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Therefore, Dana's memories of her enslavement, as Ashraf A. Rushdy explains, become a record of the "unwritten history" of African-Americans, a "recovery of a coherent story explaining Dana's various losses." By living these memories, Dana is enabled to make the connections between slavery and current social situations...
Trauma and its connection to historical memory (or historical amnesia).
Many academics have extended Dana's loss as a metaphor for the "lasting damage of slavery on the African American psyche" to include other meanings: Pamela Bedore, for example, reads it as the loss of Dana's naïvete regarding the supposed progress of racial relations in the present. For Ashraf Rushdy, Dana's missing ar...
The construction of the concept of "race" and its connections to slavery are central themes in Butler's novel. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint place "Kindred" as a key science fiction literary text of the 1960s and 1970s black consciousness period, noting that Butler uses the time travel trope to underscore the perpetuatio...
The novel's focus on how the system of slavery shapes its central characters dramatizes society's power to construct raced identities. The reader witnesses the development of Rufus from a relatively decent boy allied to Dana to a "complete racist" who attempts to rape her as an adult. Similarly, Dana and Kevin's prolon...
"Kindred" also challenges the fixity of "race" through the interracial relationships that form its emotional core. Dana's kinship to Rufus disproves America's erroneous concepts of racial purity. It also represents the "inseparability" of whites and blacks in America. The negative reactions of characters in the past an...
The depiction of Dana's white husband, Kevin, also serves to examine the concept of racial and gender privilege. In the present, Kevin seems unconscious of the benefits he derives from his skin pigmentation as well as of the way his actions serve to disenfranchise Dana. Once he goes to the past, however, he must not ju...
Originally, Butler intended for the protagonist of "Kindred "to be a man, but as she explained in her interview, she could not do so because a man would immediately be "perceived as dangerous": "[s]o many things that he did would have been likely to get him killed. He wouldn't even have time to learn the rules...of sub...
Similarly, Missy Dehn Kubistchek reads Butler's novel as "African-American woman’s quest for understanding history and self" which ends with Dana extending the concept of "kindred" to include both her black and white her heritage as well as her white husband while "insisting on her right to self definition."
"Kindred"’s title has several meanings: at its most literal, it refers to the genealogical link between its modern-day protagonist, the slave-holding Weylins, and both the free and bonded Greenwoods; at its most universal, it points to the kinship of all Americans regardless of ethnic background.
Since Butler’s novel challenges readers to come to terms with slavery and its legacy, one significant meaning of the term "kindred" is the United States’ history of miscegenation and its denial by official discourses. This kinship of black people and whites must be acknowledged if America is to move into a better futur...
On the other hand, as Ashraf H. A. Rushdy contends, Dana's journey to the past serves to redefine her concept of kinship from blood ties to that of "spiritual kinship" with those she chooses as her family: the Weylin slaves and her white husband, Kevin. This sense of the term "kindred" as a community of choice is clear...
Publishers and academics have had a hard time categorizing "Kindred". In an interview with Randall Kenan, Butler stated that she considered "Kindred" "literally" as "fantasy." According to Pamela Bedore, Butler's novel is difficult to classify because it includes both elements of the slave narrative and science fiction...
"Kindred" ’s story is further fragmented by Dana’s report of her time traveling, which uses flashbacks to connect the present to the past. Robert Crossley sees this "foreshortening" of the past and present as a "lesson in historical realities." Because the story is told from the first-person point of view of Dana, read...
Another strategy Butler uses to add dramatic interest to "Kindred"’s story is the deliberate delay of the description of Dana and Kevin’s ethnicities. Butler has stated in an interview she did not want to give their "race" away yet since it would have less of an impact and the reader would not react the way that she wa...
Butler also uses Alice as Dana's doppelgänger to compare how their decisions are a reflection of their environment. According to Missy Dehn Kubitschek, each woman seems to see a reflection of herself in the other; each is the vision of what could be (could have been) the possible fate of the other given different circu...
Butler's field research in Maryland also influenced her writing of "Kindred". She traveled to the Eastern Shore to Talbot County where she wandered a bit. She also conducted research at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and the Maryland Historical Society. She toured Mount Vernon, the plantation home of America...
"Kindred "is Butler's bestseller, with Beacon Press advertising it as "the classic novel that has sold more than 450,000 copies."
Among Butler's peers, the novel has been well received. Speculative writer Harlan Ellison has praised "Kindred "as "that rare magical artifact… the novel one returns it to again and again", while writer Walter Mosley described the novel as "everything the literature of science fiction can be."
Book reviewers were enthusiastic. "Los Angeles Herald-Examiner" writer Sam Frank described the novel as "[a] shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now." Reviewer Sherley Anne Williams from "Ms". defined the novel as "a startling and engrossing commentary on the...
High school and college courses have frequently chosen "Kindred" as a text to be read. Linell Smith of "The Baltimore Sun" describes it as "a celebrated mainstay of college courses in women's studies and black literature and culture." Speaking at the occasion of Beacon Press' reissue of "Kindred" for its 25th Anniversa...
Ordinary Light: A Memoir is a 2015 book by poet Tracy K. Smith. It was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
The 368-page book was published by Alfred A. Knopf on April 2, 2015.
Writing in "Slate", Stacia L. Brown says "most of the time", "Ordinary Light" is "a coming-of-age story about a middle-class black girl with a relatively idyllic life...the story of the healthy, nurturing bond between a black mother and daughter." However, Brown found the book "most powerful when it returns to the subj...
Smith, whose first books were poetry, has said that in retrospect, the move to writing in prose was a necessity for her to engage the story of her relationship with her mother. "I had found a way of exploring my own private material in poems. I knew the kinds of answers—that’s not the right noun because I don't think a...
"Ordinary Light" received widely favorable reviews and was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Piecing Me Together is a 2017 children's book by Renée Watson. The first person novel tells the story of Jade, an ambitious African American high school student. The book was well reviewed and won several awards.
The book was well reviewed including starred reviews by "The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books", Kirkus Reviews, which also named it a best book of 2017, and "School Library Journal", which also named it a best book of 2017.
The book was recognized by the American Library Association at the 2018 Youth Media Awards. Watson was awarded the Coretta Scott King Author Award; in her acceptance speech Watson thanked the award committee for, "bring visibility to black characters who are bold and brave, beautiful and brilliant." "Piecing Me Togethe...
So You Want to Talk About Race
So You Want to Talk About Race is a 2018 non-fiction book by Ijeoma Oluo. Each chapter title is a question about race in contemporary America. Oluo outlines her opinions on the topics as well as advice about how to talk about the issues. The book received positive critical reception, with renewed interest following the...
Author Ijeoma Oluo was an editor-at-large at "The Establishment". "So You Want to Talk About Race" is her first book. Oluo was convinced into writing a book by her agent, who conceived of a "guidebook" in which Oluo answered questions she regularly received on social media or addressed in her essays. Oluo was reluctant...
The book was published by Seal Press.
The book is about race in the contemporary United States, each chapter titled after a question. Oluo makes the argument that America's political, economic and social systems are systematically/institutionally racist. The book provides advice for readers when discussing race-related subjects, such as how to avoid acting...
The book also covers topics including affirmative action, cultural appropriation, intersectionality, microaggressions, police brutality and the school-to-prison pipeline. Oluo argues that use of the word "nigger" or other racial slurs by white people is not appropriate even if the intention is ironic or the motive anti...
The book received renewed attention following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. Having been listed for one week previously, it re-entered "The New York Times" Best Seller list in the category Combined Print & E-book Nonfiction on June 14, 2020, peaking at position #2 on June 21. It remained on the list until Sep...
"Bustle" named "So You Want to Talk about Race" to a list of 14 recommended debut books by women, praising Oluo's "no holds barred writing style", as well as to a list of the 16 best non-fiction books of January 2018. "Harper's Bazaar" also named it to a list of 10 best new books of 2018, saying "Oluo crafts a straight...
Ferguson criticised the use of the term "Indigenous American" in the book as an example of "Oluo's own basic assumptions that create an inhospitable climate for other racially marked bodies". Oluo responded that future editions of the book would instead use the term "indigenous peoples". Bhatt suggested that a further ...
Arilla Sun Down is a 1976 children's novel by Virginia Hamilton and is about the life experiences of Arilla, a young girl of African American and American Indian parentage.
A review of "Arilla Sun Down" in "The Best in Children's Books: The University of Chicago Guide to Children's Literature, 1973-78" stated "Hamilton is a genius with words; once accustomed to the pattern, the reader hears the singing quality. What is outstanding in the story is the depth and nuance of the author's perce...
"Arilla Sun Down" has also been reviewed by "Kirkus Reviews", "Children's Literature Association Quarterly", the "English Journal", and the "School Library Journal".
The press was closed down in 2004 due to lack of funds and energy. It then had reopened in 2011 by Dr. Alarcon with the help of Christina L. Gutiérrez and Sara A. Ramírez.
TWP taught Ramirez a deeper sense of women of color, all of which were thinkers, writers, and artists in which their activism; this led to her passion of finding their publishing. Alarcon was at the top of her list of activists in which she learned about TWP and its closing. Ramirez brought back the publishing movemen...
She is also the First Core Collective Member is the first member of a national collective working that helped revive TWP.
TWP was revived to honor and continue the legacy of women of color publishing. It has also published works by notable women of color such as Gloria Anzaldúa's "Living Chicana Theory" (1998), Cherrie Moraga's "The Sexuality of Latinas" (1993)"," Carla Trujillo's "Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About" ...
TWP believes that language, art, and media are tools for creating dynamic social change. The tools expand access to the work of activist scholars and artists dedicated to liberation from the historical injustices of colonialism and imperialism. They also encourage reader to collaborate with them to envisioning a world ...
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982) is a landmark feminist anthology in Black Women's Studies printed in numerous editions, co-edited by Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith.
Hull received the National Institute's Women of Color Award for her contribution to this book. Her contribution to this "landmark scholarship directed attention to the lives of Black women and, combined with the numerous articles she wrote thereafter, helped remedy the emphasis within Feminist Studies on white women an...
The interest in black feminism was on the rise in the 1970s, through the writings of Mary Helen Washington, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and others.
In 1981, the anthology "This Bridge Called My Back", edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, was published and "But Some of Us Are Brave" was published the following year. In both anthologies, the emphasis was placed on the intersection between race and gender. The contributors argued that previous waves of fe...
In the 2000 reprint of their anthology, editors Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith described how in 1992 black feminists mobilized "a remarkable national response" - "African American Women in Defense of Ourselves" - to the controversy surrounding the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court of the United States aga...
Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw cited "But Some of Us Are Brave", at the beginning of her seminal 1989 paper, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" in which she introduced the concept of Intersectionality. Cr...
Barbara Y. Welke published her article entitled "When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855–1914", in reference to Hull et al., in 1995 in the "Law and History Review." Welke wrote how Crenshaw, referring to "But Some of Us Are Brave", said that the tit...
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment is a 1990 book by Patricia Hill Collins.
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", originally published in 1990, Patricia Hill Collins set out to explore the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and wri...
For young Black girls, the manipulation of images is also an influence. From a 2016 study by University of Pennsylvania associate professor, Charlotte E. Jacobs, utilizing Black Feminist Thought as an educational work for Black girls in media depictions. Coupled with the inherent knowledge and experiences of Black girl...
With the success of "Black Feminist Thought", Collins gained more recognition as a "social theorist, drawing from many intellectual traditions." Collins' work has now been published and used in many different fields including philosophy, history, psychology and sociology.
The University of Cincinnati named Collins The Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Sociology in 1996, making her the first ever African-American, and only the second woman, to hold this position. She received Emeritus status in the Spring of 2005, and became a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College ...
"Black Feminist Thought" is used in various university African American and Women Studies courses.
Black feminism remains important because U.S. Black women constitute an oppressed group. As a collectivity, U.S. Black women participate in a dialectical relationship linking African American women's oppression and activism. Dialectical relationships of this sort mean that two parties are opposed and opposite. As long ...
"With the publication of Black Feminist Thought, black feminism has moved to a new level. Her work sets a standard for the discussion of black women's lives, experiences, and thought that demands rigorous attention to the complexity of these experiences and an exploration of a multiplicity of responses."
Black Feminist Thought provides a synthesis of a body of knowledge that is crucial to putting in perspective the situation of Black Women and their place in the overall struggle to reduce and eliminate gender, race, and class inequalities. The book provides an analysis of the ideas of Black Women, particularly those id...
"Black Feminist Thought" won the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1993 and the C. Wright Mills Award of The Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1990. According to the American Sociological Association, "The Jessie Bernard Award is given in recognition of scholarly work that...
The Society for the Study of Social Problems "annually gives its C. Wright Mills Award to the author of what the committee considers to be the most outstanding book written in the tradition of C. Wright Mills and his dedication to a search for a sophisticated understanding of the individual and society."
Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More is a memoir and the debut book by Janet Mock, an American writer and transgender activist. It was published on 1 February 2014 by Atria Books. The book has been praised by Melissa Harris-Perry, bell hooks, Laverne Cox, and Barbara Smith. It debute...
In "Redefining Realness," Janet Mock describes her life as a transgender woman from childhood to adulthood. Mock opens the book with a scene from 2009, where she starts to tell her boyfriend Aaron that she is transgender and then starts telling her story from childhood.
In 1989, as children, Mock's friend and neighbor Marylin dares Mock to take her grandmother's dress down from the clothesline and put it on. After being caught, Mock is scolded by her grandmother and mother for wearing a dress. At four years old, Mock discovers that her father is cheating on her mother. Her parents eve...
Mock's father gets a new girlfriend, and that girlfriend's son, a boy much older than Mock, molests her.
Mock, Chad, and their younger brother Jeff lived with their older sister Cori and her children. While in school in Hawaii, Mock meets Wendi, another transgender girl. Through her friendship with Wendi, Mock becomes more confident, dresses more feminine, and has access to estrogen pills. At age thirteen, Mock comes out ...
Mock's mother gets back together with Cori's father, her boyfriend from high school, named Rick. Mock attends Moanalua High School, a rigorous school. She joins the volleyball team, and becomes more confident in her femininity. She continues to meet up with Wendi, who develops a passion for makeup.
Mock becomes class treasurer at Moanalua. After taking estrogen in secret, she talks to her family to come out as a woman and ask to be called Janet. She repeatedly gets sent home from school for breaking the dress code by wearing skirts. She graduates from estrogen pills to shots, which she pays for in cash. She meets...
Mock poses for a photographer, Felix, in lingerie. This is, she says, the decision she regrets most. She gets $1500 for two modeling sessions.
Mock goes to Bangkok, Thailand, for GRS. Dr. R. and Dr. C. perform the surgery. In recovery, Mock meets an older transgender Australian woman, Genie. Mock returns to Hawaii on December 28 and her mother embraces her tearfully. While Mock recovers, her mother takes care of her. Mock accepts her mother's faults and the f...
Returning to 2009, having told her story to Aaron, Mock waits for a reaction. Their relationship is inconsistent for a while, and Mock makes a new friend in Mia, the woman who hired her for a "People" magazine job. Mock comes out to Mia as transgender. After eight months of no contact from Aaron, he comes to her apartm...
On Christmas Eve 2013, Mock launched the "Redefining Realness Storygiving Campaign". The campaign fulfilled 127 book requests from people who wished to read "Redefining Realness" but had financial constraints.
Mock has said that she wrote "Redefining Realness" for transgender girls of color, particularly, her own childhood self. However, many cisgender women of color have connected to themes and moments in the memoir.
"Redefining Realness" is praised for being one of a small number of literary texts written by transgender people of color, especially ones that feature themes of reading. "Redefining Realness" has also been praised for its complexity in representation of transgender people of color and for combining Western and African...
A 2014 review of the book claims that while Mock's memoir is personal, it reaches across the queer, transgender, and female communities to relate to many people.
In the paper "Redefining Realness?: On Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, TS Madison, and the Representation of Transgender Women of Color in Media", scholar Julian Kevon Glover complicates the popular reception of "Redefining Realness". Glover states that Mock's memoir has gained such high esteem because Mock's transition journ...
Mock published a second memoir, "Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me," which covers her twenties, a period not much discussed in "Redefining Realness."
Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" was a significant influence in Mock's writing of "Redefining Realness." "Their Eyes" was an important book in Mock's girlhood because it was a book about Black women, identity, and love. Other Black female authors that were formative for Mock and her development of "R...
In a review by David B. Green Jr., "Redefining Realness" was stated to do more than just tell a personal story as it builds from the tradition of earlier women of color writers, such as those Mock references in the memoir. Green states that Mock's memoir relates to women of all kinds, not just transgender women of colo...
Autobiography of a Family Photo is a 1995 book by Jacqueline Woodson. The book covers childhood, the growth of dark emotional and sexual tension, and the terrors of war.
Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop: The Sanitation Strike of 1968 is a 2018 children's picture book told in poetry and prose by writer Alice Faye Duncan and illustrator R. Gregory Christie, published by Calkins Creek.
The book received the 2019 Coretta Scott King Honor Award for Illustration. In its starred review, Kirkus Reviews praised the ability of how the "strong historical details back up the organizing feat…(t)he narrative is set in vignettes that jump between verse and prose, set against Christie’s bold paintings… encapsulat...
An Untamed State is the debut novel of writer Roxane Gay, first published in 2014 by Grove Atlantic.
Mireille Duval Jameson is born and raised in the United States, her parents are from Haitian descent. Her parents move back to Haiti. While vacationing at her parents' house with her husband and child in Haiti, she is kidnapped. When her father, who by now has become a wealthy Haitian developer, refuses to pay her rans...
In the first portion of the book, called "Happily Ever After," the novel moves back and forth in time between Mireille's captivity and her earlier life, meeting and falling in love with husband Michael during graduate school in the Midwest of the United States.
The latter section of the novel, "Once Upon a Time," follows Mireille in the aftermath of her trauma, including her time living with Michael's mother, Lorraine, on the family farm in Nebraska.
"An Untamed State" received positive reviews upon publication. Nolan Feeney writing for Time (magazine) called it a "riveting debut" that "captivates from its opening sentence and doesn’t let go." The Los Angeles Times called it "suspenseful, immediate and realistic." The A.V. Club awarded it an A letter grade and prai...
Gay was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction in 2015 for "An Untamed State".
In March 2016 director Gina Prince-Bythewood announced she would be adapting the novel into a feature film for Fox Searchlight. Prince-Bythewood and Gay will co-write the film, to star Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Prince-Bythewood will direct and will also produce with Michael De Luca. Prince-Bythewood and Mbatha-Raw previously co...
Men We Reaped is a memoir by African-American writer Jesmyn Ward and published by Bloomsbury in 2013. Ward describes her own personal history and the deaths of five Black men in her life over a four-year span. "Men We Reaped" won the Heartland Prize for non-fiction, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circl...
The book’s title comes from a Harriet Tubman quotation, on the occasion of the unsuccessful assault of the all-Black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry upon the Confederate forces at Fort Wagner during the American Civil War: "We saw the lightning and that was the guns; We heard the thunder and that was the big guns...
Five men in Ward's life die in the space of four years. Black men between the ages of 19-32, including her brother, Joshua, killed by a white drunk driver. Though seemingly unconnected, Ward takes her readers on a journey—personal, familial and communal—showing how they were in reality bonded by identity and place, and...
Ward learns at an early age how girls are treated differently than boys, when she gets into trouble for doing things her cousins do freely (smoking), and also seeing how her father gets to spend the family money on a motorcycle, and then ride away on it, while her mother works extra hard to put food on the table. She a...
As her mother works long hours as a maid, Ward is expected to care for her younger siblings and the household. She suffers from depression. At school, she experiences bullying. Her mother's rich, white employer offers to pay Ward's tuition for private school. There, however, she must deal with being the only Black girl...
Ward's father is now living in New Orleans. When Ward and her siblings visit, their mother sends them with groceries, because she doesn't trust him to feed the children. Her brother Joshua moves in with him, and Ward later learns that he is dealing crack to help his father pay his bills.
Ward heads out of state for university, to Stanford, becoming the first member of her family to attend college. Her grief for the loss of her brother never leaves her, but she knows it will change over time. Ward closes with her memory of riding in a car with Joshua, declaring, "I don't ride like that anymore", and ima...

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