Recommendations based on "Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké"

'A brave, beautiful book that could double as a handbook to accompany anyone on their journey through cancer' Jackie Kay, New StatesmanThe Cancer Journals is an intimate, poetic and invigorating account of the experience of breast cancer, from biopsy to mastectomy, told by the great feminist and activist Audre Lorde.Moving between journal entry, memoir, and essay, Lorde fuses the personal and political to reflect on the many questions breast cancer raises: questions of survival, sexuality, prosthesis and self-care. It is a journey of survival, friendship, and self-acceptance.'Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and for more than survival, are here in the searchings of a great poet' Adrienne Rich'This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me' Alice Walker

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that "speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines” (NPR).These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, Paradise) and that of others.An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.

Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.

“Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.”  In these twelve deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily white New England college town. Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it.  "Black Is the Body is one of the most beautiful, elegant memoirs I've ever read. It's about race, it's about womanhood, it's about friendship, it's about a life of the mind, and also a life of the body. But more than anything, it's about love. I can't praise Emily Bernard enough for what she has created in these pages." --Elizabeth Gilbert WINNER OF THE CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROSE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND KIRKUS REVIEWS ONE OF MAUREEN CORRIGAN'S 10 UNPUTDOWNABLE READS OF THE YEAR

Nearly Three Decades After Her Pioneering Anthology, Daughters Of Africa, Margaret Busby Curates An Extraordinary Collection Of Contemporary Writing By 200 Women Writers Of African Descent, Including Zadie Smith, Bernardine Evaristo And Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A Glorious Portrayal Of The Richness And Range Of African Women's Voices, This Major International Book Brings Together Their Achievements Across A Wealth Of Genres. From Antigua To Zimbabwe And Angola To The Usa, Overlooked Artists Of The Past Join Key Figures, Popular Contemporaries And Emerging Writers In Paying Tribute To The Heritage That Unites Them, The Strong Links That Endure From Generation To Generation, And Their Common Obstacles Around Issues Of Race, Gender And Class. Bold And Insightful, Brilliant In Its Intimacy And Universality, This Landmark Anthology Honours The Talents Of African Daughters And The Inspiring Legacy That Connects Them-and All Of Us.

A People Pick!“One of the year’s must-reads.” –ELLE“[A] provocative, heart-breaking, and frequently hilarious collection.” –GLAMOUR“Essential, vital, and urgent.” –HARPER’S BAZAARIn the vein of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist and Issa Rae’s The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, but wholly its own, a provocative, humorous, and, at times, heartbreaking collection of essays on what it means to be black, a woman, a mother, and a global citizen in today's ever-changing world.Black women have never been more visible or more publicly celebrated than they are now. But for every new milestone, every magazine cover, every box office record smashed, every new face elected to public office, the reality of everyday life for black women remains a complex, conflicted, contradiction-laden experience.An American journalist who has been living and working in London for a decade, Kenya Hunt has made a career of distilling moments, movements, and cultural moods into words. Her work takes the difficult and the indefinable and makes it accessible; it is razor sharp cultural observation threaded through evocative and relatable stories.Girl Gurl Grrrl both illuminates our current cultural moment and transcends it. Hunt captures the zeitgeist while also creating a timeless celebration of womanhood, of blackness, and the possibilities they both contain. She blends the popular and the personal, the frivolous and the momentous in a collection that truly reflects what it is to be living and thriving as a black woman today.

A TLS, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, GUARDIAN, OBSERVER AND WHITE REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEARFINALIST FOR THE 2021 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION From award-winning writer Claudia Rankine, the stunning follow-up to Citizen and Don't Let Me Be Lonely 'Riveting' Bernardine Evaristo, TLS (Books of the Year)'Brilliant' Gary Younge, New Statesman (Books of the Year)'Timely and powerful' Fatima Bhutto, Financial Times'One of our time's most incisive, brilliant and necessary intellectuals' Seán Hewitt, Irish Times'Ranking is a writer of genius' Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sunday Times At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not alone. In such partisan conditions, how can humans best approach one another across our differences? Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light, Claudia Rankine explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers - each disrupting the false comfort of spaces where our public and private lives intersect, like the airport, the theatre, the dinner party and the voting booth - and urges us to enter into the conversations which could offer the only humane pathways through this moment of division. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, and to breach the silence, guilt and violence that surround whiteness. Brilliantly arranging essays, images and poems along with the voices and rebuttals of others, it counterpoints Rankine's own text with facing-page notes and commentary, and closes with a bravura study of women confronting the political and cultural implications of dyeing their hair blonde. Wry, vulnerable and prescient, this is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, and being together.

Although psychoanalytic theory is one of the most potent and influential tools in contemporary literary criticism, to date it has had very little impact on the study of African American literature. Critical methods from the disciplines of history, sociology, and cultural studies have dominated work in the field. Now, in this exciting new book by the author of Domestic Allegories: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century, Claudia Tate demonstrates that psychoanalytic paradigms can produce rich and compelling readings of African American textuality. With clear and accessible summaries of key concepts in Freud, Lacan, and Klein, as well as deft reference to the work of contemporary psychoanalytic critics of literature, Tate explores African- American desire, alienation, and subjectivity in neglected novels by Emma Kelley, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Her pioneering approach highlights African American textual realms within and beyond those inscribing racial oppression and modes of black resistance. A superb introduction to psychoanalytic theory and its applications for African American literature and culture, this book creates a sophisticated critical model of black subjectivity and desire for use in the study of African American texts.

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural awakening among African Americans between the two world wars. It was the cultural phase of the "New Negro" movement, a social and political phenomenon that promoted a proud racial identity, economic independence, and progressive politics. In this Very Short Introduction, Cheryl A. Wall captures the Harlem Renaissance's zeitgeist by identifying issues and strategies that engaged writers, musicians, and visual artists alike. She introduces key figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, along with such signature texts as "Mother to Son," "Harlem Shadows," and Cane. In examining the "New Negro," she looks at the art of photographer James Van der Zee and painters Archibald Motley and Laura Wheeler and the way Marita Bonner, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen explored the dilemmas of gender identity for New Negro women. Focusing on Harlem as a cultural capital, Wall covers theater in New York, where black musicals were produced on Broadway almost every year during the 1920s. She also depicts Harlem nightlife with its rent parties and clubs catering to working class blacks, wealthy whites, and gays of both races, and the movement of Renaissance artists to Paris. From Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" to W.E.B. Du Bois's novel Dark Princess, black Americans explored their relationship to Africa. Many black American intellectuals met African intellectuals in Paris, where they made common cause against European colonialism and race prejudice. Folklore - spirituals, stories, sermons, and dance - was considered raw material that the New Negro artist could alchemize into art. Consequently, they applauded the performance of spirituals on the concert stage by artists like Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson. The Harlem Renaissance left an indelible mark not only on African American visual and performing arts, but, as Cheryl Wall shows, its legacies are all around us.

A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.  As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion.  In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories.  Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”  A Trailblazing Author’s Life: Explore the story of a pioneer who broke barriers in science fiction, a field then dominated by white men, and became one of our most important literary figures. Science Fiction as Social Commentary: Delve into how Butler used speculative worlds to critique the American empire, from its foundation on chattel slavery to its imperialist ambitions. An Unflinching Look at History: See Butler’s work through the lens of the key historical moments that shaped it, including the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and women’s liberation. The Power of "Positive Obsession": Understand the driving force behind her genius—the unstoppable, world-changing habit she called her positive obsession, a concept that defines her legacy.