BLACK FEMINIST LIBRARY

Refusing the Limitations of the Oppressors’ World

Women With A Vision’s work, like the work of all people struggling for a liberated future, is part of a long lineage of sacred, freedom work. In creating our theory on the ground, we have been in conversation with Black feminist thinkers, organizers, historians, philosophers, writers, and artists across time. This collection has inspired us to dream of a world otherwise, provided comfort in times of need, and reminded us that we are the inheritors of a phenomenal legacy and that we have all that we need to continue in the struggle.  

We acknowledge that published works represent just a portion of the Black feminist canon and that Black feminist theory and praxis is often passed on in conversation, on front porches, and in the ways we as Black women move through the world refusing the limitations of the oppressors’ world.

“WWAV’s three decades of labor to care for the ancestral and community knowledges that give our work shape and meaning dovetails seamlessly with our work inside the academy and beyond to build a body of scholarship on Black women’s political lives and vision. Some of the field’s first social historians took us into slave quarters, post-emancipation church pews, and Great Migration rail lines to explore the sacred and secular texture of Black women’s everyday lives amid systems of seemingly totalizing social death. With the 1993 publication of Tera Hunter’s To Joy My Freedom, a new era of scholarship on poor and working class Black women’s history was born. Since then, scholars have recorded numerous narratives of poor and working-class Black women as they founded mutual aid societies, negotiated public housing, joined labor movements, and challenged the carceral state. These histories, biographies, memoirs, and novels fill Deon and Shaquita’s home. Slowly after the fire, month by month, copies also began to make their way to ArtEgg as WWAV’s first Black feminist library was created by Deon, Desiree, and Mwende.” —Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South, page 197

Join the conversation by sharing what works and lessons most impact you in you and your community’s struggle for liberation in the Talk Back section.

SELECTED WORKS

  • Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South by Stephanie M.H. Camp

    PURCHASE

  • The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties by the Combahee River Collective

    READ

  • Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis

    PURCHASE

  • Want to Start a Revolution? by Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard

    PURCHASE

  • Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America by Melissa V. Harris-Perry

    PURCHASE

  • We Do This ‘Til We Free Us by Mariam Kaba

    PURCHASE

  • Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation by Beth E. Richie

    PURCHASE

  • No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by Sarah Haley

    PURCHASE

  • My Face is Black is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations by Mary Frances Berry

    PURCHASE

Full Reading List

Published Sources

  • Breaking the Walls of Silence by A.C.E Program

  • “#SAYHERNAME” African American Policy Forum

  • Pedagogies of Crossing by Jacqui M. Alexander

  • The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander   

  • “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow” Toni Cade Bambara

  • My Face Is Black Is True by Mary Frances Berry

  • Long Memory by Mary Frances Berry

  • Lemonade by Beyoncé

  • Bierria, Alisa, Mayaba Liebenthal, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. “To Render Ourselves Visible”

  • “We Deserve Better” BreakOUT!

  • Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown

  • Dark Matters by Simone Browne

  • Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

  • Closer to Freedom by Stephanie M. H. Camp

  • Listening to Images by Tina Campt

  • “Policing the Black Woman’s Body” Hazel V. Carby

  • Sex Workers Unite by Melina Chateavert

  • Black Magic by Yvonne P. Chireau

  • Democracy Remixed by Cathy J. Cohen

  • “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” Cathy J. Cohen

  • The Boundaries of Blackness by Cathy J. Cohen

  • Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins

  • A Voice From the South by Anna J. Cooper

  • Shapeshifters by Aimee Meredith Cox

  • “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” Kimberlé Crenshaw

  • “Mapping the Margins”  Kimberlé Crenshaw

  • Say Her Name by Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris

  • Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis

  • “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role” Angela Davis

  • Abolition. Feminism. Now by Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners,  Beth E. Ritchie, and Angela Davis

  • Battered Black Women by Dana-Ain Davis

  • “Black Women Unnamed” Michelle Dean

  • “Mariame Kaba” Eve Ewing

  • “The Role of Spirit… Patrisse Cullors”  Hebah H. Farrag

  • “What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly” Karen Fields

  • “The ‘Say Her Name’ Movement” Precious Fondren

  • “No One Showed Up to March” Kimberly Foster 

  • Between Sundays by Marla R. Frederick

  • Their Sisters’ Keepers by Estelle B. Freedman 

  • Dispossessed Lives by Marisa Fuentes 

  • “Abolition Geography” 

  • “Fatal Couplings” Ruth Wilson Gilmore

  • Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

  • “The Women of New Orleans” Shana M. griffin

  • Colored Amazons by Kali N. Gross

  • “Are you afraid of Black Feminists?” Alexis Pauline Gumbs

  • Words of Fire by Beverly Guy-Sheftall 

  • No Mercy Here by Sarah Haley

  • Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman

  • Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman

  • Wayward Lives by Saidiya Hartman

  • Talk with You Like a Woman by Cheryl D. Hicks

  • “African-American Women’s History” Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham 

  • Righteous Discontent by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham 

  • “#Lemonade” Jessica Marie Johnson and Janell Hobson

  • Reel to Real by bell hooks

  • Octavia’s Brood by Imarisha Walidah and adrienne maree brown, eds.

  • The Revolution Will Not be Funded by INCITE! 

  • “Statement on Gender Violence” Critical Resistance

  • Shadowboxing by Joy James

  • Wicked Flesh by Jessica Marie Johnson

  • Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around by Alethia Jones, Virginia Eubanks, and Barbara Smith

  • Fumbling Towards Repair by Mariame Kaba and Shire Hassan

  • Chained in Silence by Taliha LeFlouria 

  • A Movement Without Marches by Lisa Levenstein 

  • “Toward Thick Solidarity” Savannah Shange and Roseann Liu

  • Burst of Light by Audre Lorde

  • “Learning from the 60s” Audre Lorde

  • Talking to the Dead by LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant 

  • At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle L. McGuire           

  • Dear Science by Katherine McKittrick      

  • Demonic Grounds by Katherine McKittrick 

  • “Mathematics of Black Life” Katherine McKittrick 

  • “On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place” Katherine McKittrick 

  • “No One Knows the Mysteries” Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods

  • “Beyonce’s Simple but Radical” Brentin Mock

  • Queer (In)Justice by Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. 

  • This Bridge Called My Back by Cherrie Moraga and Toni Cade Bambara, eds

  • Pauli Murray by Pauli Murray 

  • Welfare Warriors by Premilla Nadasen

  • Grassroots Warriors by Nancy A. Naples 

  • “Repairing La Memoria Rota” Aurora Santiago Ortiz

  • Anthem by Shana L. Redmond

  • Arrested Justice by Beth E. Richie

  • “Invoking Fammie Lou Hamer” Cheryl Rodriguez

  • Witnessing and Testifying by Rosetta E. Ross 

  • “Unapologetically Black?” Savannah Shange

  • “Black Girl Ordinary” Savannah Shange

  • In the Wake by Christina Sharpe

  • Sick and Tired by Susan Lynn Smith

  • “Interstices” Hortense J. Spillers

  • “Mama’s Baby” Hortense J. Spillers

  • From #BlackLives Matter by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  • How We Get Free by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylo

  • The Paris Review. “So Be It, See to It”

  • “The Arc of Justice” Jeanne Theoharris

  • The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharris

  • We Always Resist by Dionne Turner, Loretta Ross, Jasmine Burnett, and Charles C. Stuart

  • African American Women and Christian Activism by Judith Weisenfeld

  • The Souls of Womenfolk by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh 

  • The Politics of Public Housing by Rhonda Williams

  • “Beyond Miranda’s Meaning” Sylvia Wynter 

  • “Unsettling the Coloniality” Sylvia Wynter 

  • “Girls Do What They Have To Do” Young Women’s Empowerment Project