Haunted by representations of black women that resist the reality of the body's vulnerability, Kimberly Juanita Brown traces slavery's afterlife in black women's literary and visual cultural productions. Brown draws on black feminist theory, visual culture studies, literary criticism, and critical race theory to explore contemporary visual and literary representations of black women's bodies that embrace and foreground the body's vulnerability and slavery's inherent violence. She shows how writers such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Jamaica Kincaid, along with visual artists Carrie Mae Weems and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, highlight the scarred and broken bodies of black women by repeating, passing down, and making visible the residues of slavery's existence and cruelty. Their work not only provides a corrective to those who refuse to acknowledge that vulnerability, but empowers black women to create their own subjectivities. In The Repeating Body, Brown returns black women to the center of discourses of slavery, thereby providing the means with which to more fully understand slavery's history and its penetrating reach into modern American life.

Contributors to this special issue explore feminist articulations of mourning that are anchored in slavery, settler occupation, colonialism, migration, and the violence of modern national states. The authors perceive mourning not as a process of individualized grief to be worked through or overcome but as a collective condition that encompasses historical consciousness and contemporary collective action. Essays in the issue cover mourning the mother tongue in Toni Morrison's A Mercy, the aesthetics and politics of brown and queer sorrow, Palestinian reflections on death, poems from a lesbian diasporic body, mother loss in Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig, Black maternal necropolitics, and more. By acknowledging the spaces and temporalities in which various manifestations of death abound and by examining mourning as both lineages and possibilities of loss and grief, the authors theorize mourning as an orientation to the world where the past, present, and imminent futures are not dead or destined but contain the potentialities for lives that were and are yet to be. Contributors. Courtney Baker, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Tiffany Caesar, Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Eman Ghanayem, K. Melchor Quick Hall, Tara Jones, Nancy Kang, Patricia Ann Lott, Emer Lyons, Desiree Melonas, Kelli Moore, Jyoti Puri, Sandra Ruiz, Amanda Russhell Wallace, Asli Zengin