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, DesireÉ Melonas, Kelli Moore, Jyoti Puri, Sandra Ruiz, Amanda Russhell Wallace, Asli Zengin