Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism

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  Meridians 11:2

  Paula J. Giddings

  I remember the moment when feminist transnationalism made its first indelible impression on me. I was a participant on a panel during the United Nation's Women's Conference (1985) that took place in Nairobi, Kenya, with three other women who were activists in Algeria, Palestine and Israel, respectively. We had come together before the panel to talk informally about our presentations, when, during the conversation, I bemoaned the fact that black women in the U.S., who had been so instrumental to the early civil rights struggle, were now being criticized for their leadership roles by men....

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  Meridians 11:1

  Paula J. Giddings

  This issue of Meridians is divided into two parts, linked by the politics and pull of memory. The first part includes an essay that revises the Partition literature around the "honor" suicides of women during the 1947 violence in Punjab; a meditation on Korean cultural memory and its engagement with historical but unforgotten Japanese and U.S. colonial practices; and an analysis of the portrayal of the iconic South African activist, Winnie Mandela, in the U.S. popular press. This section is also graced by three poems: "Memory's Muse," by Sonia Adams and "So you Die Slowly" and "For the Lost," by Kimberly Juanita Brown.

  The second half of the issue is a special section on Haiti, edited by Gina Athena Ulysse, a Haitian American. She has gathered narratives, poetry, and photographs: remnants of the Haitian earthquake of]anuary 2010 that come together to provide a moving testimonial.

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  Meridians 10:1

  Paula J. Giddings

  One of the missions of Meridians is to hold up a mirror to reflect the workings of identity as they shape and are shaped by transnational contexts. For this issue, the journal's discursive project includes essays that examine identity implications of the Asian American "model minority" idea; the relationship of queerness and ethnic/class privilege in a popular if controversial novel set in Hawaii; how transnational identity in a Demetria Martinez novel complicates identification; a revisionist reading of the subjectivity of Japanese War brides; the cultural signification of lndo-Trinidadian women; and a historical perspective on Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen's literary form as one of social struggle and revolutionary potential....

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  Meridians 10:2

  Paula J. Giddings

  A central task of feminist scholarship is to provide new frameworks-and new applications of existing ones-that correct, explain, and analyze the gendered experiences of women across and within multiple cultural contexts....

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  Meridians 9:1

  Paula J. Giddings

  One of the most important missions of feminist scholarship is to recognize missing voices, perspectives, and representations. A major theme in this issue of Meridians is the restoration and re-visioning of those hidden, excluded, or marginalized aspects of our interdisciplinary discourses....

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  Meridians 9:2

  Paula J. Giddings

  Social constructions shaped by art and/or various forms of violence are themes in this issue of Meridians.

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  Meridians 8:1

  Paula J. Giddings

  I confess that when Janell Hobson and R. Dianne Bartlow, co-editors of "Representin': Women, Hip-Hop, and Popular Music," offered to put together a special issue for Meridians, I was a little skeptical. My view of hip-hop was filtered through the lens of its misogyny. Yes, I knew about oppositional female and political rappers, and certainly understood how hip-hop and popular music have permeated youth culture around the world. Still, despite, or perhaps because of, a growing literature about women and hip-hop, I wondered if there was an entire volume's worth of interesting ideas to explore-and if such an issue could reach the threshold of what Meridians readers would expect....

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  Meridians 8:2

  Paula J. Giddings

  Meridians' flag is planted squarely on that piece of discursive ground where both race and gender reside. As feminist scholars/activists know, that space, with its fluid borders, can be one of liberation or possess the doubly weighted discord of constraint....

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  Meridians 7:2

  Paula J. Giddings

  Home is where ... For women especially, the idea of home evokes longing, centeredness, shelter, critique-and, too often, violation. Many of the essays in this issue of Meridians speak to a discourse of home in all of its meanings.

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  Meridians 7:1

  Paula J. Giddings

  One theme that threads through this volume of Merjdjans 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 reconceptualize the role of women through the arts, memory, and the questioning of alleged remedial institutional practices and scholarship....

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  Meridians 6:2

  Paula J. Giddings

  When the renowned Egyptian physician-psychiatrist, writer, and activist Nawal el Saadawi first told me of her plans to hold a conference entitled "Women, Creativity, and Dissidence" in Cairo, Egypt, in 2005, I immediately envisioned devoting a special issue to the proceedings. At the time, Dr. el Saadawi—whom I had first met some years before as a board member of Meridians-was a visiting Neilson Professor at Smith, and I eagerly anticipated receiving the papers from the conference that would be coedited by both she and Dr. Obioma Nnaemeka...

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  Meridians 6:1

  Paula J. Giddings

  The cover on this issue of Meridians, Hundred Surprises, by Philemona Williamson ( one of my favorite artists), speaks to a theme within this issue of the journal. As is true with much ofWilliamson's work, the painting captures a precise moment of recognition in the lives of young girls. The message, on the surface, seems straightforward enough....

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  Meridians 5:2

  Paula J. Giddings

  "A country like this forces you to find your underground spring to survive," wrote the late South African-born writer Bessie Head. The epigrammatic words, quoted on the cover of her novel When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), refer to Head's adopted home of Botswana; but as is true with all fine writers, her specificity is a loose-fitting garment, a thing that may be worn across a multitude of boundaries....

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  Meridians 5:1

  Myriam J.A. Chancy

  The time has come to offer my parting words as the editor of Meridians as I close the final issue of the journal under my supervision on a warm spring day in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts....

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  Meridians 4:2

  Myriam J.A. Chancy

  We are living in an age when it is now more possible than it ever was to overcome barriers of language, culture, distance to communicate both to strangers and to loved ones. Information proliferates and is disseminated at light speed in a dizzying zigzag of advanced Internet and telecommunications. And yet, at the same time, the global community is perhaps more divided today than it ever was and those who suffer most are not surprisingly the poor and the dispossessed....

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  Meridians 4:1

  Myriam J.A. Chancy

  This issue of Meridians was born during a long, harsh, and gray New England winter. Nestled in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, so named for the early colonists who sought either riches or freedom from religious persecution as they left European shores for the unknown, our offices are housed in a pristine college town where it would be easy to lose oneself in the flamboyance of the autumn foliage, the daily chirping of birds at the break of dawn during any season, the lush green of the rolling hills and verdant forests, the soft trickle of old, worn rivers, a land redolent with history, thick with the poetry and puritan themes of Dickinson and Hawthorne....

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  Meridians 3:2

  Myriam J.A. Chancy

  To assume the editorship of Meridians is to assume stewardship of a venue for creative and scholarly exchange long in the making; it is, in my mind, to assume the position of a midwife of sorts to deliver the voices and visions of women of color whose works in progress reflect the lives of other women, though no longer of this earth, who have provided the sacrificial blood for each our own making....

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  Meridians 3:1

  Kum-Kum Bhavnani

  This issue is the last of the four issues of Meridians that brought me to Smith College from the University of California at Santa Barbara in my two-year post as Founding Editor. I now welcome Myriam Chancy of Arizona State University to her two-year post as next editor of Meridians. I trust she will enjoy working here as much as I have.

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  Meridians 2:2

  Kum-Kum Bhavnani

  As I draft this introduction in early December, 2001, the twenty year war in Afghanistan continues despite some arguments that it is over because the Taliban have been routed from a few of their strongholds in Kabul and Kandahar....

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  Meridians 2:1

  Kum-Kum Bhavnani

  The start to a second volume of a new journal is often a time when finally the editor can not only catch her breath, and perhaps even cheer, but can also reflect on the ways in which this new arrival is beginning to grow and develop....

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  Meridians 1:2

  Kum-Kum Bhavnani

  The end of the twentieth century marks a time of realignments in the cultural and political economies of gender throughout the world. Protests in many places against the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank have brought together a range of constituencies which had been fairly remote from each other in the previous decade....

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  Meridians 1:1

  Ruth J. Simmons

  The American academy undeniably has been shaped by the individual scholars and teachers whose knowledge, values, cultures, ideologies, and preferred approaches have determined not only what is studied in our colleges and universities but also what has been seen as having worth and significance over the generations. Scholarly research and artistic production have been supported in large measure on the basis of where they stand in the estimation of those who make decisions about access and funding. We believe that issues affecting the lives of women of color must be given greater attention and support and that such support, both public and private, will result in increased economic prosperity, exciting scholarly innovation, and much societal good....