Ginetta E. B. Candelario - Böcker

Black behind the Ears is an innovative historical and ethnographic examination of Dominican identity formation in the Dominican Republic and the United States. For much of the Dominican Republic’s history, the national body has been defined as “not black,” even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Rejecting simplistic explanations, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead, it is an ideal norm of what it means to be both indigenous to the Republic (indios) and “Hispanic.” Both indigeneity and Hispanicity have operated as vehicles for asserting Dominican sovereignty in the context of the historically triangulated dynamics of Spanish colonialism, Haitian unification efforts, and U.S. imperialism. Candelario shows how the legacy of that history is manifest in contemporary Dominican identity discourses and displays, whether in the national historiography, the national museum’s exhibits, or ideas about women’s beauty. Dominican beauty culture is crucial to efforts to identify as “indios” because, as an easily altered bodily feature, hair texture trumps skin color, facial features, and ancestry in defining Dominicans as indios.Candelario draws on her participant observation in a Dominican beauty shop in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood with the oldest and largest Dominican community outside the Republic, and on interviews with Dominicans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Santo Domingo. She also analyzes museum archives and displays in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and the Smithsonian Institution as well as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American travel narratives.

This issue of Meridians looks at the expansive domains of transnational feminism, considering its relationship to different regions, historical periods, fields, and methodologies. Through scholarship and creative writing, contributors showcase populations often overlooked in transnational feminist scholarship, including Africa and its diaspora and indigenous people in the Americas and the Pacific. Understanding that transnational feminism emerges from multiple locales across the Global South and North, this group of contributors, working in exceptionally diverse locations, investigates settler colonialism, racialization, globalization, militarization, decoloniality, and anti-authoritarian movements as gendered political and economic projects.Working with manifestos, archives, oral histories, poetry, visual media, and ethnographies from across four continents, the contributors offer a radically expanded vision for transnational feminism.Contributors. Elisabeth Armstrong, Maile Arvin, Maylei Blackwell, Laura Briggs, Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Ching-In Chen, Tara Daly, Nathan H. Dize, Deema Kaedbey, Nancy Kang, Rosamond S. King, Karen J. Leong, Brooke Lober, Neda Maghbouleh, Melissa A. Milkie, Nadine Naber, Laila Omar, Ito Peng, Robyn C. Spencer, Stanlie James, Evelyne Trouillot, Denisse D. VelÁzquez, Mandira Venkat, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

Bringing together Black feminist conversations and debates taking place across the transnational Americas, North and South, this special issue covers, among other topics, #BlackGirlMagic, Black girlhood studies, Afro-Latina race consciousness, and a conversation with Edwidge Danticat titled “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine”.

Topics covered include negotiations of hybrid cultural identity; marginalized groups’ efforts to make feminism more inclusive; the impact of mass shootings, particularly on gender and racial minorities; how Brahmanical supremacy affects the works of South Asian feminist academics; and the distortion of concepts that often occurs when applying analyses of marginalized groups from one culture to another.ContributorsErika Abad, Saher Ahmed, Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Rosetta Marantz Cohen, Dia Da Costa, Lashon Daley, Devaleena Das, Kami Fletcher, Cherise Fung, Amrita Hari, Grace Louise Sanders Johnson, Yalie Saweda Kamara, Nancy Kang, Zeynep K. Korkman, Sreerekha Sathi, Julie Torres, Gina Athena Ulysse, Michaela Django

Topics covered include feminist perspectives about the realities of grappling with colonial legacies within global south communities in North America, Asia, and Africa; the impacts of colonial logic in shaping community identity and boundaries; complex entanglements with neo-colonialism while striving for decolonial praxis; and memory and trauma within communities disrupted by U.S. colonial interests. Contributors:Maryam Ala Amjadi, La Vaughn Belle, Umayyah Cable, Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Debjani Chakravarty, Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang, Sutapa Chattopadhyay, Henrikke SÆthre Ellingsen, Guadalupe Escobar, Levi Gahman, Caroline M. Mar, Nasha Mohamed, Chamara Moore, Aurora Santiago Ortiz, Shreya Parikh, Christine Standish, Aisha A. Upton, Lisa Wright, Ming Li Wu