Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged Black feminism

Imagining Black Womanhood: The Negotiation of Power and Identity Within the Girls Empowerment Project

Imagining Black Womanhood by Stephanie D. Sears is a sociological account of the experiences of young African-American girls within the Girls Empowerment Project (GEP), an “Afri-centric, womanist, single-sex, after-school program” in Sun Valley, the largest housing development in Bay City, California.

The Necessity of Climate Change: Women of Color Speak from the Ivory Tower

Morgane Richardson graduated from Middlebury College in 2008 feeling that American colleges recruit women of color, but have no idea how to address the issues they face once they are enrolled. As a result, many of these women suffer depression, anxiety, and isolation in silence. Morgane decided to do something about this situation, and less than two years later, she has collected submissions from women all over the country who have had to navigate issues of race, class, and gender at elite, predominately white college campuses. With these stories, Morgane created Refuse the Silence.

African Americans Doing Feminism: Putting Theory into Everyday Practice

There are many well-meaning people in society who identify as feminists, yet do not know what they can do to put their feminist ideals into action. African Americans Doing Feminism is an excellent resource for these people.

Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry

In Beauty Shop Politics, Tiffany M. Gill documents the central role that Black beauticians played in the struggle against Jim Crow laws. Beauty shops were one of the few industries that offered Black women some economic stability and upward mobility in the face of segregation. The industry also offered Black women a respectable alternative to domestic labor, as well as a chance to not work for White people.

Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

Can African American liberation be understood without easy binaries: nonviolent civil disobedience vs. armed self-defense, integration vs. Black nationalism, MLK vs. Malcolm X? Can the history of feminism be written without effacing the contributions of Black feminists and other people of color? As Want to Start a Revolution? shows, foregrounding the work of women in Black liberation immediately problematizes these simple classifications.

Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton

There has to be something said for being able to succeed in concisely communicating the issue of Black feminism and politics, but I think Duchess Harris has done just that.

I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde

I Am Your Sister is a collection for those who want and need to be introduced to Audre Lorde’s thinking, and it is a great anthology for those who have read and been inspired by Lorde’s writing all of their lives. How is this possible?

Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy

Why is contemporary African American literature — particularly that produced by black women — continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety? Her first book, Private Lives, Proper Relations, Candace M. Jenkins looks at how African American writers express the political consequences of intimacy for the susceptible black subject.

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology was the first publication that documented some of the concerns and challenges addressed at the Color of Violence Conference, which began at University of California-Santa Cruz in 2000. Since then, there have been two more conferences, organizing campaigns and the SISTERFIRE tour of radical women artists.

Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking their Minds

While reading this collection, I recalled when I was in a debate with a male writer about where were the intellectuals and poets from the Black Arts Movement. I named Mari Evans and was dismissed. Never mind that Cheryl Clarke, June Jordan and Audre Lorde could have also been a part of that list.

Mommy's Angel

Most savvy feminists can argue their way through complex social problems such as sexual violence, poverty and drug use. Most savvy feminists, though, could not articulate those issues though a fast-paced, sharply written story like Mommy’s Angel.

Aqua Beats and Moon Verses: Volume I

Chicago based performance artists camil.williams and veronica precious bohanan (a.k.a. AquaMoon) explore womyn-centered issues, such as rape, molestation, incest, and women in hip hop from an African American perspective. These themes are interpreted through the use of choreopoems (poems intended to be acted out on stage), and there is also a CD that comes with the book.

Dark Designs and Visual Culture

Michele Wallace is best known for her controversial, groundbreaking book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Published in 1979 when Wallace was twenty-six years old, it defined her as an outspoken feminist who was unafraid to examine the misogynistic elements of the Black Power and Civil Rights movements of the sixties, and explored how sexism as well as racism damaged the psyches of Black women. Not surprisingly, Wallace’s fearlessness came with a painful price. Although the book garnered her immediate fame and recognition in feminist and intellectual circles (so hot was the buzz about Macho that her face made the cover of Ms. shortly before the book was published), Wallace received an intense level of criticism from all sides that she was not prepared to face.

The Mammy Project

Michelle Nicole Matlock’s one-woman show, The Mammy Project, is a provocative piece of theater that entertains and educates through a series of vignettes that deconstructs the controversial history of the Mammy stereotype. Matlock builds her show around two stories - the life of Nancy Green, a former slave who was hired as the first-ever Aunt Jemima for the World’s Fair in 1893, and Matlock’s own experiences as a full-figured African-American actress who thought she’d never have to play the part of the mammy-maid in today’s entertainment business, but found herself getting cast in those r
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