Abstract This article is a Sámi feminist analysis of large-scale resource extraction in Sábme, the transnational Sámi territory spanning northern Fenno-Scandinavia and the Murmansk peninsula. Specifically, it centers on the mining of Indigenous land within the borders of the Swedish nation-state to explore the knowledge evolving from Sámi feminists engaged in the anti-mining struggle. Here, I argue that Indigenous epistemes—that is, the foregrounding of relationality and interdependency between land, humans, nonhuman beings, and the natural environment—are foundational to the research participants’ struggles against mining in Sábme. From within a Sámi knowledge system, mining entails fracturing the relational web of connection. Consequently, mining represents a multigenerational threat against the survival of Sámi body lands and lifeworlds.

Mamá,As the earth shudders, you open your eyes.Your eyes take in the cold gray sky hovering behind palm trees that survivedHurricane Maria, the hurricane that split your cabinets.Earthquakes cracked your walls.You hear your name. Feel fingers smoothingAgainst your brow. Gray sky, quaking earth, persistent palm treesBegin preparing for your return.From your bed, your frail voice calls out toYour Amados, your beloveds. Amado Sr.,Your beloved husband, sits by you.He takes remnants of your hands still filled with flesh and warmth into his.Amado Jr., the younger beloved, brews your coffee in the kitchen.The aroma of Cafe Rico wafts past decaying cabinets.The paint crumbles off the walls.you revisit memories of las nenas de Mamá.They crawl into bed with you as coffee percolates.Their knobby knees, your gnarled, knuckled handsshare warm hugs and giggles.They squeal and hum and hug into you how much they love you.They never outgrow the words and the hugs girls need to grow up to give to men. Mamá, if you only knew how long I never wanted to love them.The elder Beloved asks what else you need.The younger Beloved adds milk and sugar before bringing you coffee to your bedside. I still remember you bringing it to mine, MamáThe elder lifts your lip up to the cup as his son sits.They don’t know, among other things, what the graying sky, the weathered trees, the shuddering earth have come to do;they do not yet know of your homegoing.Café con leche is the last bit of sweetness to touch your lips.After it has coated your throat, with a coughand a squeezing of hands, your soul follows the graying sky, weathered trees, the shuddering earth home.You leave your body behind surrounded by the ones you insisted see you through this end.And you, Mamá, are grateful.The younger beloved throws himself on what’s left of your skin and boneswhile the elder beloved weeps. Their cries, ride the Caribbean winter breeze,bringing providence in to call an ambulance.You inform the gray sky, the quaking earth, and the stubborn palm trees—You tell them—that you and your God have prepared.You bought your coffin, your plot, you bought the nameplate your life never allowed you to read.You reserved the funeral home.Las nenas need only worry about the planes. Mamá, I worry about fading. I worry about the tumor returning. Mamá, I still worry about COVID-19.As others’ souls slip through them, the gray sky, the trembling earth, tell youThere’s never enough. Resistant tears, and youthful heartsAre never prepared.Never wanting,Never wanting to lose your hands.You remind the earth, the sky, and the silent treesyour love doesn’t die with your body. Mamá, how can I agree when forgetting to love me was necessary for your surviving?All the secrets, all the unnamed wounds, the palm trees hiss,Get left behind.They linger, the quaking earth says, longer than it takes your body to join me.Those scars flounder, the palm trees persist, before you become the earth that feeds me.The unnamed hurt, the gray sky spits, gets pulled out of me . . . Aye, Mamá, I tire of hidingYour wounds are the roots that bind us.Aye, you say, they’ll forget—No, the sky and trees, and earth insist, not the women you birthed to carry us. I never wanted to remember you as anything but warm, Mama.

Abstract This article combines historical and life-writing approaches to demonstrate how caste is made invisible in histories and structures of education, canonical knowledge, and research. As a dominant-caste (savarna) Bengali academic, the author follows caste-oppressed feminists to offer a methodological intervention that challenges several ways in which castelessness is reproduced in feminist scholarship. The author asks why savarna write castelessly. “Writing castelessly,” wherein caste reflexivity is absented from analysis, solidarity, and teaching, is one manifestation of savarna feminists’ historical-material relation to caste. Narrating regional caste histories of savarna Bengalis, the author shows that her practice of writing castelessly is founded on material structures of power—historically claimed monopolies over culture and education, land, labor, and political representation. Relatedly, another reason savarna write castelessly is that disciplinary training in social sciences in higher education taught the author to think, feel, read, and write castelessly. Finally, the author traces the reproduction of these disciplinary structures in her scholarship. Ultimately, this self-critique grounded in historical and material relations of caste seeks a feminist readership invested in public accountability and denaturalizing Brahminical merit in academia.

Abstract This article explores how young women born in Sweden, or arriving in Sweden as toddlers, who belong to the Latin American diaspora give meaning to and act on their experiences of being the daughters of migrant mothers, whose political activism shapes their views and practices of mothering and migration. The analysis is inspired by feminist/antiracist methodologies and consists of eight in-depth interviews with young adult women, all of them daughters of political refugees who came to Sweden to escape persecution by the military dictatorships in Latin America in the late 1970s. The interviews are combined with two focus groups that took place in the two largest Swedish cities. The category we will bring to light is that of the daughters; adults now, aged between thirty and forty-five (six of them mothers themselves). The central question in this article is what perceptions of mothering can be articulated from the perspective of daughters of Latin American migrant mothers, in a context where memories of political persecution and exile and experiences of institutional and everyday racism shape the conditions of motherwork for both the migrant mothers and their daughters.

Abstract This essay first analyzes the construction of a “Muslim Woman Other” as a particular social reality through the dissemination of academic and media discourses, militarization of the border, and the implementation of immigration policies and practices that allow “for the normalization of exclusionary practices,” which the Nijmegen school calls a process of “B/Ordering as Ordering and Othering.” Second, it positions porteadoras’ deaths and risks to their health within the political and the religious order; Muslim Moroccan women operate within strong religious and cultural spaces that dominate their everyday lives. The concept of “bordering and ordering” through “Othering” helps frame the Nador/Melilla border as the site where the “Muslim Woman Other” is constructed either as a de facto trope of victimhood in need of saving or as a national threat transgressing the management and ordering of the border and in need of violent discipline. The militarization of the Nador/Melilla border and implementation of immigration laws have served as major justifications to covertly exploit and cheapen the labor of Moroccan Muslim working-class women through globalized free market economies that erode welfare policies while supporting the free exchange of consumer goods.

Abstract Ciguapas are mythical creatures, typically represented as naked, comely females with uniquely backward feet. Such anatomy renders their path virtually untraceable. Legends suggest they inhabit remote mountains and forests in the Dominican Republic, preying on men. This essay steps away from the predatory archetype, formulating a theory of women’s loss and mourning through the motif of “forward backwardness” epitomized by the ciguapa’s feet. Using selections from the work of Dominican American poet Rhina P. Espaillat (b. 1932), the author outlines the feminist paradigm of ciguapismo, a fundamentally paradoxical mode for understanding how women endure in times of personal grief, awareness of aging, and under the shadow of sexual violence. It is also a form of environmental reckoning centered on collective care. Whether set in the Caribbean or the U.S. Dominican diaspora, ciguapismo in Espaillat’s poetry offers a critical resource, an imaginative faculty, and a liminal ontology for mapping transformative feminist intimacies against a backdrop of ever-encroaching human and environmental losses.

Abstract Part memoir, part theoretical reflection, this essay offers one answer to the question “How do Palestinians grieve?” In this narration of the author’s mother’s relationship to death, her multiple displacements, and her plan for her life, the term proactive grief is used to theorize how and why her mother’s life trajectory was shaped by her strife to have a dignified death, in other words, to be able to die in Palestine. To illuminate the significance of her mother’s approach to death and its relationship to being Palestinian, being refugee, and living under colonial war conditions, this essay also reflects on the difficulty of writing about grief while being personally entangled in its complicated emotions. Ultimately, her mother’s proactiveness and commitment to home within and beyond life present an intimate narrative and a family history that could show readers what it means to be Palestinian, to live colonization, to love home, and to face constant threat with dignity.

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. More specifically, it 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. The author literarily autopsies Nig’s raciogenesis as black, her sociopolitical genealogy as enslaved, and her etiology as melancholic. This essay conceptualizes the domestic maternal passage as her transfer from white mother to mistress, a passage that sets in motion her exile from home and entrance into the hell of slavery. This passage is procreative of her social death and an open wound in her memory of mother loss and her mother hunger. Moreover, she is plagued by racial melancholia insofar as she bewails being governed as black and covets whiteness. Nig tends to her inner wounds by mourning, but social death chokes off her measures to work through her losses. This affective asphyxiation illustrates that her psychic condition arises not from an inner inability to digest loss but from external impediments that forcibly prescribe her inconsolability. This plight delineates Nig as a figure of unweepable wounds unwept in a grievous herstory.

Abstract Often the narrative on dark skin in America has been dominated by Eurocentric standards of beauty. White supremacy dictated dark skin to be unattractive and lesser than light skin. This poem explores the rich beauty of darkness in the natural world, from fruit in America to fruit in Ireland, unpacking and giving new energy to the old phrase “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.” By exploring the journey from wonderment to acceptance to love, the work is a refutation of lighter skin being the only pathway to beauty, not just in America, but globally.

Abstract Few conversations with the renowned Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat have delved into the subject of religion in Haiti and the representations of Vodou in her fiction and nonfiction writing. This interview with Danticat explores her religious upbringing, Vodou and interfaith dialogue, and representations of Haitian religion in the media and in the world. Other topics discussed include Haitian sacred space and the environment, Vodou as a matriarchal religion, and divine archetypes present in her body of writings. Drawing from an Africana religion framework, the questions posed here consider the religious import of Danticat’s literary works as “sacred texts” of Haiti and the Haitian dyaspora.