Content area
Insurgent Wandering and the Bounds of the City: Feminist Intimacies in Havana, New York, and Paris Across the 20th Century argues that twentieth-century women creators (poets, filmmakers, and writers) active in and between three revolutionary cities forged feminist epistemologies by way of wandering, both intellectual and geographic. These epistemologies, rooted in embodied intimacy, demand a reconsideration of history centered on solidarity building. Engaging with new archival research and focused on understudied (and sometimes untranslated) bodies of work, Insurgent Wandering proposes the act of “wandering” as sustained insurgent feminist practice in lived experience and artistic practice between Havana, New York, and Paris. I historicize and theorize feminist wanderings that disrupt patriarchal narratives about artmaking and propose new epistemological frameworks ranging from the troubled to the utopian. This project assembles artists who crossed oceanic and national boundaries, creating formally innovative work. Insurgent Wandering reveals how women’s errant practices have proposed feminist visions of insurgency that reshaped twentieth-century transatlantic history.
This project looks at film, poetry, literature, and correspondence by and between women in the periods of the 1930s and the 1960s-1990s. Through close reading, archival excavation, and in-depth study of newly restored films, I reframe works by feminist artists working in the Global South and in marginalized locations of capitalist urban centers, centering the transnational and queer intimacies that inform their practices. Insurgent Wandering reconsiders the emergence of experimental ethnography, revolutionary art, and avant-garde film and poetry from the perspective of nonnormative relationalities to provide a decolonial and cross-disciplinary account of feminist artistic production that spans the twentieth century.