Editor’s Introduction
- Editor’s Introduction
[Meridians] will provide a critical forum for conversations between feminists of color, enabling women to build bridges between one another’s work, to forge links across different generations, and to make connections among our institutional and social locations.
—Smith-Wesleyan Editorial Group, vol. 1, no. 1, fall 2000
The time has come to end systems of governance that are beholden to principles of capitalism, rooted in Western thought, driven by neoliberal logics, and that continue to exploit and oppress women and negatively racialized communities.
—Nasha Mohamed, Sutapa Chattopadhyay, and Levi Gahman
In the introduction to the first Meridians issue, published in the fall of 2000, readers were informed by the Smith-Wesleyan founding editorial collective that what they called “Counterpoints” would be one of several regularly recurring features in future issues. They conceptualized this feature thus:
Counterpoints initiates a self-conscious examination of the analytical and political vocabulary of the fields in which feminists work. Our first conversation with five members of our founding advisory board examines the meanings that the terms of the journal’s subtitle have for them, particularly as geography and generation transform the meanings of race and feminism. Future symposia may interrogate other key words, now emerging or already established in various discourses, as well as elaborate on the history and contemporary usefulness of particular terms in making theory and doing [End Page 297] politics. If such a public forum fosters productive disagreement or even controversy, Meridians will have advanced its goal of enlarging the public arena for conversations among women of color.
(Smith-Wesleyan Editorial Group 2000: xii)
As I read through the contents of the present issue, I realized that every piece indeed offers “a self-conscious examination of the analytical and political vocabulary” of the wide-ranging disciplinary, discursive, temporal, archival, activist, and geographic fields the authors engage. In addition, each piece illustrates exemplary deployment of both conventional and innovative qualitative methods, as well as conventional and idiosyncratic archives, subjects, and texts. Thus, although only some of the pieces are explicitly labeled “Counterpoint” features, together they also form a “combination of two or more melodies into a harmony in which each keeps its own identity.”1 The result is that this issue offers a Meridians community chorus of authors who are committed to lending their polyphonic intersectional feminist voices to the cause of restorative and redistributive justice.
We open the issue with “Feminist Development Justice as Emancipatory Praxis: Recognizing the Knowledge of Social Movements ‘From Below’” by Nasha Mohamed, Sutapa Chattopadhyay, and Levi Gahman. This “In the Trenches” piece presents the principles of “feminist development justice” articulated by grassroots social movements of the Global South “that are decidedly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-patriarchal” counterpoints to “‘modern’ development programs [that] are inextricably linked to the enduring colonial order of the . . . global (capitalist) economy.” These principles have been at the center of the global organizing efforts of Asian Pacific Forum on Women, Law, and Development (APWLD), an independent transnational feminist organization born of the 1985 Third World Forum on Women held in Nairobi, Kenya. For nearly forty years, the APWLD has initiated multiple organizing campaigns that build the local capacity of “systematically marginalized groups, in particular women, across a range of Asia-Pacific geographies” to “effect justice, promote equality, and defend human rights” from below, that is, at the grassroots and community level. To that end, the APWLD has magnified the voices of women from the “Majority World” who demand “an economy that puts the dignity of people at its heart and represents a call to arms for feminist people-centered economies in which local communities have sovereignty [End Page 298] and decision-making power over the means of production/distribution” (Mohamed, Chattopadhyay, and Gahman, this issue).
In “Consumption as Changemaking and Producers as Artists: Theorizing Alt-Profit Corporations from a Transnational Feminist Perspective,” the sociologists Debjani Chakravarty and Christine Standish document how transnational corporations have attempted to co-opt precisely the kind of critical socio-economic-justice projects that would center the needs of craftswomen and artisanal makers from the “Majority World.” Chakravarty and Standish’s “Counterpoint” coins the term alt-profit and undertakes a...
