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. Published between the release of her second landmark book Black Feminist Criticism and her death, these writings include eloquent reviews, evaluations of black feminist criticism as a discipline, reflections on black feminism in the academy, and essays on Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and others.
Can black males offer useful insights on black women and patriarchy? Many black feminists are doubtful. Their skepticism derives in part from a history of explosive encounters with black men who blamed feminism for stigmatizing black men and undermining racial solidarity and in part from a perception that black male feminists are opportunists capitalizing on the current popularity of black women's writing and criticism. In Breaking the Silence, David Ikard goes boldly to the crux of this debate through a series of provocative readings of key African American texts that demonstrate the possibility and value of a viable black male feminist perspective. Seeking to advance the primary objectives of black feminism, Ikard provides literary models from Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Toni Morrison's Paradise, Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, and Walter Mosley's Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned and Walkin' the Dog that consciously wrestle with the concept of victim status for black men and women. He looks at how complicity across gender lines, far from rooting out patriarchy in the black community, has allowed it to thrive. This complicity, Ikard explains, is a process by which victimized groups invest in victim status to the point that they unintentionally concede power to their victimizers and engage in patterns of behavior that are perceived as revolutionary but actually reinforce the status quo. While black feminism has fostered important and necessary discussions regarding the problems of patriarchy within the black community, little attention has been paid to the intersecting dynamics of complicity. By laying bare the nexus between victim status and complicity in oppression, Breaking the Silence charts a new direction for conceptualizing black women's complex humanity and provides the foundations for more expansive feminist approaches to resolving intraracial gender conflicts.
In late 1995, the Million Man March drew hundreds of thousands of black men to Washington, DC, and seemed even to skeptics a powerful sign not only of black male solidarity, but also of black racial solidarity. Yet while generating a sense of community and common purpose, the Million Man March, with its deliberate exclusion of women and implicit rejection of black gay men, also highlighted one of the central faultlines in African American politics: the role of gender and sexuality in antiracist agenda. In this groundbreaking anthology, a companion to the highly successful Critical Race Feminism, Devon Carbado changes the terms of the debate over racism, gender, and sexuality in black America. The essays cover such topics as the legal construction of black male identity, domestic abuse in the black community, the enduring power of black machismo, the politics of black male/white female relationships, racial essentialism, the role of black men in black women's quest for racial equality, and the heterosexist nature of black political engagement. Featuring work by Cornel West, Huey Newton, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Houston Baker, Marlon T. Riggs, Dwight McBride, Michael Awkward, Ishmael Reed, Derrick Bell, and many others, Devon Carbado's anthology stakes out new territory in the American racial landscape. --Critical America, A series edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stephancic.
Black Feminist Cultural Criticism is the first comprehensive analysis of the full range of Black women's creative achievements. In this outsdanding collection, writers and scholars in literature, film, television, theatre, music, art, material culture, and other cultural forms explicate Black women's artistry within the context of an activist framework. The contributors are concerned with the politics of cultural production and the ways in which Black women have confronted institutional and social barriers.
Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom—a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma’s girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime—until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula’s anarchy leads to a betrayal that may be beyond forgiveness. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Masterful, richly textured, bittersweet, and vital, Sula is a modern masterpiece about love and kinship, about living in an America birthed from slavery. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison gives life to characters who struggle with what society tells them to be, and the love they long for and crave as Black women. Most of all, they ask: When can we let go? What must we hold back? And just how much can be shared in a friendship?
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.
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, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.
Whitney Battle-Baptiste outlines the basic tenets of Black feminist thought for archaeologists and shows how it can be used to improve historical archaeological practice.
