Special Issue 41.1

“World”-Making and “World”-Travelling with Decolonial Feminisms and Women of Color

Hot off the press! A timely release of special issue 41.1 with guest editors Wanda Alarcón, Maria Dalida Benfield, Annie Isabel Fukushima, and Marcelle Maese.

Cover Art “The Electrics” by Linda Vallejo

We begin this introduction to the special issue “World”-Making and “World” Travelling with Decolonial Feminisms and Women of Color thinking about the difficult work of coalition, the relations requisite to enact it, and the animation of attitudes of vulnerability and tantear that must accompany it. Cindy Cruz, primary editor for this special issue, brought the interest in María Lugones’s work to our first editorial discussions. Dr. Cruz has been intrigued with the possibilities of the lifework of María Lugones in her own research with teachers and youth, in which the foundations of this politic emerge as the relation necessary to “world”-travelling with an attitude of playfulness and loving perception. It is a survival-rich practice that is both life affirming and persistent. We want to thank the special issue guest editors, Wanda Alarcón, Maria Dalia Benfield, Annie Isabel Fukushima, and Marcelle Maese, for all their hard work and creativity in developing a call for papers; recruiting a fierce group of writers, artists, and reviewers; and all the labor of revisioning/re-envisioning that happens among editors. This special issue gathers together a collection of writings that are urgent and insistent in their demand for transforming the social through love, pedagogy, coalition, resistance, and friendship.

We encourage readers to engage and think of this issue in conversation with This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, where it is in the coming together of narratives, poetry, letters, and manifestos, some louder or more insistent or more urgent that others, that coalition is made manifest. Something similar happens in this special issue when the writings are in conversation. It recalls the anthologizing practices of writing and reading that is Bridge and the writing practices of women of color where we can begin to recognize how there practices are foundational for decolonial feminism.

Cindy Cruz, Wanda S. Pillow, and Kimberly M. Jew

For the full issue visit https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/42309/print

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