked plane hit the first floor of the Pentagon’s west wall; and a fourth plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers successfully thwarted the hijackers....
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Meridians 20:1
Ginetta Candelario
I write this in mid-November of 2020, after one of the most contentious presidential elections in my lifetime. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many states began allowing and even encouraging the use of absentee voting/mail-in ballots to reduce the risk of infection during in-person voting. Although he himself votes by mail, the outgoing president began a systematic and sustained campaign of maligning the legality and validity of absentee ballots, claiming without evidence that they were more vulnerable to “illegal voting” and fraud, and encouraging his constituent base to vote in person on election day....
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Meridians Twentieth Anniversary Reader
Ginetta Candelario
This critical anthology consists of thirty of Meridians's most frequently cited, downloaded, and anthologized scholarly essays, activists reports, memoirs, and poems since its first issue was published in fall 2000. The forty authors featured are a virtual who's who of internationally renowned feminist women-of-color scholar-activists (such as Sara Ahmed, Angela Davis, Sonia Alvarez, Paula Giddings, and Sunera Thobani) and award-winning poets (such as Nikky Finney, Laurie Ann Guerrero, and Suheir Hammad). Ranging broadly across geographies (North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East), diasporas (Black, Asian, Indigenous), and disciplines, the collection beautifully exemplifies the best practices of intersectionality as a theory, a method, and a politics.
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Meridians 19:2
Ginetta Candelario
As I began writing this introduction, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the thirty-eighth state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a milestone arriving thirty-eight years after the 1982 deadline for its ratification....
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Meridians 19:1
Ginetta Candelario
This volume’s publication coincides with the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which Meridians readers likely know was the culmination of nearly a century of women’s organizing for political and civil rights....
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Meridians 18:2 Radical Transnationalism: Reimagining Solidarities, Violence, Empires
Ginetta Candelario
In the mid-1990s a small group of feminist faculty from women’s studies, Latin American studies, and Afro-American studies at Smith College came together to discuss the troubling lacunae in each of their respective fields.1 Because each interdisciplinary field had a foundational mission to address the biases and assumptions of traditional disciplines that had overlooked—or worse, distorted—the experiences of its particular oppressed and/or exploited community, the fields prioritized one locus of discrimination and generally glossed over others. This paradigmatic weakness extended to each field’s otherwise innovative curricula, scholarship, and pedagogy...
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Meridians 18:1
Ginetta Candelario
Exemplifying Meridians’s mission to bring race and transnationalism into feminist conversation, the pieces in this issue illuminate what is at stake in our quests to grapple with settler colonial and imperialist legacies that flow through us. Like rivers, at times these legacies carry us along, at others they pull us under or require that we gather all our energies to swim against the current, and oftentimes these legacies demand that we remedy and protect them from the toxic wastes of earlier generations....
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Meridians 17:2 Cartographies for the Twenty-First Century
Ginetta Candelario
The first African feminist I ever met was Wambui Mwangi, my 1990 classmate at Smith College. It was the spring of 1988, at the Mwangi Cultural Center, where all the heads of student of color organizations on campus had gathered together to discuss and strategize our response to yet another instance of institutional racism at Smith....
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Meridians 16:1
Ginetta Candelario
This issue is the product of several departures, layovers, connections, and arrivals. Paula J. Giddings retired from Smith College and Meridians as ofJune 30, 2017, closing a successful twelve-year run as Editor. Paula is succeeded by Ginetta E. B. Candelario, a long-time member of the Meridians editorial group, who assumed the editorship as ofJuly 1, 2017....
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Meridians 17:1
Ginetta Candelario
Meridians is thrilled to announce that this is our first issue published by Duke University Press. This is also the first issue that I curate fully from submissions accepted during my first year as editor; as such, it expresses my particular vision for Meridians going forward. I am keenly interested in internationalizing our transnational frame, specifically by soliciting from scholars, culture workers, and activists living outside the United States and in languages other than English working on our core themes of feminism, race, and transnationalism....
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Meridians 16:2
Ginetta Candelario
It is a bittersweet pleasure to publish this special issue on Black women's health, guest edited by Jameta Nicole Barlow and LeConte J. Dill. The serendipitous timing of a special issue focused on Black women's health is particularly significant at this historical moment when Black women have launched and are leading movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #MeToo because Black men, women, and children continue to be disproportionately subjected to life-threatening, state-based, structural and interpersonal violence in the United States....
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Meridians 15:2
Paula J. Giddings
Every time I come across a historical record about African-descended women and movement—migration, immigration, or just plain going and gone—I raise my hand in tribute....
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Meridians 15:1
Karsonya Wise Whitehead
With the increasingly high stakes nature of teaching and the ongoing push to teach within the adopted Common Core, there appears to be very little room for teachers to incorporate the voices and experiences of anyone whose life is not already embedded within the curriculum....
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Meridians 14:2
Sonia E. Alvarez, Kia Lilly Caldwell, and Agustín Lao-Montes
As anthropologist Christen Smith contends in her contribution to this issue, "Because of the tendency to over-emphasize the experiences of English-speaking Black women" within the global project of Black feminist studies, Afro-Latin American women's voices have been "muted," despite the fact that they "have made significant theoretical and philosophical interventions that could potentially change the way that we think about gendered racial politics transnationally." Cognizant that feminist academics and activists in the United States and the global North, including many U.S.-African Americans and other feminists of color, often lack access to the critical insights and innovations developed by Black feminist theories and practices emergent in the "South" of the Americas, we organized this two-volume guest-edited issue of Meridians as a work of political and cultural translation....
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Meridians 14:1
Sonia E. Alvarez and Kia Lilly Caldwell
Coined by Lelia Gonzalez, one of the premier thinkers of Afro-Brazilian feminisms, the term Amtjricanidade or "Amefricanity" references both the black diaspora and indigenous populations of the Americas, signaling their histories of resistance as colonized peoples....
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Meridians 13:2
Paula J. Giddings
Citizenship, belonging, solidarity. These are the themes that wind through this issue of Meridians and emerge in an array of cultural contexts: IndoCaribbean, African American, Korean, Jamaican, Japanese, Egyptian, Mexican, and the Black Diaspora....
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Meridians 13:1
Paula J. Giddings
Carole Boyce Davies, the eminent scholar of Caribbean and African studies, opens the issue with an analysis regarding a "shift" in African feminist discourse in her essay, "Gender/Class Intersections and African Women's Rights." Like its African American second-wave counterpart, the discourse challenged "all forms of economic and social oppression" but now emphasizes women's cultural politics over political systems. Davies explores what she calls the critical variable of class evasion....
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Meridians 12:2
Paula J. Giddings
Like the conference at the University at Albany, SUNY, that spawned it, this special issue of Meridians is an extraordinary event....
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Meridians 12:1
Paula J. Giddings
This volume of Meridians is rich with literature and politics. Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Martha Southgate, Dionne Brand, and Ralph Ellison are all subjects of critical essays; and there is an intriguing fiction piece by Itoro Udofia....
