Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

by Alice Walker

In this, her first collection of nonfiction, Alice Walker speaks out as a black woman, writer, mother, and feminist in thirty-six pieces ranging from the personal to the political. Among the contents are essays about other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and her daughter’s healing words.

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series)

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series)

by Audre Lorde

essays & speeches

The Second Sex

by Simone De Beauvoir

The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.

Feminist Theory, Second Edition: From Margin to Center (South End Press Classics Series)

Feminist Theory, Second Edition: From Margin to Center (South End Press Classics Series)

by Bell Hooks

In this attractive South End Press Classics edition, featuring a new preface, hooks maintains that mainstream feminism's reliance on white, middle-class, and professional spokeswomen obscures the centrality of women of color and poor women in the movement for women's liberation.

The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Perverse Modernities)

The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Perverse Modernities)

by Kara Keeling

Kara Keeling contends that cinema and cinematic processes had a profound significance for twentieth-century anti-capitalist Black liberation movements based in the United States. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's notion of "the cinematic"--not just as a phenomenon confined to moving-image media such as film and television but as a set of processes involved in the production and reproduction of social reality... (more)

Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

by Bell Hooks

Writing is a healing act of power for this woman who rea up in an old school Southern black world where children were meant to be seen and not hear. 'Talking back' was punished with silence. But in the world of woman-talk, where the everyday rules of how to live and how to act were established, hooks made language her birthright. When it comes to bigotry, there is no mincing words; bell hooks talks back. In... (more)

Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Women of Letters)

Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Women of Letters)

by Cheryl A. Wall

"Wall's writing is lively and exuberant. She passes her enthusiasm for these writers' works on to the reader. She captures the mood of the times and follows through with the writers' evolution -- sometimes to success, other times to isolation.... Women of the Harlem Renaissance is a rare blend of thorough academic research with writing that anyone can appreciate." -- Jason Zappe, Copley News Service "By... (more)

Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (Modern & Contemporary Poetics)

Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (Modern & Contemporary Poetics)

by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Feminist issues in avant garde poetry. In her now-classic The Pink Guitar , Rachel Blau DuPlessis examined a number of modern and contemporary poets and artists to explore the possibility of finding a language that would question deeply held assumptions about gender. In the 12 essays and introduction that constitute Blue Studios , DuPlessis continues that task, examining the work of experimental poets and... (more)

Women, Race and Class (Women's Press Classics)

Women, Race and Class (Women's Press Classics)

by Angela Y. Davis

A powerful study of the women's movement in the U.S. from abolitionist days to the present that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders.

Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (Gender and American Culture)

Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (Gender and American Culture)

by Cheryl A. Wall

In blues music, "worrying the line" is the technique of breaking up a phrase by changing pitch, adding a shout, or repeating words in order to emphasize, clarify, or subvert a moment in a song. Cheryl A. Wall applies this term to fiction and nonfiction writing by African American women in the twentieth century, demonstrating how these writers bring about similar changes in African American and American literary... (more)

Alchemy of Race and Rights

by Patricia J. Williams

Williams enables us to see how we can unthink the process that allows racism to persist. She presents an eloquent argument for keeping rights and affirmative action in the legal vocabulary--and a powerful description of the seemingly ineluctable status of black people in the United States today.

After Mecca: Women Poets And The Black Arts Movement

After Mecca: Women Poets And The Black Arts Movement

by Cheryl Clarke

"This is the only book-length treatment of Black women poets of the Black Arts Movement, their contributions to the development of feminism and lesbian-feminism, and their impact on the poets who succeeded them. Clarke has the advantage of being an "insider" who witnessed part of the era she’s analyzing."—Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Spelman College, co-author of Gender Talk The politics and music of the sixties and... (more)

Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology

An anthology of writings by black and lesbian activists. First published in 1983, this edition benefits from an updated list of contributor biographies, and a new preface that provides an assessment of how black women's lives have changed - or not - since the book was first published.

The Black Interior

by Elizabeth Alexander

With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current culture. In The Black Interior , she examines the vital roles of such heavyweight literary figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Rita Dove, as well as... (more)

When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America

When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America

by Paula Giddings

When and Where I Enter is an eloquent testimonial to the profound influence of African-American women on race and women's movements throughout American history. Drawing on speeches, diaries, letters, and other original documents, Paula Giddings powerfully portrays how black women have transcended racist and sexist attitudes--often confronting white feminists and black male leaders alike--to initiate social and... (more)

Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present

Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present

Within the Circle is the first anthology to present the entire spectrum of twentieth-century African American literary and cultural criticism. It begins with the Harlem Renaissance, continues through civil rights, the Black Arts Movement, and on into contemporary debates of poststructuralist and black feminist theory. Drawing on a quote from Frederick Douglass for the title of this book, Angelyn Mitchell explains... (more)

Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture

Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture

by Hortense J. Spillers

Black, White, and in Color offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past twenty years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate... (more)

By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry

Have women finally moved beyond the status of cultural outsiders to become full participants in American poetry and its criticism? In By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry , contemporary women poets reconsider their art form on their own terms, and the results are both telling and fascinating. This lively and richly varied collection offers more than two dozen essays that are uniformly original, challenging, playful,... (more)

Civil Wars

by June Jordan

In Civil Wars, June Jordan's battleground is the intersection of private and public reality, which she explores through a blending of personal reflection and political analysis. From journal entries on the line between poetry and politics and a discussion of language and power in "White" versus "Black" English to First Amendment issues, children's rights, Black studies, American violence, and sexuality, Jordan... (more)

Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women

Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women

by Lynn Keller

Expanding the boundaries of both genre and gender, contemporary American women are writing long poems in a variety of forms that repossess history, reconceive female subjectivity, and revitalize poetry itself. In the first book devoted to long poems by women, Lynn Keller explores this rich and evolving body of work.

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: feminist criticism

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

by Alice Walker

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series)

by Audre Lorde

The Second Sex

by Simone De Beauvoir

Feminist Theory, Second Edition: From Margin to Center (South End Press Classics Series)

by Bell Hooks

The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Perverse Modernities)

by Kara Keeling

Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

by Bell Hooks

Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Women of Letters)

by Cheryl A. Wall

Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (Modern & Contemporary Poetics)

by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Women, Race and Class (Women's Press Classics)

by Angela Y. Davis

Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (Gender and American Culture)

by Cheryl A. Wall

Alchemy of Race and Rights

by Patricia J. Williams

After Mecca: Women Poets And The Black Arts Movement

by Cheryl Clarke

Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology

The Black Interior

by Elizabeth Alexander

When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America

by Paula Giddings

Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present

Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture

by Hortense J. Spillers

By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry

Civil Wars

by June Jordan

Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women

by Lynn Keller