Jo’s Comments (group member since Jan 12, 2016)

Jo’s comments from the Our Shared Shelf group.

Okay sorry for the delay - a bit later than planned, but this competition is now closed.
Winners will be contacted by PM in due course.

Thanks to those who entered :)

Florian wrote: "Here are two related topics. I do not know if they were officially approached but they seem essential to me.

1) Is Our Shared Shelf Western World centered?
2) How to make OSS more inclusive in att..."

and...

Robert wrote: "Hello Everyone,
Topic 1

Is Our Shared Shelf Western World centered?

Topic 2

How to mak..."

We think a better question to pose is - Is the publishing industry biased towards western audiences/books/authors/English. (The answer is yes.)

It’s extremely difficult to find widely available intersectional feminist books that are affordable and have been translated. We’d almost exclusively be looking at classics. Then when we do feature these, there’s not a ton of discussion in other languages about it, so hard to know how it’s being received or widely read.

Also, there are writers who don’t originally write in English that we’d like to feature, but they have to be extremely popular before they are translated widely and then they are not often affordable.

And we’ve noticed when we do feature international authors on the crowdsource votes, they never get many votes at all.

We are giving this competition one more day, so please make sure you answers are in by tomorrow!

Many thanks!

For those asking for the Pay it Forward thread, you can now find this here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

If you have copy and are happy to send it to another member, please use that thread.

Many thanks :)

Please use this thread to coordinate book borrowing between members! Hopefully everyone who wants to is able to read The Things I Would Tell You: British-Muslim Women Write.

Please use this thread ONLY for offers of and requests for Paying It Forward. All other comments about the book and where you got it from can be posted in other relevant topics, such as the book announcement at the top of the discussion board.

Our Pay It Forward initiative is strictly with regards to LEGAL methods of book sharing (for example, sharing hard copies or Kindle sharing). Any posts regarding illegal scans/PDFs/file sharing will be deleted without warning.

Thank you.

So to get things rolling for our new book 'The Things I Would Tell You: British-Muslim Women Write edited by Sabrina Mahfouz' I thought I would ask the standard question - Has anyone read this book before? If so, please share your thoughts.

Dear Our Shared Shelf:
Our selection for January/February 2019, is: The Things I Would Tell You: British-Muslim Women Write edited by Sabrina Mahfouz. This empowering anthology of essays, poems, opinions and stories from emerging and renowned writers help begin to reveal a rich and complex picture of Muslim women. In the face of Brexit, media misrepresentations, documented intolerance and violent acts of Islamophobia around the world, we are honored to be able to amplify these diverse voices of British-Muslim women who inspire us with their insight, passion and experience.

As a special treat, we asked poet, writer and editor, Sabrina Mahfouz, if she would share a short introduction to this book, especially for Our Shared Shelf members. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

The new year is a time of hope and reflection. One stark observation that stood out to me is how the policing of women’s bodies as an oppressive global obsession seemed to increase during 2018. Among countless examples, one was Egyptian actress, Rania Youssef, facing criminal trial for wearing a ‘revealing’ dress to Cairo film festival. Then Denmark became the latest European country to ban ‘face covering veils’. It happens differently in places but has the same misogyny at its root. Growing up between Europe and the Middle East, I have seen women in one country being legally banned from wearing something that in another, they are legally forced to wear. This constant shift over the decades, reminds me of the phrase ‘that which unites us is far greater than that which divides us’. Yet, those supposed divisions must be examined in order for meaningful unification to be possible. In some areas of the UK, including London, Muslim women wearing Islamic clothing have reported being unable to leave the house due to the increase in physical and verbal attacks. This Islamophobia, enabled partly by non- and/or misrepresentation of Muslims, continues to be stoked by politicians and the media. We must counteract this fear and misperception at every possible turn, and I hope this book, along with being entertaining and enjoyable, can shake up the representation of Muslim women in some small way.

The contributors to this anthology are an inspirational force. They offer the reader a range of styles (fiction, memoir, opinion, poetry and dramatic writing), striking stories, thoughts and experiences. The fact that these women all have a British and a Muslim identity is important in dispelling the narrow image of who a British-Muslim woman is and how she lives. We also hope to inspire those who don't often find writing that resonates with their own experiences or in the canon we are taught at schools. It is a simple idea, but it never fails to surprise me how much representation can empower and how much non- or misrepresentation can disempower. In my opinion, to not be reflected in a complex way in the cultural output of your society is to be denied your humanity. And we must all do whatever we can to alter the current, dominant narratives, for the benefit of everybody’s future. Thank you for joining the journey!

Here’s to an empowering and inspired 2019!

With love,

Sabrina Mahfouz and Team Our Shared Shelf


P.S. For our OSS members in North America, due to high demand, this book is currently being reprinted in the U.S. and may take a week or so to be restocked, in case you experience issues with availability. Thank you for your patience.

Dear OSS Members,
We’re thrilled to have been a part of bringing you this essential conversation about anger by two of our featured authors this month: Rebecca Traister and Dr. Brittney Cooper. The authors answered some great questions from our members. Reading through all your questions made us feel so proud of how thoughtful and serious OSS members are about this timely and important topic.

At OSS, we’re always looking for new ways to bring the message of intersectional feminism to a wider audience. And since our Instagram membership has grown to over 373,000 members, we thought it would be fun to try out the IGTV format.

You can access the 35 minute interview through this link: https://tinyurl.com/BCxRT
And we will have the full interview uploaded here some time tomorrow. Feel free to let us know what you think of it as we always welcome your feedback.

Additionally, after you watch the interview, leave a comment in this thread for a chance to win both books, Good and Mad and Eloquent Rage. We’ll be giving away 25 copies of both books to random winners who’ve chosen to answer this question:

What surprised you about this conversation around anger and how it's perceived differently depending on who is expressing it?

Love,
Team OSS

[Edit:] Video can now also be seen here: https://www.goodreads.com/videos/1443...

Please may I ask if your post has a question or a discussion point Nurullah? if not, i'm afraid I will need to close it.

Thanks to everyone who sent in questions! This competition is now closed - Winners will be contacted within the next week or so via personal message :)

Thank you!

This competition closes at 5pm UK time TODAY - so get those questions in! :)

Dear OSS,
We are very excited to announce that two of our currently selected authors (Brittney Cooper and Rebecca Traister) will be interviewing each other in the near future!

We would love to hear your questions for them, so please post your burning questions in the comments below!
…and if that wasn't enough, we will give away 25 copies of Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider to 25 randomly selected replies!

Please reply to this thread as soon as you can - and good luck!

The OSS Moderators

Please use this thread to coordinate book borrowing between members! Hopefully everyone who wants to is able to read Good and Mad.

Please use this thread ONLY for offers of and requests for Paying It Forward. All other comments about the book and where you got it from can be posted in other relevant topics, such as the book announcement at the top of the discussion board.

Our Pay It Forward initiative is strictly with regards to LEGAL methods of book sharing (for example, sharing hard copies or Kindle sharing). Any posts regarding illegal scans/PDFs/file sharing will be deleted without warning.

Thank you.

Please use this thread to coordinate book borrowing between members! Hopefully everyone who wants to is able to read Eloquent Rage.

Please use this thread ONLY for offers of and requests for Paying It Forward. All other comments about the book and where you got it from can be posted in other relevant topics, such as the book announcement at the top of the discussion board.

Our Pay It Forward initiative is strictly with regards to LEGAL methods of book sharing (for example, sharing hard copies or Kindle sharing). Any posts regarding illegal scans/PDFs/file sharing will be deleted without warning.

Thank you.

As all three of our November / December books deal with anger, I wanted to ask you all (as a feminist) what is making you angry right now?

I personally hate the way racism seems more rife than ever with the likes of Trump leading the US and Brexit happening in the UK. Far-right extremists are becoming ever more present and it's absolutely awful.
It's hard to know what sort of world our children and our children's children will live in, but I try to teach my boys about feminism and racism in subtle ways as they are still young. Nobody is born racist, and so as a parent I feel it my duty to ensure this remains the case.

Has anyone read any of these three books recommended for Nov/Dec? If so, we would love to know your thoughts :)

Hi all,
We hear you with regards the pricing of books and the fact that there are three.
Audre Lorde's book should (hopefully) be available at a reasonable price for most - which was part of the thought process for selecting this title.

If it helps, think of Brittney Cooper and Rebecca Traister's books as accompaniments with similar themes. It seemed like a nice idea to tie them all in together.

Please don't feel that you MUST read them all, you are free to pick and choose as you feel. Our Pay if forward section is there if you need it.


If you have any concerns, please PM me and I will do my best to help.


Thanks,
Jo

Please use this thread to coordinate book borrowing between members! Hopefully everyone who wants to is able to read Sister Outsider.

Please use this thread ONLY for offers of and requests for Paying It Forward. All other comments about the book and where you got it from can be posted in other relevant topics, such as the book announcement at the top of the discussion board.

Our Pay It Forward initiative is strictly with regards to LEGAL methods of book sharing (for example, sharing hard copies or Kindle sharing). Any posts regarding illegal scans/PDFs/file sharing will be deleted without warning.

Thank you.

Pam wrote: "Would it be better to read Lorde's book first and then the other two? ..."

That would certainly be my recommendation :)

Dear Our Shared Shelf Readers,

We are honored to be able to begin a conversation with you about the power and consequence of women’s rage, both personal and political. We could not be prouder or more excited that Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, and Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger have been selected as the Our Shared Shelf books for November/December 2018.

The famed feminist activist, poet, and essayist Audre Lorde was one of the foremost thinkers on the importance of anger. In her essay, “The Uses of Anger,” which you will get to read in her book Sister Outsider, she wrote, “every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”

To encounter these words is to be changed by them. We have been changed by them. And we hope that women’s anger, put to use within progressive coalitions in which fury is expressed and treated as instructive, will in turn have the power to change the world.

In this period, as we reckon with the rise of hard right authoritarian regimes around the world, many determined to roll back human rights—the very freedoms generations of angry women before us worked to win—today’s women are again being called to embrace our rage–its force, its potential, its messy complications. The fight against global patriarchy is far from over. Violence abounds but so does the possibility of building a new world from the wreckage of the old one.

To that end, and just as crucial as the call to angry expression, is the responsibility—instilled by Lorde—to listen with curiosity and respect to the rage of the women around us.

Our books, Eloquent Rage and Good and Mad, are an invitation into a conversation across race, across cultural contexts, across the things that make us both different and the same. If you are ready to come to terms with your anger, with the good, the bad, and the ugly of it, then you will enjoy—and perhaps find your tongues, your ears, your heads and hearts—liberated by these books.

Rebecca’s book Good and Mad will give you a deep and engaging (and sometimes enraging) historical deep dive into the way that women’s anger has been used throughout history to drive social movements, as well as about how rage at the inequalities replicated within those social movements has worked to both slow them and make them stronger. The stories will make you mad but they’ll also inspire you.

Brittney’s book invites the question of what it takes to meet Audre Lorde’s challenge: how do we focus our anger with precision? Through a range of personal stories about becoming a feminist, navigating friendships and romance and the white-washed shoals of pop culture, as well as contending with the limits of white feminists and the legacy of white feminism, Brittney demonstrates what it means to harness anger as a superpower.

We hope these books will lead to conversations—honest, real, and tough conversations—about the racial politics that too easily divide us. We hope that you will find useful narratives, historical surprises, and even questions that might expand your thinking and the thinking of those in your communities. We are friends, and we have had the opportunity to grow because we read and take each other’s work and struggles seriously. Now it’s your turn. Read our books. If you aren’t already mad, get mad. If you’ve never asked the women around you—older and younger—if they’re mad, or why they’re mad, now is a great time to start that conversation.

Let’s struggle; let’s read, let’s laugh and talk and think. We’ve got work to do if we’re gonna turn this thing around.

Best,
Brittney and Rebecca