Transnational intergenerational trauma and queer/trans/feminist/decolonial care

From the end of 2024 to mid-2026, Danille Arendse, J. C. D. Calderón, Devika Misra, and Neelofer Qadir met with Meghana Nayak over email and Zoom conversations to discuss her book Tilt: a novel on intergenerational trauma (2024). Instead of a traditional ‘Author Meets Critics’ format, the participants shared creative responses including poetry, time-traveling prose, and epistolary engagement directly with the novel’s protagonist, Kavya. Nayak responded with an imagined essay written by her not-yet-existent grandchild in 2048. They all met to conceptualize ‘transnational intergenerational trauma’ as a contribution to International Relations (IR) scholarship on colonialism, colorism, casteism, slavery, settler colonialism, family separation, migration, transnational solidarities, and the global political economies of addressing harm, while remaining committed to trans/feminist/queer/de(s)colonial/anti-racist ethics of engagement.