This issue’s “Africa Reconfigured” cluster presents new scholarly and artistic approaches to decolonization emerging from African Studies. Xavier Livermon argues that new definitions of “tradition”—not just legal rights—have led Black South Africans to “queer” marriage practices. Cheryl Toman offers an account of writer, playwright, and performer Werewere Liking’s distinctive questioning of colonialism through performance art and social activism in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. Busi Makoni examines how young women creatively relate to the prevailing lexicon of body parts in southern African languages. Our featured artist is Peju Alatise, whose materials and ideas deeply question European and US aesthetics, as Moyo Okediji explains. Creative writers published in this issue, Olumide Popoola and Gabeba Baderoon, examine the workings of gender orders and memory in African contexts.

In the second half of this issue, Sara Evans and Agatha Beins reconsider the relationship between race and US women’s liberation in the 1960s and early 1970s. Also, Mark Schuller offers an intersectional analysis of the violence that Haitian women faced in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.

Our forum “Teaching about Ferguson” offers reflections by six scholars on how to approach teaching about state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.

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Africa Reconfigured

Xavier Livermon
Usable Traditions: Creating Sexual Autonomy in Postapartheid South Africa
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Busi Makoni
Labeling Female Genitalia in a Southern African Context: Linguistic Gendering of Embodiment, Africana Womanism, and the Politics of Reclamation
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Cheryl Toman
The Impact of African Feminisms and Performance in Conflict Zones: Werewere Liking in Côte-d’Ivoire and Mali
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Moyo Okediji
Scarves of Rare Porcelain: Peju Alatise’s Fabric Architecture (Art Essay)
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Creative work
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• Olumide Popoola
   Fishing for Naija (Creative Writing)
• Gabeba Baderoon
   Focal Length; Poetry for Beginners; ID Photos (Poetry)

Sara M. Evans
Women’s Liberation: Seeing the Revolution Clearly
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Agatha Beins
Radical Others: Women of Color and Revolutionary Feminism
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Mark Schuller
“Pa Manyen Fanm Nan Konsa”: Intersectionality, Structural Violence, and Vulnerability Before and After Haiti’s Earthquake
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Forum: Teaching about Ferguson (forum of 6 articles)

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• Jennifer C. Nash
   Teaching about Ferguson: An Introduction
  
• Jennifer James
   Looking
  
• Sylvanna M. Falcón
   The Globalization of Ferguson: Pedagogical Matters about Racial Violence
  
• Sarah Jane Cervenak
   On Not Teaching about Violence: Being in the Classroom After Ferguson
  
• Rebecca Wanzo
   The Deadly Fight Over Feelings
  
• Treva B. Lindsey
   Post-Ferguson: A “Herstorical” Approach to Black Violability
  

Cover Art

Front cover: Peju Alatise, Unconscious Struggle, 2012, detail.

Back cover: Peju Alatise, She Said No!, 2012, detail.