This annual WGSI lecture, which will be launched in 2026, will honour the incredibly generative contributions Professor Emerita M. Jacqui Alexander has made to the field of transnational women’s studies, as well as to Black feminist, Caribbean feminist and queer of colourscholarship. It recognises the impact of Jacqui’s undergraduate and graduate teaching and scholarship while she was a Professor in WGSI. Two of her undergraduate courses in particular, offered well over a decade ago, were way ahead of their time: Black and Aboriginal Women in the Land of Dollars; and Migrations of the Sacred, which invited students to explore the entanglements of diaspora and indigeneity, and which centred the sacred and more than human kin in our classrooms. One of our graduates has written about the experience of following plants in a WGSI classroom, concluding that: “My reflection and the reflections of my colleagues that were shared after our journeys really substantiated the fact that the plants we chose to research and engage, actually chose us…The plant had a story to tell. I have a long way to go still, to understand why I had been selected, and what this means in the unfolding journey of my own life.”
In an interview with Haitian feminist Gina Ulysse, Jacqui has described teaching these courses; elsewhere she elaborates the experience of bringing students from WGSI and Spelman College together. Jacqui’s work continues to be a touchstone in our classes and in our research. The lecture series is a fitting tribute that recognises and commits to the historical and institutional record, Professor M. Jacqui Alexander’s remarkable contributions to WGSI.
As Professor Lisa Yoneyama has noted of Professor Alexander: “She has always been at the forefront of the intellectual currents of critical gender studies and has led the fundamental shift in women’s studies in the US. Not only was Jacqui’s work generative in that she was among the first to bring sexuality into the discussion of the formation of gender, class, and postcolonial statehood; her collaboration with Chandra Mohanty exemplified for many, including myself, the transnational, intersectional, and materialist theorization of race that went far beyond the North American framework and highlighted the profound and intensifying effects of colonialism, empires, and globalization. In part, perhaps, because of the affinity with the British Empire, Jacqui saw “Asia” as an important difference at a time when race meant only white guilt in the black-white binary. Jacqui also gifted us with new visions of feminist solidarity, solidarity with and through difference, as well as the idea of “becoming” (as in her famous phrase, women of color “become” women of color by listening to each other’s stories), pushing us out of narrow identitarian politics and ways of relating to each other. Jacqui’s work is so multifaceted and unique that it cannot be categorized in any one discipline or approach. It moves freely and generatively across political science, history, and literature.”