Redirecting Currents: Theoretical Wayfinding with Latinx Folkloristics and Women of Color Transnational Feminisms

Abstract

Abstract The introduction to the special issue of JAF “Redirecting Currents: Theoretical Wayfinding with Latinx Folkloristics and Women of Color Transnational Feminisms” approaches Latinx folklore studies from transnational feminist perspectives. The issue engages with folklore key terms used by researchers, community members, public sector workers, artists, and activists. By using an extended metaphor of aquatic movements, the introduction elucidates how lexical discontinuities and connections allow for a transparent conversation of intellectual and/or ethnographic distortions, and it acknowledges the power of writing as process and the politics of remapping the field of contemporary folklore studies. In this model, a metaphor of affective transcultural cartographies is employed to frame ideas in and of racialized spaces. The authors also discuss the poetics and historical entanglements of folklorists and postcolonial thought with the Enlightenment, and how these vexed and intimate relations are situated in language, culture, and power. The introduction summarizes the keyword essays that follow and also poses some questions about future work in folklore studies based on similar approaches.