Katie Geneva Cannon Research Collection

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.

In Black Sexual Politics,Patricia Hill Collins explores how images of Black sexuality have been used to maintain the color line and how they threaten to spread a new brand of racism around the world today.

In On Intellectual Activism, Collins asks scholars and public intellectuals to assess the meaning of their work. She challenges readers to rethink the potential of speaking truth to power, and examines both the role of the intellectual in public life and how well questions of contemporary social issues are communicated to the public at large.

Neoliberalism is the normative rationality of contemporary global capitalism that orders people to live by the generalized principle of competition in all social spheres of life. Keri Day asserts that neoliberalism and its moral orientations consequently breed radical distrust, lovelessness, disconnection, and alienation within society. She argues that engaging black feminist and womanist religious perspectives with Jewish and Christian discourses offers more robust critiques of a neoliberal economy. Employing womanist and black feminist religious perspectives, this book provides six theoretical, theologically constructive arguments to challenge the moral fragmentation associated with global markets. It strives to envision a pragmatic politics of hope.

Black women in marginalized communities are uniquely at risk of battering, rape, sexual harassment, stalking and incest. Through the compelling stories of Black women who have been most affected by racism, persistent poverty, class inequality, limited access to support resources or institutions, Beth E. Richie shows that the threat of violence to Black women has never been more serious, demonstrating how conservative legal, social, political and economic policies have impacted activism in the U.S.-based movement to end violence against women.

In an increasingly globalized economy, Sims argues that Ida B. Wells's fight against lynching is a viable option to address systemic forms of oppression. More than a century since Wells launched her anti-lynching campaign, an examination of her work questions America's use of lynching as a tool to regulate behavior and the manner in which public opinion is shaped and lived out in the private sector.

In Wounds of the Spirit, Traci West employs first person accounts-from slave narratives to contemporary interviews to Tina Turner's autobiography-to document a historical legacy of violence against black women in the United States. West, a black feminist Christian ethicist, situates spiritual matters within a discussion of the psycho-social impact of intimate assault against African American women. She identifies specific social mechanisms which contribute to the reproduction of intimate violence, insisting that cultural beliefs as well as institutional practices must be altered if we are to combat the reproduction of violence, and suggests methods of resistance which can be utilized by victim-survivors, those in the helping professions, and the church.

This best-selling anthology examines the interrelationship of race, class, and gender and explores how they have shaped the experiences of all people in the U.S. Drawing from an interdisciplinary array of contemporary and historical readings, coupled with personal narratives from various writers, the authors help students see the connections between personal experience and social institutions. The introductions to each of the sections provide continuity by identifying central issues and help students place the articles in context.

In this important new book, two of the nation’s leading African American intellectuals offer a resounding and far-reaching answer to a question that has been ignored for far too long: Why has the African American community remained silent about gender even as race has moved to the forefront of our nation’s consciousness?

A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders.

The trial of Angela Y. Davis in connection with the prisoner revolt by three black prisoners on August 7, 1970 at the Marin County Courthouse will be remembered as one of America's most historic political trials. This first person account is thorough analysis of that increasingly important symbol - the political prisoner.

A collection of speeches and writings by political activist Angela Davis which address the political and social changes of the past decade as they are concerned with the struggle for racial, sexual, and economic equality.

This portrayal of the poverty of black women in this country describes the unemployment, underemployment, isolation, and lack of assets they typically experience. It demolishes the common stereotypes that castigate poor black women as "morally problematic and dependent on the money of good tax-paying citizens." She calls on the black churches to become potential agents of change and leaders in addressing the unequal social and economic structures that hold captive these poor women. The goal is to empower poor black women to develop assets that will prevent long-term poverty and allow them to flourish.

Mining the Motherlode defines the tenets, resources, and methods of womanist Christian social ethics by providing a womanist orientation on how racial and gender ideologies as well as social position inform research methods for this field. Floyd-Thomas accomplishes this by: a) articulating the methodological contributions that womanist ethicists have made in this field of Christian ethics b) distinguishing between traditional Christian ethics and liberation ethics c) upholding Black women's moral struggles with race, class, and gender as an essential context to inform ethical inquiry and new possibilities for social justice.

Deeper Shades of Purple brings together a who's who of scholars in the study of Black women and religion who view their scholarship through a womanist critical lens. The contributors revisit Alice Walker's definition of womanism for its viability for the approaches to discourses in religion of Black women scholars. Whereas Walker has defined what it means to be womanist, these contributors define what it means to practice womanism, and illuminate how womanism has been used as a vantage point for the theoretical orientations and methodological approaches of Black women scholar-activists.

This is not only an eloquent testament to the unsung contributions of individual women to our nation, but to the collective activism which elevated the race and women's movements that define our times. From Ida B. Wells to the first black Presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm; from the anti-lynching movement to the struggle for suffrage and equal protection under the law; Giddings tells the stories of black women who transcended the dual discrimination of race and gender.

Higginbotham gives an account of the crucial role of black women in making the church a powerful institution for social and political change in the black community. Between 1880 and 1920, the Black church served as the most effective vehicle by which men and women alike, pushed down by racism and poverty, regrouped and rallied against emotional and physical defeat. Focusing on the National Baptist Convention, the largest religious movement among black Americans, Higginbotham shows us how women were largely responsible for making the church a force for self-help in the black community.

This inspiring, sometimes heartbreaking narrative offers fresh scholarship and historical presentation as presents the strength, courage, and resourcefulness of African-American women as individuals and as a collective force for positive change. A Shining Thread of Hope discloses their impact on American life from colonial America to the years of antebellum slavery to the arts renaissance of the 1970s and '80s. Gripping stories of Civil War spies, a new look at the Civil Rights movement, and an examination of the triumphs of recent years reveal what Black women have to teach all Americans about courage and survival.

hooks uses the term white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy as a lens through which to both critique various aspects of American culture and to offer potential solutions to the problems she explores. She addresses topics including the goals of feminist movement, the role of men in feminist struggle, the relevance of pacifism, solidarity among women, and the nature of revolution.

What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, bell hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives—to see that feminism is for everybody.

hooks examines the effect of racism and sexism on black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the 1970s. She argues that the convergence of sexism and racism during slavery contributed to black women having the lowest status and worst conditions of any group in American society. White female abolitionists and suffragists were often more comfortable with black male abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, while southern segregationalists and stereotypes of black female promiscuity and immorality caused protests whenever black women spoke.

bell hooks writes about the meaning of feminist consciousness in daily life and about self-recovery, about overcoming white and male supremacy, and about intimate relationships, exploring the point where the public and private meet.

For bell hooks, the best cultural criticism sees no need to separate politics from the pleasure of reading. Yearning collects together some of hooks's classic and early pieces of cultural criticism from the '80s. Addressing topics like pedagogy, postmodernism, and politics, hooks examines a variety of cultural artifacts, from Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing and Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire to the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. The result is a poignant collection of essays which, like all of hooks's work, is above all else concerned with transforming oppressive structures of domination.

This ground-breaking collection provides hours of enjoyment for the general reader and a wealth of materials needed to develop course units on black women; political theory, literary essays on major writers, guidelines for consciousness-raising about racism, and surveys of black women's contributions to the blues. "Important and innovative."-- Feminist Bookstore News

As a womanist theologian, Kirk-Duggan analyzes the language of the Spirituals, lyrics that "name, unmask, and engage the powers." She takes us to performances of the Spirituals by powerful ensembles during the Civil Rights era, and to performances by song leaders and individual singers. We meet the women who lived and sang and worked with the Spirituals. In them, stories and music combine to form a theology of justice and a theodicy in which God affirms the identity of Black people and God's love for them.

Cheryl Kirk-Duggan calls on Christians to take seriously how their tradition has participated in violence while preaching against it. She uses theology, ethics, and cultural studies to explore such key issues as war, homicide, suicide, and scapegoating.

In More than Chains and Toil, Joan Martin explores the experiences of enslaved women and the realities of their social world to uncover the interrelationships among moral agency, work, and human meaning. She then reflects ethically on the implications such a distinct perspective on labor might have for women in contemporary African American communities and for broader discussions about the meaning of work in American society.

After a chapter exploring black women's religious context and presenting early examples of this work by women of the ante-bellum and post-Reconstruction eras, Ross looks at seven civil rights activists who continue this tradition. They are Ella Josephine Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Way DeLee, Clara Muhammad, Diane Nash, and Ruby Doris Smith Robinson.

The first major anthology to trace the development, from the early 1800s to the present, of black feminist thought in the United States, Words of Fire is Beverly Guy-Sheftall's comprehensive collection of writings, in the feminist tradition, of more than sixty African American women. From the pioneering work of abolitionist Maria Miller Stewart and anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells-Barnett to the writings of contemporary feminist critics Michele Wallace and bell hooks, black women have been writing about the multiple jeopardies--racism, sexism, and classicm--that have made it imperative for them to forge a brand of feminism uniquely their own.

Sims roots her work in oral histories and gives voice to the memories of African American elders who remember lynching not only as individual acts but as a culture of violence, domination, and fear. Sims examines the relationship between lynching and the interconnected realities of race, gender, class,and other social fragmentations that ultimately shape a person's and a community's religious self-understanding. She explores how people reconcile their personal and communal memory of lynching with their lived Christian experience.

This book recovers the life and historical context of Ida Wells-Barnett and examines the extent to which her perspective can be a resource for a contemporary womanist Christian social ethic. Beginning with a brief biographical sketch, Townes examines the religious and social world in which Wells-Barnett worked as well as her many speeches and publications and focuses especially on Wells-Barnett's participation in the anti-lynching campaigns of the late nineteenth century. She argues that Wells-Barnett's life and work can provide important lessons in leadership and social activism for contemporary Black churchwomen.

This volume is an interdisciplinary exploration of the interplay between the contemporary Black Church in the United States and African American womanist spirituality and social witness. Historically, the Black Church itself has represented a strong yoking of social witness and spirituality. This blend has endured whether the primary theology and ethical import of the Church has been accomodationist or protest-oriented. African American women in the Church have carried this legacy in their lived witness of spirituality and social action.

In 1996, 42 million Americans had no medical insurance and the rise of managed care organizations (HMOs) in the late 1990s is changing the kind of healthcare other Americans receive.

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders has enlisted a wide variety of scholarly perspectives and critical approaches about the place of black women's bodies within the American cultural consciousness to discuss the ways that the simultaneous interrogation of gender, race, and corporeality shape the construction of black female representation. She presents a persuasive argument for broadening the ongoing scholarly conversations about the body. It makes clear that the most salient discourses in poststructuralist and feminist theory are made richer and more complex when the black female body is considered.