Translations across Black Feminist Diasporas

As anthropologist Christen Smith contends in her contribution to this issue, “Because of the tendency to over-emphasize the experiences of English-speaking Black women” within the global project of Black feminist studies, Afro-Latin American women’s voices have been “muted,” despite the fact that they “have made significant theoretical and philosophical interventions that could potentially change the way that we think about gendered racial politics transnationally.” Cognizant that feminist academics and activists in the United States and the global North, including many U.S.-African Americans and other feminists of color, often lack access to the critical insights and innovations developed by Black feminist theories and practices emergent in the “South” of the Americas, we organized this two-volume guest-edited issue of Meridians as a work of political and cultural translation. Beyond language barriers and cultural distinctiveness, we maintain that translation is politically and theoretically indispensable to forging feminist, pro-social justice, antiracist, postcolonial/decolonial, and anti-imperial political alliances and epistemologies. This is particularly the case among Afro-descendant feminisms and all who embrace anti-racist politics; the “intertwined diasporas” that forged Blackness in the Americas make it “imperative that the vernacular wisdoms and feminist political epistemic lenses of Afro-Latin@ women travel and get valorized as equal partners from South to North, to pluralize and enrich feminist cultures, to foster decolonial projects of liberation, grounded in Afro-diasporic reciprocity and solidarity” (Lao-Montes and Buggs 2014, 398).