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Abstract: As it stands, death shapes the horizon of life.Yet, absence is a form of presence and an active shaping of the now: in memory, in mourning, and in melancholia. Presence is similarly an absence from elsewhere or else-when.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. Our family, social, school, and work lives were upended as we moved in and out of “shut-downs” of the institutions and spaces we lived our lives in as we had known them in order to contain the virus’s spread. We were also in the ... Read More PubDate: 2022-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Shadows become the location of our destiny, outlining the shape of our past, present, and future possibility.”In Toni Morrison’s ([1977] 2004) novel Song of Solomon, Pilate and her daughter Reba attend the funeral of Reba’s daughter Hagar. Pilate begins to shout during the service, “Mercy . . . I want Mercy!” And soon after: ‘“Mercy'’ Now she was asking a question, ‘Mercy'’” Morrison continues, “It was not enough. The word needed a bottom, a frame. She straightened up, held her head high, and transformed the plea into a note. In a clear bluebell voice she sang it out—the one word held so long it became a sentence—and before the last syllable had died in the corners of the room, she was answered in a sweet soprano: ... Read More PubDate: 2022-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: When my mother asked what I wanted for my forty-second birthday, I told her that I wanted her to mark my death. I had decided that the version of me that had been birthed by her needed to die, and that someone else needed to be birthed in her place. Dying Grace-lessly is something that I have been learning from my grandmother. After crying and pleading and talking with me, my mother honored my birthday wish. That day, my mother dressed in black. And so began my birthday mourning.The shedding of the earlier version of me became a necessity, given that my mother could not stop sacrificing parts of herself for the daughter she birthed. That daughter has been draining her. Exhausted from trying to make myself small in ... Read More PubDate: 2022-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Toni Morrison’s novel, A Mercy (2008), is a historical narrative of national becoming, set amidst the rich and wild landscape of America at the end of the seventeenth century. Its characters are shaped by their simultaneous connections to and disconnection from their nations of origin, their current communities, labor, gender, and one another. The novel deploys the vexed term lashing to describe the wounding that a secondary character— the Widow Ealing—inflicts on her daughter, Jane, to save them both from the men of their village (echoes of the patriarchal Puritan tribunal of the contemporaneous Salem witch trials). Yet the term’s signification as both harmful and helpful also applies to the core relationships of ... Read More PubDate: 2022-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: “You need to touch the body softly, you have to be gentle,” she noted. “The water shouldn’t be cold or hot, just warm enough, like the water you use to wash babies. Treat the body like she’s still alive.” These are the words of Halise,1 a fifty-year-old Sunni Muslim woman who had been working as a gassal (corpse washer) for six years at the time of our interview in Istanbul during the summer of 2016. We were sitting in the recreation room for female corpse washers in the Zincirlikuyu Cemetery gasilhane,a special washing place for deceased Sunni Muslims located within cemeteries or hospitals in Turkey.I had arrived at the Zincirlikuyu Cemetery at around noon and walked through the lush green vegetation that ... Read More PubDate: 2022-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Ciguapismo is a critical tool for assessing feminist mourning in the work of contemporary Dominican American poet Rhina P. Espaillat (1932–). The paradigm illuminates the artist’s rapport with human loss, gratitude for female friendships, self-awareness over time as a mature woman, and the desire to engage in ethical care of our endangered natural world. By way of introduction to the notion of ciguapismo, I offer background on the mythic figure at the core of the term while briefly surveying some of the most prevalent uses of La Ciguapa in both literary and scholarly discourse. Following that preface, which will hopefully underline some key feminist valences of the creature’s hermeneutic potential, my thematic ... Read More PubDate: 2022-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: My mother sits me down very often to tell me about the things she wants to leave me when she dies. My mother, a Palestinian who spent her formative years as a refugee before making her way back home—in the West Bank where she now lives with the rest of my family—is not saying that because she thinks she will die suddenly. She also does not say that politically—that is, in political terms related to her life under war conditions and the possibility of getting killed. No, none of that. My mother has a plan for her life. She used to say, “I will die at the age of sixty-three” (she is sixty-six now). She used to hope to die while praying, but sometimes would tell stories about other women where she would say, “She ... Read More PubDate: 2022-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must learn to turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.In putting afoot a new woman, we delight in remembering that half of the world is female. We are challenged, however, when we recall that more than half the globe’s female half is yellow, brown, black, and red. I do not mean to suggest that “white” in this ethnic and political calculus is an addendum, but, rather, only an angle on a thematic vision whose agents in gaining authenticity have the radical chance now, which patriarchy passed up, to help orchestrate the dialectics of a global new woman. As I see it, the goal is not an articulating of sexuality so ... Read More PubDate: 2022-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: My work tends to rest in the undoing: optical undoing via historical collaging. Because I situate my practice in various forms of the archive, I propose that my methods are akin to a form of visual critical fabulation. When I historically collage, I am attempting to “jeopardize the status of the event . . . by flattening the levels of narrative discourse and confusing narrator and speakers,” as described by Saidiya Hartman (2008: 11, 12). Hartman uses this characterization in “Venus in Two Acts” to describe her writing method of critical fabulation. Her method seeks to “represent the lives of the nameless and the forgotten, to reckon with loss, and to respect the limits of what cannot be known” (4). It is not just ... Read More PubDate: 2022-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: “What does it mean to defend the dead'” (Sharpe 2016: 10). This is but one compelling question that permeates the pages of Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, wherein to protect the dead, one must commit to the conscious labor of wake work. In arriving at such consciousness, Sharpe answers her own question: “It means work. It is work: hard emotional, physical, intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the needs of the dying, to ease their way, but also to the needs of the living” (10). Analyzing both aesthetic and everyday accounts of Black life that are assembled into what she calls “the orthography of the wake” (20–21), Sharpe demonstrates how Black life weathers beyond the ... Read More PubDate: 2022-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This essay analyzes Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) as a book of lamentations for its bereaved black subject’s mother loss, social death, and prematurely ended girlhood.1 More specifically, it critically examines a daughter’s devastation over her natal alienation, violent domination, and general degradation within a hurtful herstory in which white motherhood and white mistresshood are sisters in subjugation.2 It thus reads and writes elegy for the author-protagonist’s stolen and stricken youth.3To trace Nig’s conception as a subject, I literarily autopsy her raciogenesis as black, her sociopolitical genealogy as enslaved, and her etiology as melancholic. The girl’s tribulations are born after her African father ... Read More PubDate: 2022-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The death of a child brings forth the metamorphosis of a mother into a new being or crushes her soul daily as she joins the living dead. What causes a black woman to fight to survive versus being another casualty or walking dead to the black maternal necropolitics'“Cynthia’s Love Tree.” Courtesy of the author.The above words and the accompanying image—written and drawn by one of the authors of this work, Dr. Tiffany Caesar—came together out of a desire to bear witness to the devastating, cutting, and multilayered transformation Black mothers whose children have died at the hands of police violence often undergo. Here the process is described in a way one might not expect, by alluding to the vitalizing potential ... Read More PubDate: 2022-11-26T00:00:00-05:00
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