With its flora crossing boundaries, Deus Ex Nigrum is, above all else, an invitation to bloom. This chapbook of poems holds a speaker remapping her body, which travels from a site of betrayal to one of renewal. Enacted here is an interlocution of self and body, a configuration outside of canonical human experience, a trans speaker who so finds posterity & futurity in the surround of human being: flowers, seasons, satellitic cyclings. These poems, forever embarking on the commute between monster and human, paint for us the hypervisibility and interior awe that accompany a trans femme’s movement through urban landscapes. Despite being rooted in Baltimore and Brooklyn, there is an unmistakable pull towards the botanical and the cosmic. These poems take us upwards and outwards, coiling and opening with a kaleidoscopic preference for synergy, oceania, and beauty. There is a persistent vulnerability which accumulates & allows the text to arrive upon a new speaker, one who knows herself & says, "here is who i am. i am. i am."

On February 15, 1975, Kenneth C. Edelin was found guilty of manslaughter after he performed an abortion on an patient who was 20 weeks pregnant. One of the biggest public issues was whether the subject of abortion was on trial. The verdict sent shock waves to various sectors of the medical and health care professions, with many medical professionals voicing support of Edelin. The Massachusetts Hospital Association, however, issued a memorandum stating that hospital administrators may wish to place new emphasis upon the limitations of abortion procedures and stated that hospitals may be more cautious about performing abortions after the first 20 weeks of pregnancy. A fear that both the medical community and the judiciary share is the growing and complex interwining of the law and medicine.

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony asks: Whose testimony is valid? Whose testimony is worth recording? Osman's speakers, who are almost always women, assert and reassert in an attempt to establish authority, often through persistent questioning. Specters of race, displacement, and colonialism are often present in her work, providing momentum for speakers to reach beyond their primary, apparent dimensions and better communicate. The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony is about love and longing, divorce, distilled desire, and all the ways we injure ourselves and one another.

Crenshaw's paper, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" examines three legal cases to support her theorization of intersectionality, including the DeGraffenreid v. General Motors case.

Launched in December 2014 by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS), the #SayHerName campaign brings awareness to the often invisible names and stories of Black women and girls who have been victimized by racist police violence, and provides support to their families.

Exiles of Eden looks at the origin story of Adam, Eve, and their exile from the Garden of Eden, exploring displacement and alienation from its mythological origins to the present. In this formally experimental collection steeped in Somali narrative tradition, Osman gives voice to the experiences and traumas of displaced people over multiple generations. The characters in these poems encounter exile's strangeness while processing the profoundly isolating experience of knowing that that once you are sentout of Eden, you can't go back.

Women's and Gender studies major Sara Hayet ’18 interviews Kimberlé Crenshaw about "Intersectional Feminism." Crenshaw served as the keynote speaker on Sept. 17, 2015, for the 30th anniversary of Women’s and Gender Studies at Lafayette.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker's iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book. A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker's epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.

As an organizer, writer, publisher, scholar-activist, and elected official, Barbara Smith has played key roles in multiple social justice movements, including Civil Rights, feminism, lesbian and gay liberation, anti-racism, and Black feminism. Her four decades of grassroots activism forged collaborations that introduced the idea that oppression must be fought on a variety of fronts simultaneously, including gender, race, class, and sexuality. By combining hard-to-find historical documents with new unpublished interviews with fellow activists, this book uncovers the deep roots of today's "identity politics" and "intersectionality" and serves as an essential primer for practicing solidarity and resistance.

A national best seller, deemed "one of Morrison's most haunting works" by the New York Times, A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the story of a mother and a daughter--a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment. In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors--D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet--and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

This revolutionary, award-winning play by a lauded playwright and poet is a fearless portrayal of the experiences of women of color--"extraordinary and wonderful...that anyone can relate to" (The New York Times) and continues to move and resonate with readers today more than ever. From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange's words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975 when it was praised by The New Yorker for "encompassing...every feeling and experience a woman has ever had," for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

The most influential writing on the pivotal concept of intersectionality, by the scholar who introduced the term, collected for the first time. Intersectionality has emerged as an influential approach to understanding discrimination and exclusion in our society, whose members can experience bias in multiple ways - as a consequence of race, gender, sexual orientation, or a combination of these. In this first-ever collection of Crenshaw's writing, readers will find the key essays and articles that have defined the concept of intersectionality.

Since Victoria Woodhull launched her symbolic bid for the presidency in 1872, dozens of women have sought the presidency over the past 150 years. Their quest began long before women won the vote and it unfolded over decades when a woman's pursuit of any higher political office was met with prejudice, mockery, and hostility. Even after women started voting in 1920, they remained shut-out of rooms where presidential candidacies were often born. Whether a woman will break through the glass ceiling during the current election cycle is uncertain, Fitzpatrick acknowledges. But it will happen sooner or later.

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. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides a fresh assessment of how Black women's lives have changed-or not-since the book was first published. Contributors are Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Julie Carter, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willie M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita Weems.

Harriet Tubman is one of America's most beloved historical figures, revered alongside luminaries including Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History tells the fascinating story of Tubman's life as an American icon. The distinguished historian Milton C. Sernett compares the larger-than-life symbolic Tubman with the actual "historical" Tubman. He does so not to diminish Tubman's achievements but rather to explore the interplay of history and myth in our national consciousness. Analyzing how the Tubman icon has changed over time, Sernett shows that the various constructions of the "Black Moses" reveal as much about their creators as they do about Tubman herself. Three biographies of Harriet Tubman were published within months of each other in 2003-04; they were the first book-length studies of the "Queen of the Underground Railroad" to appear in almost sixty years. Sernett examines the accuracy and reception of these three books as well as two earlier biographies first published in 1869 and 1943. He finds that the three recent studies come closer to capturing the "real" Tubman than did the earlier two. Arguing that the mythical Tubman is most clearly enshrined in stories told to and written for children, Sernett scrutinizes visual and textual representations of "Aunt Harriet" in children's literature. He looks at how Tubman has been portrayed in film, painting, music, and theater; in her Maryland birthplace; in Auburn, New York, where she lived out her final years; and in the naming of schools, streets, and other public venues. He also investigates how the legendary Tubman was embraced and represented by different groups during her lifetime and at her death in 1913. Ultimately, Sernett contends that Harriet Tubman may be America's most malleable and resilient icon.

Claudia Jones, intellectual genius and staunch activist against racist and gender oppression founded two of Black Briton's most important institutions; the first black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Times and was a founding member of the Notting Hill Carnival. This book makes accessible and brings to wider attention the words of an often overlooked 20th century political and cultural activist who tirelessly campaigned, wrote, spoke out, organized, edited and published autobiographical writings on human rights and peace struggles related to gender, race and class. "Claudia Jones was an iconic figure who inspired a generation of black activists and deserves to be much more widely known. This important book is a fitting memorial." Diane Abbott, MP, Westminster, London.
*Recommended essay for key term: "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!"; "We Seek Full Equality for Women"

Very few theories have generated the kind of interdisciplinary and global engagement that marks the intellectual history of intersectionality. Yet, there has been very little effort to reflect upon precisely how intersectionality has moved across time, disciplines, issues, and geographic and national boundaries. Our failure to attend to intersectionality’s movement has limited our ability to see the theory in places in which it is already doing work and to imagine other places to which the theory might be taken. Addressing these questions, this special issue reflects upon the genesis of intersectionality, engages some of the debates about its scope and theoretical capacity, marks some of its disciplinary and global travels, and explores the future trajectory of the theory. To do so, the volume includes academics from across the disciplines and from outside of the United States. Their respective contributions help us to understand how intersectionality has moved and to broaden our sense of where the theory might still go.

Rooted in Black feminism and Critical Race Theory, intersectionality is a method and a disposition, a heuristic and analytic tool. In the 1989 landmark essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term to address the marginalization of Black women within not only antidiscrimination law but also in feminist and antiracist theory and politics.

On June 2, 2013, Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind and Mobile Homecoming organized a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Combahee River uprising, an epic event organized by Harriet Tubman in which nearly 800 enslaved Africans achieved their freedom at the Combahee River near Beaufort, South Carolina, and the legacy of the Combahee River Collective, a Boston-based, black, lesbian, socialist, feminist organization famous for its analysis of interlocking oppression in the 1970s and early 1980s. With the support of INCITE Women of Color against Violence, Black Women's Blueprint, and the Resource Center for Women's Ministry in the South, twenty-one black feminists converged on the revolutionary site for a three-day retreat, re-enactment, and immersive educational experience. This article contextualizes the gathering in terms of the dream work of Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Collective, and a holistic practice of black feminism as a collective visionary act.

This op-ed talks about how Black women, specifically, get overlooked in conversations on police violence.

On June 2, 1863, Harriet Tubman led 150 black Union soldiers, who were part of the U.S. 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, in the Combahee River Raid and liberated more than 700 enslaved people. Tubman, often referred to as “the Moses of her people,” was a former slave who had fled to freedom in 1849. Throughout the 1850s, she returned to her native Maryland to bring other enslaved people north into freedom, first to Pennsylvania and then eventually to Canada.

"ZAMI is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author's vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde's work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page."--Off Our Backs

As a woman, writer, mother, and feminist, Walker explores the theories and practices of feminism, incorporating what she calls the womanist tradition of African American women.

Barbara Smith and the Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective.

Sojourner was a feminist periodical that evolved from a small Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) women's newspaper to a national forum for feminist analysis of news, opinion, and the arts, as well as women's creative writing and poetry. By the 1990s, Sojourner prided itself as a vital link for the feminist community, including those marginalized women who were on welfare or incarcerated. Although there was a loyal readership, Sojourner experienced financial challenges throughout its history. The newspaper would see a steady decline in advertisers and subscribers, and by 2002 discontinued publication.

"Petry is the writer we have been waiting for, hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose."--Tayari Jones,The Enthusiast, New York Times Book Review THE STREET tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, a beloved bestseller with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still resonates today.

The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom brings together more than two decades of literary criticism and political thought about gender, race, sexuality, power, and social change. As one of the first writers in the United States to claim black feminism for black women, Barbara Smith has done groundbreaking work in defining black women's literary traditions and in making connections between race, class, sexuality, and gender. Smith's essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," is often cited as a major catalyst in opening the field of black women's literature. Pieces about racism in the women's movement, black and Jewish relations, and homophobia in the Black community have ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers address. The collection also brings together topical political commentaries on the 1968 Chicago convention demonstrations; attacks on the NEA; the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Senate hearings; and police brutality against Rodney King and Abner Louima. It also includes a never-before-published personal essay on racial violence and the bonds between black women that make it possible to survive.

In Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory Patricia Hill Collins offers a set of analytical tools for those wishing to develop intersectionality's capability to theorize social inequality in ways that would facilitate social change. While intersectionality helps shed light on contemporary social issues, Collins notes that it has yet to reach its full potential as a critical social theory. She contends that for intersectionality to fully realize its power, its practitioners must critically reflect on its assumptions, epistemologies, and methods. She places intersectionality in dialog with several theoretical traditions--from the Frankfurt school to black feminist thought--to sharpen its definition and foreground its singular critical purchase, thereby providing a capacious interrogation into intersectionality's potential to reshape the world.

Stella Nyanzi was arrested on November 2, 2018 for posting a poem on Facebook that was said to cyber-harras the long-serving President of Uganda, Mr. Yoweri Museveni. She was convicted and sentenced to eighteen months in jail. At the date of publishing this poetry collection, Nyanzi remains incarcerated. She wrote all the poems in this collection during her detention. This arguably makes her the first Ugandan prison writer to publish a poetry collection written in jail while still incarcerated. The first batch of the poems was released on her 45th birthday on June 16, 2019 celebrated while she was in jail under the hashtag #45Poems4Freedom. Other poems were written after the birthday. These poems must be read not only for their beauty and the power of the poet's vision, but also for the bravery and radical intent of their writing and publishing.

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
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This matter is before the Court upon its sua sponte reconsideration of its Order of September 30, 1975, which denied the cross motions of the plaintiffs and defendant General Motors Corporation for summary judgment on the grounds that questions of fact and law then existed. The Court is of the opinion, for the reasons stated below, that the then existing questions of law and fact have been resolved, and that this matter is now ripe for partial summary judgment as delineated in the accompanying Order of this date.

* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry * * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker,Boston Globe,The Atlantic,BuzzFeed, NPR.Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly,Slate,Time Out New York,Vulture,Refinery 29, and many more . . . A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking bookDon't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry,Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

How She Read is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination. Drawing from grade-school vocabulary spellers, literature, history, art, media and pop culture, Chantal Gibson's sassy semiotics highlight the depth and duration of the imperialist ideas embedded in everyday things, from storybooks to coloured pencils, from paintings to postage stamps. A mediation on motherhood and daughterhood, belonging, loss and recovery, the collection weaves the voices of Black women, past and present. As Gibson dismantles the grammar of her Queen Elizabeth English, sister scholars talk back, whisper, suck teeth, curse and carry on from canonized texts, photographs and art gallery walls, reinterpreting their image, re-reading their bodies and claiming their space in a white, hegemonic landscape. Using genre-bending dialogue poems and ekphrasis, Gibson reveals the dehumanizing effects of mystifying and simplifying images of Blackness. Undoing the North Star freedom myth, Harriet Tubman and Viola Desmond shed light on the effects of erasure in the time of reconciliation and the dangers of squeezing the past into a Canada History Minute or a single postage stamp. Centrefolds Delia and Marie Therese discuss their naked Black bodies and what it means to be enslaved, a human subject of art and an object of science, while Veronica? tells it like it is, what it means to hang with the Group of Seven on the walls of the Art Gallery of Ontario amongst the lakes, the glaciers, the mountains and the dying trees. Supported by the voices of Black women writers, the poems unloose the racist misogyny, myths, tropes and stereotypes women of colour continue to navigate every day. Thoughtful, sassy, reflective and irreverent, How She Read leaves a Black mark on the landscape as it illustrates a writer's journey from passive receiver of racist ideology to active cultural critic in the process of decolonizing her mind.

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, originally published in 1990, Patricia Hill 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 a superbly crafted and revolutionary book that provided the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought and its canon.

Summaries of the bills passed to protect women from violence in the United States.

Written by Earl Conrad and originally published by Carter G. Woodson and the The Associated Publishers in 1943 and 1990, General Harriet Tubman is a well-researched and documented biography. It draws on the accounts of Tubman's living relatives and others with expert knowledge of the period in which she lived. Perhaps, for this reason, in his Acknowledgements for the first edition, Conrad likened the book to Tubman herself: "Scores of people have contributed to the information, the understanding, and diverse other assistance that has been necessary in effecting this complete life of Harriet Tubman. I could not possibly call it my own. It is as much the property of others, and of the Negroes in particular, as Harriet herself was the claim of her people and her country."

Kenneth Carlton Edelin was an American physician known for his support for abortion rights and his advocacy for indigent patients' rights to healthcare. He was born in Washington, D.C. and died in Sarasota, Florida.

Jones addresses the triple oppression and super exploitation of Black women under capitalism and the ensuing political and social results, thoroughly demonstrating a theory of race, sex, and class long before it became known as intersectionality. Much of the text reads as though it was published today; namely, the gross neglect of Black women in virtually all echelons of society - including, still, relegation to domestic work - and the ongoing problem of the refusal of white Communists to include Black women in their activism. A must-read for understanding revolutionary movements.

From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women's liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. "Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard."--The New York Times Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women's rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger's racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.

Established in 2011, the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School will serve as a global focal point for the development, articulation, and application of intersectionality as both a theoretical framework and a cogent practice in law, human rights, and social justice advocacy.

The first such center of its kind, its research projects and initiatives will bring together scholars and practitioners from law, sociology, feminist and gender studies, human rights, social justice, and other fields to explore the relationship of intersectionality to their work, to shape more effective remedies, and to promote greater collaboration between and across social movements. The director of the center is Professor Crenshaw.

Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person -- no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.

Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. "[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware."--The New York Times In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to "never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . "

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding New York Times bestseller transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick

“A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don’t know how to live properly.” —Zadie Smith

One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.

Recipient of the 2002 Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Historical Writing. In this "stunning collection of documents" (Washington Post Book World), African-American women speak of themselves, their lives, ambitions, and struggles from the colonial period to the present day. Theirs are stories of oppression and survival, of family and community self-help, of inspiring heroism and grass-roots organizational continuity in the face of racism, economic hardship, and, far too often, violence. Their vivid accounts, their strong and insistent voices, make for inspiring reading, enriching our understanding of the American past. "A very timely and powerful collection which gives emphasis to the magnificent role of Black women in the struggle of Black people to survive in this, the United States,"--Nathan Irvin Huggins "Gerda Lerner has collected . . . material which can change images that whites have had of Blacks, and possibly even those which we, as Blacks, have of ourselves,"--Maya Angelou

Paris Is Burning offers a vibrant glimpse into the New York drag and ball subculture during the 1980s, along with the African-American, Latino, gay, and transgender communities involved in it. It examines the system of ‘houses’, which serve as a means of shelter and solace for those who have been kicked out of their homes due to being LGBT. These houses represent a community of friends led by a ‘mother’, typically an older member of the drag scene, and enables members to feel a sense of belonging after being estranged from their biological families.

The essential, "richly researched"* biography of Harriet Tubman, revealing a complex woman who "led a remarkable life, one that her race, her sex, and her origins make all the more extraordinary" (*The New York Times Book Review). Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history--a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow slaves to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. Now, in this magnificent biography, historian Kate Clifford Larson gives us a powerful, intimate, meticulously detailed portrait of Tubman and her times. Drawing from a trove of new documents and sources as well as extensive genealogical data, Larson presents Harriet Tubman as a complete human being--brilliant, shrewd, deeply religious, and passionate in her pursuit of freedom. A true American hero, Tubman was also a woman who loved, suffered, and sacrificed. Praise for Bound for the Promised Land "[Bound for the Promised Land] appropriately reads like fiction, for Tubman's exploits required such intelligence, physical stamina and pure fearlessness that only a very few would have even contemplated the feats that she actually undertook. . . . Larson captures Tubman's determination and seeming imperviousness to pain and suffering, coupled with an extraordinary selflessness and caring for others."--The Seattle Times "Essential for those interested in Tubman and her causes . . . Larson does an especially thorough job of . . . uncovering relevant documents, some of them long hidden by history and neglect."--The Plain Dealer "Larson has captured Harriet Tubman's clandestine nature . . . reading Ms. Larson made me wonder if Tubman is not, in fact, the greatest spy this country has ever produced."--The New York Sun

The activist, educator, and author has spent her life challenging oppressive power structures and supporting women of color. And she's not done yet.

Barbara Smith invokes in her seminal 1978 essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” that her goal in developing a Black feminist criticism is to reveal “the state of Black women’s culture and the intensity of all Black women’s oppression.” The primary oppressions Black women historically endured have been based on race, gender, and class; this trifecta has been given many names, but I will refer to it as intersecting identities. While Black feminist theory emerged as early as 1892, with intersecting identities at its heart, the conversation around this marginalization is still relevant today. It was Kimberlé Crenshaw’s seminal 1989 essay, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” that popularized the term intersectionality to the larger scholarly community. This theory has real repercussions for Black women, Black feminists, and Black women artists. Intersectionality is not just theory for Black women; it constitutes their lived experiences in the United States. To critically assess meaning of Black women’s artwork, an understanding of intersectionality is necessary, as Afrofemcentrism acknowledges.

On this page you will find resources on Intersectionality.

An example for students to analyze how systemic failures to consider race and gender adversely affect women of color, specifically in relation to their interactions with police

Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement is a 1970 anthology of feminist writings edited by Robin Morgan, a feminist poet and founding member of New York Radical Women. It is one of the first widely available anthologies of second-wave feminism.

Most people are familiar with the 1863 popular version of Sojourner Truth's famous, “Ain’t I a woman” speech but they have no idea that this popular version, while based off of Sojourner’s original 1851 speech, is not Sojourner's speech and is vastly different from Sojourner’s original 1851 speech. I must acknowledge Nell Irvin Painter, a professor at Princeton University, specializing in American history and notable for her works on southern history of the nineteenth century. Professor Painter was the scholar who first rang the bell on this historical mistake. This site would not be possible with out relying on her brilliant work.

First published in 1859, Our Nig is an autobiographical narrative that stands as one of the most important accounts of the life of a black woman in the antebellum North. In the story of Frado, a spirited black girl who is abused and overworked as the indentured servant to a New England family, Harriet E. Wilson tells a heartbreaking story about the resilience of the human spirit. This edition incorporates new research showing that Wilson was not only a pioneering African-American literary figure but also an entrepreneur in the black women's hair care market fifty years before Madame C. J. Walker's hair care empire made her the country's first woman millionaire.

"My People Are Free" A poem by the Participants in “My People Are Free”: Harriet Tubman and Prophecy in the Present Tense

Kimberle Crenshaw speaks during the New York Women's Foundation's "Celebrating Women" breakfast in New York City, on May 10, 2018.

CeCe McDonald is a Black Trans woman who was sentenced to 41 months in prison for defending her friends and herself from racist, transphobic assaulters. Her imprisonment for self-defense, as well as her placement in a male prison, led to an outpour of support from local, national, and transnational communities. During her imprisonment she wrote letters to her supporters who then published them into a blog. There are ten letters in total that range from personal narratives to direct advocacy for activist causes. In each letter, McDonald poses the transformative and political power of love and compassion despite the rejection and violence she has faced for her very existence. McDonald’s ability to draw from the strength of her relationships and the love she’s formed with others proposes a radical approach to social and political revolution in which unity and change must stem from our collective care for each other.

Black Feminist in Public is a new series of conversations between creative Black women and Janell Hobson, a Ms. scholar whose work focuses on the intersections of history, popular culture and representations of women of African descent.

Philando Castile, Eric Garner and George Floyd. The deaths of these Black men at the hands of police have fueled outrage over police brutality and systemic racism.

This explicitly Black feminist perspective is especially powerful during an era when violence against women and other hate crimes have escalated to epidemic proportions.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, a 2017 NAIS People of Color Conference speaker, civil rights advocate, and professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, talks about intersectional theory, the study of how overlapping or intersecting social identities—and particularly minority identities—relate to systems and structures of discrimination.

The following is from But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. Originally published in 1982, the anthology was the first comprehensive collection of black feminist scholarship. Michele Wallace is Professor of English, Women’s Studies and Film Studies at the City College of New York and the City University of NY Graduate Center. She is the author of several books including Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.

As Nationalists, our lives have only one purpose. That purpose is
the building and maintaining of our nation . In building our nation, we
must restore our people to their traditional greatness. We can't restore
anything if we are backward . VG'e can't leave a legacy for our children if
we are backward. We have to define ourselves as Nationalists who are
concerned with improving our lives, to always develop and preserve a
better way of living .

Joan* Little was acquitted on this day in 1975, the first woman in U.S. history to be acquitted using the defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault. She had killed a guard in self-defense while incarcerated.

Inspired by the legacy of radical and queer black feminists of the 1970s and '80s, Revolutionary Mothering is an anthology that centres mothers of colour and other marginalised mothers' voices. Marginalised and oppressed mothers are at the centre of a world of necessary transformation. The challenges we face as movements working for racial, economic, reproductive, gender and food justice, as well as anti-violence, anti-imperialist and queer liberation are the same challenges that marginalised mothers face every day.

Jarena Lee's religious autobiography is among the most moving and profound of its kind, telling the story of one woman's journey to faith in a society hostile to her gender and race.

Published in 1836, this memoir attracted much attention for its eloquence, whereby Jarena Lee relays in clear and articulate terms her discovery of God and conversion to Christianity. Filled with emotional gravitas and passages attesting her devotion to the divine, the journal is one of the most inspiring religious biographies of its period.

After her early upbringing Jarena worked as a servant maid, where she struggled with depression and self-esteem. Often feeling damned and wretched, she contemplated and fantasized about suicide several times. It was only when she began to study the Bible and the Christian doctrines in detail that she found her calling in life and set about following it.

Feeling galvanized and joyous at having gained a sense of purpose on the Earth, Jarena set about delivering sermons and preaching. After founding the African Methodist Episcopal Church, she would traverse tremendous distances on foot, sometimes covering more than a thousand miles in a single year to deliver over one hundred lectures. This pilgrim's tirelessness, and her status as both a woman and a black person, distinguished Jarena Lee and brought her a measure of fame.

At the time Jarena experienced her career as a preacher, slavery was legal in the United States. Racism was accepted and, in parts of the nation, condoned as the correct attitude to hold towards black people. As such, Jarena struggled against abuse concerning both her gender and race. In spite of these attempts to undermine her character and devotion to God, Jerena went on to live a lengthy life of over eighty years total.

In Black Feminism Reimagined Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism's engagement with intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and political contribution to feminist theory. Charting the institutional history and contemporary uses of intersectionality in the academy, Nash outlines how women's studies has both elevated intersectionality to the discipline's primary program-building initiative and cast intersectionality as a threat to feminism's coherence. As intersectionality has become a central feminist preoccupation, Nash argues that 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.

Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present-titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin-five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire-how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race-a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.

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Sojourning for Freedom portrays pioneering black women activists from the early twentieth century through the 1970s, focusing on their participation in the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) between 1919 and 1956. Erik S. McDuffie considers how women from diverse locales and backgrounds became radicalized, joined the CPUSA, and advocated a pathbreaking politics committed to black liberation, women's rights, decolonization, economic justice, peace, and international solidarity. McDuffie explores the lives of black left feminists, including the bohemian world traveler Louise Thompson Patterson, who wrote about the "triple exploitation" of race, gender, and class; Esther Cooper Jackson, an Alabama-based civil rights activist who chronicled the experiences of black female domestic workers; and Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born activist who emerged as one of the Communist Party's leading theorists of black women's exploitation. Drawing on more than forty oral histories collected from veteran black women radicals and their family members, McDuffie examines how these women negotiated race, gender, class, sexuality, and politics within the CPUSA. In Sojourning for Freedom, he depicts a community of radical black women activist intellectuals who helped to lay the foundation for a transnational modern black feminism.

In “In Search of Discourse and Critique/s that Center the Art of Black Women Artists,” Tesfagiorgis states that “[Afrofemcentrism] focuses on the Black woman subject as depicted by the Black woman artist, exploring the distinct manner in which the latter envisions and present Black women's realities.”

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but anunfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs's Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of "vision" and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.

*Recommended section for Combahee River Raid and Collective: "remember"

One of the very few Black women's studies books is entitled
All the Women Are White; All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of
Us are Brave.1 I have chosen this title as a point of departure in
my efforts to develop a Black feminist criticism 2 because it sets
forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and
gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis.'
In this talk, I want to examine how this tendency is perpetuated
by a single-axis framework that is dominant in antidiscrimination
law and that is also reflected in feminist theory and antiracist
politics.

Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. A Penguin Classic First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde's testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.

This groundbreaking collection reflects an uncompromised definition of feminism by women of color. 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.”

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. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the 2016 Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book. Her articles have been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, New Politics, The Guardian, In These Times, Black Agenda Report, Ms., International Socialist Review, and other publications. Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. "Extravagantly beautiful. . . . A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter." --The New York Times Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal--or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.

Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances--blues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects--hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook--as precious icons. Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant--a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher's angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up. Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, artist, and educator from Chicago. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, New Republic, The Nation, The Atlantic, and many other publications. She is a sociologist at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.

Crenshaw's groundbreaking essay, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" includes her first public theorization of intersectionality.

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Patrick Johnson's oral history Honeypot takes a unique approach to preserving the lives of black queer women who were raised in the American South. Using a fictional framework to recount real-life oral histories, Johnson presents a world where he, as Dr. EPJ, is awakened one morning by the mysterious Miss B.

A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain't I a Woman has become a must-read for all those interested in the nature of black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman's involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this book a critical place on every feminist scholar's bookshelf.

Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison powerfully examines our obsession with beauty and conformity--and asks questions about race, class, and gender with her characteristic subtly and grace. In Morrison's bestselling first novel, Pecola Breedlove--an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. Here, Morrison's writing is "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry" (The New York Times).