This essay recovers Black women's contributions to the 1963 March on Washington. Through a feminist ecological telling of the event, I first examine the many genres that comprised the march and the intersectional exclusions that created different types of access for women. Women such as Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson performed musical leadership, yet women were barred from speaking as visionaries and equal partners in the movement. The next analytical move is to study how women spoke back to this exclusionary ecology and the expansive vision of Black freedom they crafted through their advocacy. Toward this end, I widen the bounds of the ecology to highlight Pauli Murray and Anna Arnold Hedgeman interrogating male civil rights leaders and then shifting their questions to wider audiences and new activist ends. The essay thus contributes to histories of civil rights rhetoric, genre studies, and methods of feminist historiography.
In response to criminalization, Irish Republican internees in Long Kesh prison began the No Wash protest, smearing shit on cell walls as an anticolonial tactic. This essay offers analysis of the olfactory rhetorics and processes of ruination generated by excrement, utilizing archival documents from the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. While shit is often thought of as discard, excrement is a fundamental signifier of the life form from which it came. Through the excessive use of shit, No Wash protestors rendered their prison internment a failed attempt to contain their liveliness. This analysis traces the institutional management of smell and ruination, showing how protesting prisoners' strategic use of human waste created a context where prison authorities were forced to participate in the ruination of their own colonial infrastructure via intensive sanitation processes. The effects of the No Wash protest demonstrate the need for attention to waste not just as a byproduct but as a rhetorical resource for resistance and invention.
