Transnational Feminisms and Art’s Transhemispheric Histories

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