The Color Pynk
Thinking with and through color is a lineage of Black women’s writing. In 1970, Toni Morrison pondered the meaning of beauty through a dark-skinned, little Black girl’s desire for blue eyes. Famously, in 1983, Alice Walker imagined a deeper and more communal practice for women’s liberation, marking womanist as the purple to feminist’s lavender. In 1999, Joan Morgan long...
We Are Owed.
Grief is an offering none may refuse. When I was 26, my best friend died suddenly under mysterious circumstances. It was days before we knew she passed. Still lodged in the deep isolation of COVID-19 quarantine, I mourned her death mostly alone through my poetry. I wrote poems to her ghost out of a desperate need to hear her voice in whatever form it chose to present it...
America, Goddam
Treva B. Lindsey’s America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice provides an in-depth examination of the lived experiences of Black women throughout the history of the United States. Exploring theories of power and inequality, anti-Blackness, misogynoir, and racial capitalism, Lindsey highlights the ways in which Black women not only face...
Sasinda Futhi Siselapha (still Here): Black Feminist Approaches to Cultural Studies in South Africa’s Twenty Six Years Since 1994
Sasinda Futhi Siselapha (Still Here) is an edited volume of interdisciplinary scholars who work on ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa. The strength of the edited volume lies in the authors’ commitment to what feminist scholar Amina Mama calls the idea of activist scholarship[i]. While allowing for diversity in feminist met...
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
In the July/August 2022 issue of Rolling Stone, rising hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion pondered why her assault at the hands of rapper Tory Lanez had not garnered more public sympathy, support, and care. Despite Lanez shooting at and injuring her—today, bullet fragments remain in her feet from his violent assault in the summer of 2020—Megan rightly discerned t...
The Divorce Colony
Our culture’s fascination with scandal and sensationalism did not begin with the Kennedys or Kardashians, but instead, has roots in the end of the nineteenth-century, when the U.S. press became fascinated with the growing number of women seeking divorce. April White’s The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier
Honour-based Violence and Forced Marriages
Honour-based Violence and Forced Marriages: Community and Restorative Practices in Europe by Clara Rigoni explains issues that are truly relevant in our modern world. The book is mostly about such urgent matters as violation of human rights (especially those of women and children) in gender-based violence. Rigoni analyzes reasons for, features, and consequences...
Dressed for Freedom
This fascinating and timely work will have you think twice about the clothes you put on every day. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox asks readers to take another look at twentieth-century fashion – this time, with a feminist lens. Throughout the twentieth century, she argues, women used fashion to express their politics and to influence mainstream consciousness. Dressed for Fre...
Desert Chrome
For those new to Kathryn Wilder’s nature-based creative nonfiction, she draws from her life, and how her decisions have affected not only her, but her family and the advocacy she lives as well. Her work has been cited in Best American Essays and nominated for the PEN America Literary Award and Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in a variety of...
Medicine Stories
Aurora Levins Morales’s book sets the reader up on a journey through her teachings and knowledges that she has gained over the years as a Puerto Rican Ashkenazi Jewish activist. This newly revised edition that expands on the original 1998 version, takes into consideration and subtly comments on the current political, social and activists’ climate. Morales explores the c...
Beyond the Periphery of the Skin
Marxist feminist scholar Silvia Federici’s latest book, based on a series of lectures delivered at the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2015, critically examines the role of the body under late capitalism. The book draws significantly from her earlier work Caliban and the Witch (2004), which examines the ways in which the persecution of women libelle...
Staging Black Fugitivity
Slavery’s legacies, afterlives, and remains continually haunt our present. Embedded in our political, cultural, educational, and social institutions, the specter of slavery is intimately entangled with contemporary life, functioning as an unresolvable enmity expressed toward black people. Studies of slavery within black theatre history are often relegated to the past, w...
Beauty Diplomacy
It is easy to dismiss beauty pageants as sexist or inconsequential. After all, many pageants continue to make judgments and enforce rules based on women’s body measurements, age, and marital status. Oluwakemi M. Balogun’s Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation, however, examines beauty pageants in their full complexity by recognizing aspects of pageantry that so...
You’re Dead – So What?
This book provides an empirical study of media and law enforcement bias in reporting and investigating homicides of African American women compared with their white counterparts. The author discusses the symbiotic relationship between media coverage and the response from law enforcement to victims of color, particularly when these victims are reported missing and presumed to be in danger by their loved ones.
As We Have Always Done
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking. She makes clear that the goal of Indigenous resistance can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic, calling for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state.
Evidence of Being
Evidence of Being is an important book that should impact the contours of Black and Queer Studies. Bost’s recuperation of the history of black gay cultural expression opens new lines of inquiry for scholars concerned with black sexuality, loss, history, and memory. Readers will find Evidence of Being moving, theoretically rich, and original.
From Angel to Office Worker
Susie S. Porter’s newest monograph, From Angel to Office Worker, Middle-Class Identity and Female Consciousness in Mexico, 1890–1950, is an important piece of scholarship that unapologetically emphasizes that women’s history is labor history and that labor history is women’s history.
Sarah Waters: Gender and Sexual Politics
In her book, Claire O’Callaghan inserts herself into the debate between essentialist feminists and queer theorists, reading Waters’ historical fiction as a model for contemporary queer and feminist interdependence.