Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Collects essays and letters from African American feminists, addressing race and gender issues in the United States

An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought

Words of Fire

Rudolph P. Byrd

Johnetta Betsch Cole

Audre Lorde was not only a famous black poet; she was also one of the most important radical black feminists of the past half century. iI Am Your Sister rcollects her non-fiction prose from 1976 to 1990, and it is the first volume to provide a full picture of Lorde's political work (as opposed to her aesthetic work). The essays cover an impressive variety of topics: sexuality, race, gender, culture, class, parenting, disease, resistance, and power-both within the United States and across the African diaspora. While Lorde is best known as a progenitor of black feminist studies, I Am Your Sister stresses her signal influence in the creation of gay and lesbian studies. Lorde's work presaged the late 1980s shift in the academy toward the emphasis on the tight connections between race, class, gender, and sexuality-and later disability. Accordingly, the breadth of topics Lorde tackles in the various essays in iI Am Your Sisterr capture the spirit of intersectionality that now dominates analysis in the humanities and critical social sciences.

I Am Your Sister Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde

Frances Smith Foster

Stanlie Myrise James

A definitive guide to race and gender from the pioneers of black women's studies.

The Evolution of Black Women's Studies

Still Brave

Johnnetta Betsch Cole

Audre Lorde was not only a famous poet; she was also one of the most important radical black feminists of the past century. Her writings and speeches grappled with an impressive broad list of topics, including sexuality, race, gender, class, disease, the arts, parenting, and resistance, and they have served as a transformative and important foundation for theorists and activists in considering questions of power and social justice. Lorde embraced difference, and at each turn she emphasized the importance of using it to build shared strength among marginalized communities. I Am Your Sister is a collection of Lorde's non-fiction prose, written between 1976 and 1990, and it introduces new perspectives on the depth and range of Lorde's intellectual interests and her commitments to progressive social change. Presented here, for the first time in print, is a major body of Lorde's speeches and essays, along with the complete text of A Burst of Light and Lorde's landmark prose works Sister Outsider and The Cancer Journals. Together, these writings reveal Lorde's commitment to a radical course of thought and action, situating her works within the women's, gay and lesbian, and African American Civil Rights movements. They also place her within a continuum of black feminists, from Sojourner Truth, to Anna Julia Cooper, Amy Jacques Garvey, Lorraine Hansberry, and Patricia Hill Collins. I Am Your Sister concludes with personal reflections from Alice Walker, Gloria Joseph, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and bell hooks on Lorde's political and social commitments and the indelibility of her writings for all who are committed to a more equitable society.

Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde

I Am Your Sister

Feminists speak out on race and gender in the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign

Who Should Be First?

Johnnetta B. Cole

Why has the African American community remained silent about gender even as race has moved to the forefront of our nation’s consciousness? 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. Hard-hitting and brilliant in its analysis of culture and sexual politics, Gender Talk asserts boldly that gender matters are critical to the Black community in the twenty-first century. In the Black community, rape, violence against women, and sexual harassment are as much the legacy of slavery as is racism. Johnnetta Betsch Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall argue powerfully that the only way to defeat this legacy is to focus on the intersection of race and gender. Gender Talk examines why the “race problem” has become so male-centered and how this has opened a deep divide between Black women and men. The authors turn to their own lives, offering intimate accounts of their experiences as daughters, wives, and leaders. They examine pivotal moments in African American history when race and gender issues collided with explosive results—from the struggle for women’s suffrage in the nineteenth century to women’s attempts to gain a voice in the Black Baptist movement and on into the 1960s, when the Civil Rights movement and the upsurge of Black Power transformed the Black community while sidelining women. Along the way, they present the testimonies of a large and influential group of Black women and men, including bell hooks, Faye Wattleton, Byllye Avery, Cornell West, Robin DG Kelley, Michael Eric Dyson, Marcia Gillispie, and Dorothy Height. Provding searching analysis into the present, Cole and Guy-Sheftall uncover the cultural assumptions and attitudes in hip-hop and rap, in the O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson trials, in the Million Men and Million Women Marches, and in the battle over Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Fearless and eye-opening, Gender Talk is required reading for anyone concerned with the future of African American women—and men.

The Struggle For Women's Equality in African American Communities

Gender Talk

"This is a valuable project. The editors are excellent, well-known scholars, and activists in the academy." --Darlene Clark Hine "After looking carefully at Traps' selections, I have to confess that I'm both excited and satisfied by what Rudolph Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall have assembled here from the 19th century to the present. Educators genuinely need a text like this for opening their classroom to critical discussions on the well-worn subjects of race and gender." --Charles Johnson Traps is the first anthology of writings by 19th- and 20th-century African American men on the overlapping categories of race, gender, and sexuality. The selections on gender in Sections I and II reveal what some may view as the unexpected commitment of African American men to feminism. Included here are critiques of the subordinate social, economic, and political position of black women. Sections III and IV analyze the taboos and myths in which black sexuality is enmeshed. These essays also stress the importance of rejecting homophobia and the need to contest the predominance of a heterosexual paradigm. Monolithic constructions of gender and sexuality, reinforced by sexism and historically sanctioned homophobia, are the "traps" that give this book its focus and its title.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall

About

Books

Join the club