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Gloria Anzaldúa concludes her 1987 multilingual poem "To live in the Borderlands means you" with: "To survive the Borderlands/you must live sin fronteras/be a crossroads." This ending prompts the question: How can we both live without borders (Anzaldúa's provided translation of sin fronteras) and be a crossroads? The both–and dynamic connotes an approach to the politics of in/visibility and il/legibility that asks us to consider how altering public spaces, like the U.S.–Mexico border and immigrant detention centers, concomitantly alter our perceptions of the concepts and systems they represent. By turning to public art and engaging with language, this article examines what happens when queer feminist artists extend Anzaldúa's words to address imperial violence. I use Cassils's and rafa esparza's 2020 co-led skytyping project In Plain Sight as a case study, which worked with eighty artists to skytype a range of phrases above U.S. detention centers and to offer a form of countermapping. By focusing on In Plain Sight, this article analyzes: how transmedia works complicate spatial, textual, and geopolitical borders; how an activist call-in and -out may be simultaneously articulated; and how features of embodied practice shape our understandings of queer feminist worldmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of black feminist performance artist and scholar Gabrielle Civil as a mode of transhistorical historiography. By working from Civil's artistic aim to open up space and her commitment to breaking the frames of identity, history, and art, the paper explores how textual and temporal slippages cultivate an embodied polyphonic practice responding to individual and collective histories and senses of belonging. With specific regard for transnational and diasporic identities and experiences, Civil's work addresses three different relationships between oneself and others: familial, (re)imagined familial, and ancestral bloodlines. The resulting dynamic enacts a "collaborative timeslip" as a means with which to address racist and patriarchal histographies and transgenerational trauma and memories. This approach allows for layering asynchronistic local and global perspectives to elicit calls for and demonstrations of protest and joy. Drawing from interdisciplinary, performance, and African diaspora scholars such as Avery F. Gordon, Long Le-Khac, Kara Keeling, Tina M. Campt, Nadège T. Clitandre, and Jack Isaac Pryor, the article primarily examines Civil's Fugue (Da Montréal) (2014) performance and debut full-length collection Swallow the Fish (2017). Extending beyond medium and genre, the collaborative timeslip perpetually enacts an oscillation of Civil's experiments: truth telling, creating, inviting someone in, documenting, and repeating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the opera "Four Saints in Three Acts" with libretto by Gertrude Stein and music by Virgil Thomson. She mentions the casting of African Americans in the opera, the use of repetition in the libretto to create a sense of continuity, and the lack of identity in the creation of the characters.