The Black Feminist Reader

by James, Joy; Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean

• ISBN13: 9780631210078
• ISBN10: 0631210075
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-06-08
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Organized into two parts, "Literary Theory" and "Social and Political Theory," this Reader explores issues of community, identity, justice, and the marginalization of African American and Caribbean women in literature, society, and political movements.

Author Biography

Joy James is Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. She is author of Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender & Race in US Culture (1996); Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals (1996), Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (1999). James is also editor of the Angela Y. Davis Reader (Blackwell Publishers, 1998), States of Confinement: Policing, Detention and Prisons (2000), and co-editor of Spirit, Space & Survival: African American Women In (White) Academe (1993), which received the 1994 Gustavus Myers Human Rights award.

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is Associate Professor of French and Director of the African American Studies and Research Center at Purdue University. She is author of Frantz Fanon: Conflicts & Feminisms (1997) and Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives in French (1999). She is co-editor of Fanon: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Publishers, 1996) and Spoils of War: Women of Color, Cultures, and Revolutions (1997), which received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America in 1997.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	vii
Preface	ix
Acknowledgements	xiii
Editors' Introduction	1	(10)
I Literary Theory
The Race for Theory	11	(13)
Barbara Christian
Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature	24	(33)
Toni Morrison
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book	57	(31)
Hortense J. Spillers
A Black Man's Place in Black Feminist Criticism	88	(21)
Michael Awkward
Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/silencing the ``Demonic Ground'' of Caliban's ``Woman''	109	(22)
Sylvia Wynter
II Social and Political Theory
Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory	131	(15)
bell hooks
Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation	146	(37)
Angela Y. Davis
The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought	183	(25)
Patricia Hill Collins
Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics	208	(31)
Kimberle Crenshaw
Radicalizing Feminism	239	(46)
Joy James
Appendix: Key Feminist Statements
Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement (1977)	261	(10)
African American Women in Defense of Ourselves (1991)	271	(2)
Open Letter from Assata Shakur (1998)	273	(12)
Bibliography	285	(4)
Index	289