Introduction to Black Feminism
This research guide celebrates the accomplishments of Black feminists and their scholarship
Intersectionality
Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in this essay: “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics [1989].” In Feminist Legal Theory, 1st ed., 57–80. Routledge, 1991.
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. "Smithsonian Learning Lab Resource: Intersectional Feminism." Smithsonian Learning Lab. September 18, 2019. Accessed February 15, 2023.
Select Documentaries
Griffin, A. G., Parkerson, M., & Third World Newsreel, film distributor. (1996). A litany for survival : the life and work of Audre Lorde [90 min] [Video recording]. Third World Newsreel. [available online]
Walker, A., Bellinelli, M., & Moore, E. (1992). Alice Walker [30 min] [Video recording]. California Newsreel. [available online]
Select Articles
Lorde, A. (1985). I am your sister Black women organizing across sexualities (1st ed.). Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
Lorde, A. (1979). “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In The Schlager Anthology of Women’s History : A Student’s Guide to Essential Primary Sources (pp. 630–633).
Black Women Feminists
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Pauli Murray (1910-1985)
As a poet, writer, activist, organizer, legal theorist, and priest, Murray was directly involved in, and helped articulate, the intellectual foundations of two of the most important social justice movements of the twentieth century. She was a staunch advocate for the rights of women and people of color and fought tirelessly for civil rights. -
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)
Lorde's work highlighted her experience of the world as a Black lesbian woman and later, as a mother and person suffering from cancer. -
Angela Davis (1944- )
Davis is an American political activist, academic and author who was an active member in the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party. -
Alice Walker (1944- )
Walker is an American writer, poet, and activist known for her insightful portrayal of African American life and culture. Her 1982 novel The Color Purple was the subject of a major motion picture and Broadway musical. -
Cheryl Clarke (1947- )
A poet and writer of essays relevant to queer Black community, Clarke retired from Rutgers University in 2013 after working in administration and teaching for 41 years. -
bell hooks (1952-2021)
Née Gloria Jean Watkins, hooks was one of the most influential American authors, scholars, feminists, and social activists. -
Kimberlé Crenshaw (1959- )
Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism and the law. Her work has been foundational in critical race theory and in “intersectionality,” a term she coined to describe the double bind of simultaneous racial and gender prejudice. -
Saidiya Hartman (1960- )
Hartman is a scholar of African American literature and cultural history whose works explore the afterlife of slavery in modern American society and bear witness to lives, traumas, and fleeting moments of beauty that historical archives have omitted or obscured.
Select Publications
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The Cancer Journals
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Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals offers a profoundly feminist analysis of her experience with breast cancer & a modified radical mastectomy. Moving between journal entry, memoir, & exposition, Lorde fuses the personal & political & refuses the silencing & invisibility that she experienced both as a woman facing her own death & as a woman coping with the loss of her breast. After Lorde died of cancer in 1992, women from all over the U.S. & beyond paid tribute to her in essays & poems. Aunt Lute's special hardcover edition of The Cancer Journals gathers together twelve such tributes as well as a series of six photographs taken of Lorde by photographer Jean Weisinger. Tributes by: Margaret E. Cronin, Linda Cue, Elliot, Ayofemi Folayan, Jewelle Gomez, Margaret Randall, Adrienne Rich, Kate Rushin, Elizabeth Sargent, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, & Evelyn White.
Call Number: Douglass RC280.B8L58 1980 and RUonlineISBN: 9781879960268 -
In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose
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As a woman, writer, mother, and feminist, Walker explores the theories and practices of feminism, incorporating what she calls the womanist tradition of African American women.
Call Number: Douglass PS3573.A425Z467 1983ISBN: 0151445257 -
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Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement
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What is Critical Race Theory and why is it under fire from the political right? This foundational essay collection, which defines key terms and includes case studies, is the essential work to understand the intellectual movement Why did the president of the United States, in the midst of a pandemic and an economic crisis, take it upon himself to attack Critical Race Theory? Perhaps Donald Trump appreciated the power of this groundbreaking intellectual movement to change the world. In recent years, Critical Race Theory has vaulted out of the academy and into courtrooms, newsrooms, and onto the streets. And no wonder: as intersectionality theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw recently told Time magazine, "It's an approach to grappling with a history of white supremacy that rejects the belief that what's in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it." The panicked denunciations from the right notwithstanding, CRT has changed the way millions of people interpret our troubled world. Edited by its principal founders and leading theoreticians, Critical Race Theory was the first book to gather the movement's most important essays. This groundbreaking book includes contributions from scholars including Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Dorothy Roberts, Lani Guinier, Duncan Kennedy, and many others. It is essential reading in an age of acute racial injustice.
Call Number: Douglass KF4755.A75 C7 1995ISBN: 9781565842717 -
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America
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In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation during slavery and its aftermath, Saidiya Hartman illumines the forms of terror and resistance that shaped black identity. Scenes of Subjection examines the forms of domination that usually go undetected; in particular, the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment, protection, rights, and consent. By looking at slave narratives, plantation diaries, popular theater, slave performance, freedmen's primers, and legal cases, Hartman investigates a wide variety of "scenes" ranging from the auction block and minstrel show to the staging of the self-possessed and rights-bearing individual of freedom. While attentive to the performance of power--the terrible spectacles of slaveholders' dominion and the innocent amusements designed to abase and pacify the enslaved--and the entanglements of pleasure and terror in these displays of mastery, Hartman also examines the possibilities for resistance, redress and transformation embodied in black performance and everyday practice. This important study contends that despite the legal abolition of slavery, emergent notions of individual will and responsibility revealed the tragic continuities between slavery and freedom. Bold and persuasively argued, Scenes of Subjection will engage readers in a broad range of historical, literary, and cultural studies.
Call Number: Douglass E443.H37 1997ISBN: 9780195089837 -
"After Mecca": Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement
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The politics and music of the sixties and early seventies have been the subject of scholarship for many years, but it is only very recently that attention has turned to the cultural production of African American poets. In "After Mecca," Cheryl Clarke explores the relationship between the Black Arts Movement and black women writers of the period. Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Alice Walker, and others chart the emergence of a new and distinct black poetry and its relationship to the black community's struggle for rights and liberation. Clarke also traces the contributions of these poets to the development of feminism and lesbian-feminism, and the legacy they left for others to build on. She argues that whether black women poets of the time were writing from within the movement or writing against it, virtually all were responding to it. Using the trope of "Mecca," she explores the ways in which these writers were turning away from white, western society to create a new literacy of blackness. Provocatively written, this book is an important contribution to the fields of African American literary studies and feminist theory.
Call Number: Alexander PS310.N4C48 2005ISBN: 0813534054 -
Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
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In childhood, bell hooks was taught that "talking back" meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure and daring to disagree and/or have an opinion. In this collection of personal and theoretical essays, hooks reflects on her signature issues of racism and feminism, politics and pedagogy. Among her discoveries is that moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, making new life and new growth possible.
Call Number: RUonlineISBN: 1317588215Publication Date: 2014 -
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
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Black feminists remind us "that America's destiny is inseparable from how it treats [black women] and the nation ignores this truth at its peril" (The New York Review of Books). Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction "If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free." --Combahee River Collective Statement The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today's struggles. "A striking collection that should be immediately added to the Black feminist canon." --Bitch Media "An essential book for any feminist library." --Library Journal "As white feminism has gained an increasing amount of coverage, there are still questions as to how black and brown women's needs are being addressed. This book, through a collection of interviews with prominent black feminists, provides some answers." --The Independent "For feminists of all kinds, astute scholars, or anyone with a passion for social justice, How We Get Free is an invaluable work." --Ethnic and Racial Studies Journal
Call Number: RUonlilneISBN: 9781608468683Publication Date: 2017 -
Angela Davis: Seize the TIme
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Inspired bya private archive and including contemporary work by artists who acknowledge the continued relevance of Angela Davis's experience and politics, the essays, interviews, and images in this book provide a compelling and layered narrative of her journey through the junctures of race, gender, economic and political policy. Beginning with the arrest, trial, and acquittal of Davis, 1970-72, and continuing through her world tour to thank those who joined in demanding her release and her influential career as a public intellectual, the book examines fifty years of history in light of the current political moment. Profusely illustrated with materials found in the archive (press coverage, photographs, court sketches, videos, music, writings, correspondence, and Davis's political writings), the book includes an interview with Angela Davis and Lisbet Tellefsen, the archivist who collected these materials, as well as essays that ouch on visibililty and invisibility, history, memory, and the iconography of black radical feminism.
Call Number: Alexander E185.97.D23A55 2020ISBN: 9783777435749 -
Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life
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The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (1910-1985) was a trailblazing social activist, writer, lawyer, civil rights organizer, and campaigner for gender rights. In the 1930s and 1940s, she was active in radical left-wing political groups and helped innovate nonviolent protest strategies against segregation that would become iconic in later decades, and in the 1960s, she cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW). In addition, Murray became the first African American to receive a Yale law doctorate and the first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Yet, behind her great public successes, Murray battled many personal demons, including bouts of poor physical and mental health, conflicts over her gender and sexual identities, family traumas, and financial difficulties. In this intimate biography, Troy Saxby provides the most comprehensive account of Murray's inner life to date, revealing her struggles in poignant detail and deepening our understanding and admiration of her numerous achievements in the face of pronounced racism, homophobia, transphobia, and political persecution. Saxby interweaves the personal and the political, showing how the two are always entwined, to tell the life story of one of twentieth-century America's most fascinating and inspirational figures.
Call Number: RUonlineISBN: 9781469654928Publication Date: 2021 -
