These books are a selected representation of what is available. Search the library catalog to discover more!
Black Feminism Reimagined
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As intersectionality has become a central feminist preoccupation, black feminism has been marked by a single affect—defensiveness—manifested by efforts to police intersectionality's usages and circulations. Nash contends that only by letting go of this deeply alluring protectionist stance, the desire to make property of knowledge, can black feminists reimagine intellectual production in ways that unleash black feminist theory's visionary world-making possibilities.
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
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In Black Feminist Thought, Collins set out to explore the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without. Here Collins provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Drawing from fiction, poetry, music and oral history, the result is the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought and its canon.
Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center
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This work is a comprehensive examination of the core issues of sexual politics, including political solidarity among women, men as partners in struggle, and the feminist movement to end violence. Always engaging and frequently provocative, hooks combines an accessible style with critical insight to offer a vision of feminism rooted in compassion, respect, and integrity.
Women, Race, and Class
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Davis analyzes the women’s movement from abolitionist times to the modern day, and critiques the racism and classism demonstrated by its leaders.
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
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The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles.
Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform
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Press, Platform, Pulpit examines how early black feminism goes public by sheding new light on some of the major figures of early black feminism as well as bringing forward some lesser-known individuals who helped shape various reform movements.
The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women's Unruly Political Bodies
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The Embodiment of Disobedience explores the ways in which the African Diaspora has rejected the West's efforts to impose imperatives of slenderness and mass market fat-anxiety.
Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts
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Contains over twenty essays in which African-American women discuss their bodies and physical characteristics, including selections from Iyanla Vanzant, Jill Scott, Melyssa Ford, and others.
The Black Female Body: a Photographic History
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The Black Female Body offers a stunning array of familiar and many virtually unknown photographs. Willis and Williams show how photographs reflected Western culture's fascination with black women's bodies, reinforcing beliefs about racial differences and hierarchies. The authors also show how the powerful images created by twentieth-century photographers increasingly challenged these false beliefs
Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women's Consciousness
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Hair Matters is the first book on the politics of Black hair to be based on substantive, ethnographically informed research. Focusing on the everyday discussions that Black women have among themselves and about themselves, Ingrid Banks analyzes how talking about hair reveals Black women's ideas about race, gender, sexuality, beauty, and power. Ultimately, what emerges is a survey of Black women's consciousness within both their own communities and mainstream culture at large.
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
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Roxane Gay addresses the experience of living in a body that she calls 'wildly undisciplined.' She casts an insightful and critical eye over her childhood, teens, and twenties -- including the devastating act of violence that was a turning point at age 12 -- and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life.
Romance with Voluptuousness: Caribbean Women and Thick Bodies in the United States
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Using personal accounts this book examines the ways in which black women with heritage in the English-speaking Caribbean participate in, perpetuate, and struggle with the voluptuous beauty standard of the black Caribbean while living in the hegemony of thinness cultivated in the United States.
The Body Is Not an Apology: the Power of Radical Self-Love
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As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world--for us all.
Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women
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Nappi by nature: afros, hot combs, and black pride -- Beauty, race, and black pride -- Advertising contradictions -- Broadening representational boundaries -- Gender, hair, and African American women's magazines -- In search of connections.
Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat: a Story of Bulimia
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In this moving first-person narrative, Armstrong describes her struggle as a black woman with a disorder consistently portrayed as a white woman’s problem. Trying to escape her selfhatred and her food obsession by never slowing down, Stephanie becomes trapped in a downward spiral. Finally, she can no longer deny that she will die if she doesn’t get help, overcome her shame, and conquer her addiction to using food as a weapon against herself.
African Diasporic Women's Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship
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Using feminist and womanist theory, Simone Alexander takes as her main point of analysis literary works that focus on the black female body as the physical and metaphorical site of migration. She shows that over time black women have used their bodily presence to complicate and challenge a migratory process often forced upon them by men or patriarchal society.
Beneath the Surface: a Transnational History of Skin Lighteners
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The Womanist Reader
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Charting the course of womanist theory from its genesis as Alice Walker’s African-American feminism, through Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi’s African womanism and Clenora Hudson-Weems’ Africana womanism, to its present-day expression as a global, anti-oppressionist perspective rooted in the praxis of everyday women of color, this interdisciplinary reader traces the rich and diverse history of a quarter century of womanist thought.
Letters to the Future: Black Women, Radical Writing
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A collection of poems, essays, elder conversations, and visual works, this book celebrates temporal, spatial, formal, and linguistically innovative literature. The anthology collects late-modern and contemporary work by Black women from the United States, England, Canada, and the Caribbean--work that challenges readers to participate in meaning making.
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
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Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, “the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.”
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies
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Originally published in 1982, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies is the first comprehensive collection of black feminist scholarship. Featuring contributions from Alice Walker and the Combahee River Collective, this book is vital to today's conversation on race and gender in America.
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology
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The pioneering anthology Home Girls features writings by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and writings.
Words of Fire: an Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought
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The first major anthology to trace the development, from the early 1800s to the present, of black feminist thought in the United States, Words of Fire is Beverly Guy-Sheftall's comprehensive collection of writings, in the feminist tradition, of more than sixty African American women
Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism
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In Colonize This!, Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman have collected a diverse, lively group of emerging writers who speak to the strength of community and the influence of color, to borders and divisions, and to the critical issues that need to be addressed to finally reach an era of racial freedom.
Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts
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Contains over twenty essays in which African-American women discuss their bodies and physical characteristics, including selections from Iyanla Vanzant, Jill Scott, Melyssa Ford, and others.
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines
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An anthology that gives access to the voices of mothers of color and marginalized motherswomen who are in a world of necessary transformation. The challenges faced by movements working for antiviolence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation, as well as racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice are the same challenges that marginalized mothers face every day.
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America
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Jezebel's sexual lasciviousness, Mammy's devotion, and Sapphire's outspoken anger -- these are among the most persistent stereotypes that black women encounter in contemporary American life. Hurtful and dishonest, such representations force African American women to navigate a virtual crooked room that shames them and shapes their experiences as citizens. Many respond by assuming a mantle of strength that may convince others, and even themselves, that they do not need help. But as a result, the unique political issues of black women are often ignored and marginalized.
Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
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bell hooks introduces a popular theory of feminism rooted in common sense and the wisdom of experience. Hers is a vision of a beloved community that appeals to all those committed to equality, mutual respect, and justice. hooks applies her critical analysis to the most contentious and challenging issues facing feminists today, including reproductive rights, violence, race, class, and work.
When and Where I Enter: the Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
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A testimonial to the profound influence of African-American women on race and women's movements throughout American history. Giddings portrays how black women have transcended racist and sexist attitudes to initiate social and political reform. From the open disregard for the rights of slave women to examples of today's more covert racism and sexism in civil rights and women's organizations, Giddings illuminates the black woman's crusade for equality.
Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women's Music
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She argues that the women's music festival is a significant institutional site for the emergence of black feminist consciousness in the contemporary period. Hayes also offers sage perspectives on black women's involvement in the women's music festival scene, the ramifications of their performances as drag kings in those environments, and the challenges and joys of a black lesbian retreat based on the feminist festival model.
Hip Hop's Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement
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Drawing from academic and organic intellectual/activist communities as diverse as African American studies and women's studies, postcolonial studies and sexuality studies, history and philosophy, politics and economics, and sociology and ethnomusicology, Hip Hop's Inheritance calls into question one-dimensional and monodisciplinary interpretations or, rather, misinterpretations, of a multidimensional and multivalent form of popular culture that has increasingly come to include cultural criticism, social commentary, and political analysis.
Aphro-Ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism From Two Sisters
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Aph and Syl Ko provide new theoretical frameworks on race, advocacy for nonhuman animals, and feminism. Using popular culture as a point of reference for their critiques, the Ko sisters engage in groundbreaking analysis of the compartmentalized nature of contemporary social movements, present new ways of understanding interconnected oppressions.
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
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A groundbreaking work of feminst history and theory analyzing the complex relations between various forms of oppression. Ain't I a Woman examines the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the historic devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism within the recent women's movement, and black women's involvement with feminsim.
You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain
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Being a black woman in America means contending with old prejudices and fresh absurdities every day. Robinson has experienced her fair share over the years: she's been relegated to the role of "the black friend," as if she is somehow the authority on all things racial; she's been called "uppity" for having an opinion in the workplace; she's been followed around stores by security guards; and yes, people do ask her whether they can touch her hair all. the. time.
We Should All Be Feminists
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Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
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Notes from a trip to Russia -- Poetry is not a luxury -- The transformation of silence into language and action -- Scratching the surface : some notes on barriers to women and loving -- Uses of the erotic : the erotic as power -- Sexism : an American disease in blackface -- An open letter to Mary Daly -- Man child : a black lesbian feminist's response -- An interview : Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich -- The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house -- Age, race, class, and sex : women redefining difference
This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America
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In This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.
Bad Feminist
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A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay.
In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose
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Walker speaks out as a Black woman, writer, mother, and feminist in thirty-six pieces ranging from the personal to the political. Among the contents are essays about other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and her daughter's healing words.
Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays
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Essayist June Jordan presents this collection that follows the more than 40-year span of her writing career, which includes political essays about the incomplete legacy of the civil rights movement as well as more personal essays about her experience as a single mother, and also as a black feminist bisexual.
Difficult Diasporas: the Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic
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In this comparative study of contemporary black atlantic women writers, the author demonstrates the role of aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and location. Thinking beyond national identity to include African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British literature, this publication brings together an innovative archive of twentieth-century texts marked by their break with conventional literary structures.
New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000
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A passionate and celebrated pioneer in her own words New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000 collects a selection of essays and reviews from Barbara Christian, one of the founding voices in black feminist literary criticism.
Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995
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Black Internationalist Feminism examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's'nationalist internationalism,'which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
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Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature...draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World--without the mandate for conquest."
Writing Through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature
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Hardison examines African American literature and its representation of black women during the pivotal but frequently overlooked decades of the 1940s and 1950s. At the height of Jim Crow racial segregation—a time of transition between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement and between World War II and the modern civil rights movement—black writers also addressed the effects of'Jane Crow,'the interconnected racial, gender, and sexual oppression that black women experienced.
Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature: From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison
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Geneva Cobb Moore deftly combines literature, history, criticism, and theory in Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature by offering insight into the historical black experience from slavery to freedom as depicted in the literature of nine female writers across several centuries. Moore traces black women writers' creation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power in literature.
Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood
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This volume examines how Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths, or SOLHOT, a radical youth intervention, provides a space for the creative performance and expression of Black girlhood and how this creativity informs other realizations about Black girlhood and womanhood. Founded in 2006 and co-organized by the author, SOLHOT is an intergenerational collective organizing effort that celebrates and recognizes Black girls as producers of culture and knowledge.
Pushout: the Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
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Pushout exposes a world of confined potential and supports the movement to address the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures. For four years Morris chronicled the experiences of black girls across the country whose intricate lives are misunderstood, highly judged-by teachers, administrators, and the justice system-and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish.
Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence
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With an outward gaze focused on a better future, Between Good and Ghetto reflects the social world of inner city African American girls and how they manage threats of personal violence. Drawing on personal encounters, traditions of urban ethnography, Black feminist thought, gender studies, and feminist criminology, Nikki Jones gives readers an account of how African American girls negotiate schools and neighborhoods governed by the so-called "code of the street"
Imagining Black Womanhood: The Negotiation of Power and Identity Within the Girls Empowerment Project
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Examines how Black girls and women negotiate and resist dominant stereotypes in the context of an Afrocentric youth organization for at-risk girls in the Bay Area.
Black Womanist Leadership: Tracing the Motherline
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Black Womanist Leadership: Tracing the Motherline offers a culturally based model of Black women’s leadership practices, and examines the mother-daughter transmission of these skills. The personal narratives fit into a storytelling tradition that reveals the ways Black mothers and women of the community—the Motherline—teach girls the “ways women lead.”