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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, including the exploitation of blue-collar workers, police violence, rape, domestic abuse, and segregation.
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 arm is the price she must pay for her attempt to change history. Robert Crossley quotes Ruth Salvaggio as inferring that the amputation of Dana's left arm is a distinct "birthmark" that represents a part of a "disfigured heritage." Scholars have also noted the importance of Kevin's forehead scar, with Diana R. Paulin arguing that it symbolizes Kevin's changing understanding of racial realities, which constitute "a painful and intellectual experience."
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 perpetuation of past racial discrimination into the present and, perhaps, the future of America. The lesson of Dana's trips to the past, then, is that "we cannot escape or repress our racist history but instead must confront it and thereby reduce its power to pull us back, unthinkingly, to earlier modes of consciousness and interaction."
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 prolonged stay in the past reframes their modern attitudes. Butler's depiction of her principal character as an independent, self-possessed, educated African-American woman defies slavery's racist and sexist objectification of black people and women.
"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 and the present to Dana and Kevin's integrated relationship highlight the continuing hostility of both white and black communities to interracial mixing. At the same time, the relationship of Dana and Kevin extends to concept of "community" from people related by ethnicity to people related by shared experience. In these new communities whites and black people may acknowledge their common racist past and learn to live together.
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 just resist accepting slavery as the normal state of affairs, but dissociate himself from the unrestricted power white males enjoy as their privilege. His prolonged stay in the past transforms him from a naive white man oblivious about racial issues into an anti-slave activist fighting racial oppression.
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 submission." She then realized that sexism could work in favor of a female protagonist, "who might be equally dangerous" but "would not be perceived so."
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 future.
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 from Butler's first use of the word to indicate Dana and Kevin's similar interests and shared beliefs. Dana and Kevin's relationship, in particular, signals the way for black and white America to reconcile: they must face the country's racist past together so they can learn to co-exist as kindred.
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. Frances Smith Foster insists "Kindred" does not have one genre and is in fact a blend of "realistic science fiction, grim fantasy, neo-slave narrative, and initiation novel." Sherryl Vint describes the narrative as a fusion of the fantastical and the real, resulting in a book that is "partly historical novel, partly slave narrative, and partly the story of how a twentieth century black woman comes to terms with slavery as her own and her nation's past."
"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, readers feel they are witnessing firsthand the cruelty and hardships that many slaves faced every day in the South and so identify with Dana's gut-wrenching reactions to the past. This autobiographical voice, along with Dana's harrowing recollection of the brutality of slavery and her narrow escape from it, is one of the key elements that have made critics classify "Kindred" as a neo-slave narrative.
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 wanted them to. Dana's ethnicity becomes revealed in chapter two, "The Fire," while Kevin's ethnicity becomes clear to the reader in chapter three, "The Fall," which also includes the history of Dana's and Kevin's interracial relationship.
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 circumstances. According to Bedore, Butler's use of repetition blurs the lines between the past and present relationships. As time goes on, Alice and Rufus’ relationship begins to seem more like a miserable married couple while Dana and Kevin become somewhat distant.
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's first president, George Washington. At the time, guides referred to the slaves as "servants" and avoided referring to the estate as a former slave plantation. Butler also spent time reading slave narratives, including the autobiography of Fredrick Douglass, who escaped and became an abolitionist leader. She read many grim accounts, but decided she needed to moderate events in her book in order to attract enough readers.
"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 complex actuality and continuing heritage of American slavery. "Seattle Post-Intelligencer" writer John Marshall said that "Kindred" is "the perfect introduction to Butler’s work and perspectives for those not usually enamored of science fiction." "The Austin Chronicle" writer Barbara Strickland declared "Kindred" to be "a novel of psychological horror as it is a novel of science fiction."
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 Anniversary, African-American literature professor Roland L. Williams said that the novel has remained popular over the years because of its crossover appeal, which "continues to find a variety of audiences--fantasy, literary and historical" and because "it is an exceedingly well-written and compelling story… that asks you to look back in time and at the present simultaneously."
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 subject" with which Smith opens the narrative: "her mother’s illness and Smith’s slow-dawning realization that she will not recover"—Smith's mother died shortly after Smith graduated from college.
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 poem "solves" things—but I knew the kind of encounter I was capable of creating in a poem. I realized that if I wanted to get something new out of that material I needed to shift languages."
"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 Together" was also named a Newbery Honor book with the award committee citing its, "Through artful and poetic language, Watson explores themes of race, class, gender and body image in this dynamic journey." Bank Street College of Education also recognized the novel with its Josette Frank Award.
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 May 2020 killing of George Floyd, after which the book re-entered "The New York Times" Best Seller list.
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 to spend so much time writing about race, but was inspired after beginning to ask people what issues they face when talking about race and hearing the responses of people of color.
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 defensive or getting off-topic. Statistics are used to support the book's arguments. Oluo also describes her upbringing and experience living in Seattle, Washington. She was raised by a white single mother and became a single mother herself to two mixed-race sons at a young age.
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-racist.
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 September 13 and reappeared October 4.
"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 straightforward guidebook to the nuances of conversations surrounding race in America." "The New York Times" listed the book in its "New & Noteworthy" column.
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 reading list would have improved the book.
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 perception of the young adolescent, the brilliant characterization, and the dramatic impact of some of the episodes." and Margaret Bernice Smith Bristow, writing about Hamilton in "The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature", found "Her use of unconventional stream of consciousness and language in "Arilla Sun Down" (1976) is also noteworthy."
"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 movement because she and the resources support to do so for feminism of color. In 2011, Ramirez asked Alarcon if she could revitalize TWP project and resulted in the rebirth of TWP. Without Ramirez, the press would not have reopened or functioning as of today.
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" (1991), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's "Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha" (1994) and Ana Castillo's "The Sexuality of Latinas" (co-editor, with Norma Alarcón and Cherríe Moraga) (1993).
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 for women of color that incorporates migratory, diasporic, and indigenous women both within and beyond U.S. national borders.
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 and within Black studies on Black men".
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 feminism had focused on issues related to white women. They wanted to negotiate a large space for women of color. According to Teresa de Lauretis, "This Bridge Called My Back" and "But Some Women Are Brave" revealed "the feelings, the analyses, and the political positions of feminists of color, and their critiques of white or mainstream feminism" and created a "shift in feminist consciousness."
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 against the backdrop of allegations by law professor Anita Hill, about sexual harassment that became part of Thomas' confirmation hearings.
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. Crenshaw is known for introducing and developing intersectional theory to feminism. Crenshaw noted that it was one of the "very few Black women's studies books". She used the title "All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave", as her "point of departure" to "develop a Black feminist criticism".
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 title "sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis.
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 writers, both within the academy and without. Here Collins provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Drawing from fiction, poetry, music, and oral history, the result is a book that provided the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought and its canon.
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 girls, Jacobs explained how it is able to provide an "opportunity to develop critical media literacy skills." Knowing this frameworks aids in their own viewpoints and stances to media representations in understanding and deciphering the images and meaning behind such imagery. Moving beyond the surface images and using this framework as a means of combatting against the prevalent, normalized view of characters and ideals within the media that are shown as representations of and for young Black girls.
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 Park. The University of Maryland named Collins a Distinguished University Professor in 2006."
"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 as Black women's subordination within intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation persists, Black feminism as an activist response to that oppression will remain needed.
"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 ideas that reflect a consciousness in opposition to oppression.
"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 has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society. The contribution may be in empirical research, theory, or methodology. It is presented for significant cumulative work done throughout a professional career."
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 debuted in 19th position on "The New York Times" Best Seller list for Hardcover Nonfiction. The book's original title was "Fish Food". The memoir follows Mock's journey as a transgender girl and young woman in Hawaii.
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 eventually split up and at age seven Mock is sent to live with her father and brother, Chad, in Oakland, California. While there, her father tries to instill masculinity into young Mock, pushing her to participate in sports and other activities that her brother enjoys.
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 as gay to her mother, and Wendi helps her become even more feminine. Together, they meet other transgender women and drag queens.
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 a boy named Adrian, who shows interest in her but rejects her when he discovers she is transgender.
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 family is loving.
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 apartment in the middle of the night. They reconcile, and move in together soon after. The book ends with a discussion of LGBT representation in the media and the perception that transgender women need to be out and visible at all times.
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 structures of autobiography.
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 journey reflects traditional heteronormative norms, beauty standards, and respectability politics. Glover states that many transgender women who do not uphold heteronormative ideals rarely get as much media prestige. While the popularity of "Redefining Realness" is significant for representation of transgender women, Glover states, many transgender activists are denied media presence because their bodies or actions are not in line with respectability politics.
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 "Redefining Realness" were Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Audre Lorde. References to "Their Eyes Were Watching God" appear throughout the book. She also includes quotes from Ralph Ellsion, Gloria Anzaldua, and James Baldwin.
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 color.
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… encapsulates the bravery, intrigue, and compassion that defined a generation, presenting a history that everyone should know: required and inspired." The School Library Journal noted the book as a "a superbly written and illustrated work. A first purchase for public and school libraries.”
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 ransom, she is gang-raped and tortured by her captors, who keep her imprisoned for 13 days before finally releasing her.
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 praised it as "a gripping psychological portrait of how trauma remakes the body to respond only to itself."
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 collaborated on "Beyond the Lights".
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 Circle Award for Autobiography and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.
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; We heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."
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 how race, poverty and gender predetermined the outcome of their lives.
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 also learns that for her male relatives, being Black is dangerous in itself, as her mother and grandmother worry about them being arrested or experiencing violence.
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 in a white environment. She experiences racism and rejection.
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 imagining that when her life is over, Joshua will ride up and ask her to go for one more ride.

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