The Black Feminist Reader

by Joy James (Editor), T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Editor)

Organized into two parts, "Literary Theory" and "Social and Political Theory," this Reader explores issues of community, identity, justice, and the marginalization of African American and Caribbean women in literature, society, and political movements.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Race, Gender Studies, Academic

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Joy James is the John B. and John T. McCoy Presidential Professor of Humanities and College Professor in Political Science at Williams College. She is the author of Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture, and her edited works on incarceration and human rights include States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons and Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion.

Reviews

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is much to digest within this volume, but those who take the time to not only read, but listen and meditate over the words of Joy James, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, Angela Y. Davis, and the rest, will be taken into a discourse that works on two separate levels- one, which can be used to empower the reader, especially if that reader exists at the intersectionality of being both black and a woman, and two, if one is not at the intersectionality of being both black and a woman, the essays in this volume, including the historical documents that function as an appendix to this collection, highlight privileges that might otherwise be unrecognized by the reader, bringing this kind of reader closer to the truth that only can be experienced through black womanhood and its intersectionality with feminism.

[Caleb Sewell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that helps us map the different perceptions of Black feminist thought and criticisms. It includes how Black men have taken up Black Feminism through Michael Awkward and what it looks like to take up revolutionary Black feminist praxis through Joy James.

[Mardou · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Preface to this 2000 collection, "in our estimation the following essays best reflect the literary, social, and political critiques that mark this area of feminism as singular, controversial, and trnasformative. The ten essays reprinted here were written during the last twenty-five years by intellectuals who address key themes within black feminisms: the intersections of sex, gender, and race, sometimes class and ideology."