1st Edition
Transnational Feminisms and Art’s Transhemispheric Histories Ecologies and Genealogies
In this second book of her trailblazing trilogy, Marsha Meskimmon proposes that decolonial, ecocritical, feminist art’s histories can unravel the anthropocentric legacies of Eurocentric universalism, to create transformative conversations between and across many and more-than-human worlds.
Engaging with the ecologies and genealogies – worlds and stories – that constitute the plural knowledge projects of transnational feminisms and art’s transhemispheric histories, the book is written through two critical figurations: transcanons and trans-scalar ecologies. Materializing art’s histories as radical practices of disciplinary disobedience, the volume demonstrates how planetary feminisms can foster interdependent flourishing as they story pluriversal worlds, and world pluriversal stories, with art.
This is essential reading for students and researchers in art history, theory and practice, visual culture studies, feminism and gender studies, environmental humanities and cultural geography.
The Trilogy:
- Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections
- Transnational Feminisms and Art’s Transhemispheric Histories: Ecologies and Genealogies
- Transnational Feminisms and Posthuman Aesthetics: Resonance and Riffing
Introduction
Part I Storying Pluriversal Worlds
1. Transcanons: Transhemispheric Stories for Pluriversal Worlds
Part II Practice and Flourish
2. Poetic Stories: Genealogies of Work and Survival with Audre Lorde
3. Pedagogical Worlds: Expansive Ecologies of Connection and Care
Part III Worlding Pluriversal Stories
4. Trans-Scalar Ecologies: Worlding Planetary Feminist Stories with Art
Afterword: On Trilogics
Biography
Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Transnational Art and Feminisms, and Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough University (UK). Her publications include Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections (2020), Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (2010), Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2003), all with Routledge.
This extraordinary, thought-provoking book is the most convincing envisioning of a decolonial, ecocritical feminist art history to date. ‘Walking alongside’ many different women and gender-diverse artists, thinkers, activists and writers, especially of Black feminist, Indigenous and eco-critical backgrounds, Marsha Meskimmon searches for other knowledges and strategies for collective survival within the damaged terrain of anthropogenic climate change. Her erudite prose borders on poetics in a unique way that builds bridges between different ecologies of knowledge and inspires new ways of writing rigorously critical yet hopeful stories on art and activism. Meskimmon practices the pedagogy she teaches: take risks, be open, be in transhemispheric dialogue. Offering new tools such as ‘transcanon’ and ‘trans-scalar ecologies’ with which to dismantle the master’s house, this wonderful book finds imaginative answers in the flourishing genealogies and ecologies of transnational feminisms.
Professor Anne Ring Petersen,
Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen
Given this is the second in Marsha Meskimmon’s trilogy of volumes examining transnational feminisms, politics, and art, it seems appropriate that she mobilizes the prefix "trans" as an embodied and critical conceptual tool to examine crossings and connections across categories of identity, canons, hemispheres, corporeal bodies, and bodies of knowledge. Meskimmon is as elegant a writer as she is a brilliant thinker - indeed, she is simply one of our most elegant contemporary academic writers - so she avoids conflating the terms she invokes. The book focuses on worlds and stories, or ecologies and genealogies, and the section on method nestled in its center should not be overlooked: it is about listening and coalition-building rather than mastery of knowledge. As she has for over a quarter of a century, Meskimmon shifts the discussion from art history as an object to art’s histories as material-discursive practices; her scholarship always gives me hope for the discipline of art history, this one also gives me hope for our planet.
Alpesh Kantilal Patel
Associate Professor, Contemporary Art
Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia
