The Poem, a Smile, and Black Feminist Placemaking

Bibliographic Data

ID19488807
AuthorsMuna Dahir (Queen's University, corresponding author), Katherine Mckittrick (Queen's University)
Year2026
Pages1-18
Publication date2026-06-03
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeoHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2373-5678 • E-ISSN: 2373-566X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/2373566x.2026.2631450
OpenAlexW7163424360
LanguageEN
References cited27

In Spring 2025 a collective of artists, scholars, poets, curators, and designers exhibited A Smile Split by the Stars, which closely engaged a single poem, nourbeSe philip’s “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones.” Working with philip and her archival materials, the installation sought to spatialize the poem by staging a series of multi-textured, multi-sensorial, and audio-visual compositions. This essay thus offers its own meditation on this experience through lessons learned about black feminist placemaking, drawing attention to a constellation of alternative imaginative and geographic practices of freedom, which in turn offer brief moments of reprieve, rebellion, and respatialization. Across seven interrelated sections, we reflect on how our curatorial process experimented with multidisciplinary and collaborative methodologies for engaging black women’s creative texts beyond extractive scholarly conventions, while remaining attentive to institutional limits

Beauty · Black feminism · Feminism · Girl · Meditation · Multidisciplinary approach · Placemaking · Poetry · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Latin American and Latino Studies · Race, History, and American Society

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