This book explores the critical significance of the visual arts to transnational feminist thought and activism.

This first volume in Marsha Meskimmon’s powerful and timely Trilogy focuses on some of the central political challenges of our era, including war, migration, ecological destruction, sexual violence and the return of neo-nationalisms. It argues that transnational feminisms and the arts can play a pivotal role in forging the solidarities and epistemic communities needed to create social, economic and ecological justice on a world scale. Transnational feminisms and the arts provide a vital space for knowing, imagining and inhabiting – earth-wide and otherwise. The chapters in this book each take their lead from a current matter of political significance that is central to transnational feminist activist organizing and has been explored through the arts in ways that permit dialogues across geopolitical borders to take place.

Including examples of artwork in full colour, this is essential reading for students and researchers in art history, theory and practice, visual culture studies, feminism and gender studies, political theory and cultural geography.

The Transnational Feminisms and the Arts 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

The story of Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art will shake up our understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and judgement, art and politics. There are very few writers who have both the courage to zoom out and survey the wider cultural forces that shape our collective belonging, and the patience to zoom in to the material details of artistic practice. In this fractured and globalizing world, Meskimmon has a generous and penetrating voice that needs to be listened to.

Professor Nikos Papastergiadis

Director of the Research Unit of Public Cultures

University of Melbourne

An impressive and ambitious reckoning with the political affects of transnational feminism and the arts, Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art is a timely undertaking that demonstrates how transversal politics, non-binary and intersectional thinking can help us to locate imaginative practices as fundamental to transformative and lasting political change. Meskimmon carefully delineates the ways in which art has been, can be and will always be the vehicle in which transformative dialogues across geopolitical borders take place most effectively and with most care. The book is a tour de force of imaginative possibilities for political transformations.

Professor Dorothy Price

Department of History of Art, University of Bristol

Editor, Art History

Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Art History and Theory, and Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough University. She is the author of a number of books on feminisms and the arts, including Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (2010) and Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2003).