-
Lessons from Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger: UCONN Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at 50
In recent years, we have witnessed renewed calls for women to embrace anger as a source of power. These voices have Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger”, first delivered at the University of Connecticut (UCONN), Storrs, in 1981, to thank for charting an innovative scholarly and poetic terrain that theorizes anger as much more empowering and liberating than conventional discussions of the term typically allow.
Lorde’s essay redefined anger productively, approaching it as an epistemological tool igniting a desire for self and collective liberation. The result was a remarkable critical reflection that laid the groundwork for deconstructing broader systems of oppression, particularly, heteronormativity, heteropatriarchy, institutionalized racial poverty, racial capitalism, and white privilege. Lorde’s essay moved with precision, centering Black women’s struggles in a world built around the use – and abuse – of racialized people subjected to systematic dehumanization.
In their introduction, Jane Anna Gordon, Elva Orozco Mendoza, and Sherry Zane reflect on the inheritance, lessons, and responsibilities that Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies must grapple with if it is to deepen and fulfill its radical mission.
Guided by the imperative to look backward to understand the present and forge a future, the book closes with a sankofic interview with M. Jacqui Alexander and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, conducted by Briona Simone Jones.
-
Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War
War is never just the war itself, it’s not the event or the epoch. War is the impossible and unending afterlife, the struggle to breathe after being bludgeoned, and the re-situating of one’s self and of one’s place after displacement and fragmentation.
Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War advances a new paradigm of war writing by focusing on gender. War is always fought upon the backs of women, often under the pretense of saving them. Yet, along the way, the brutalities unleashed on women during wartime remain relentless. In this collection, insurgency emerges in the raw and meticulous language of witnessing, and in the desire to render the space of conflict in radically different ways. These feminist and queer perspectives on war come out of regions and positions that disobey the rules of war writing. Comprising reportage, fiction, memoir, poetry, and conversations from over sixty writers, the collection includes contributions by Chika Unigwe, Nathalie Handal, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Suchitra Vijayan, Bélen Fernández, Uzma Falak, Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Lara Pawson, Gaiutra Bahadur, Robtel Neajai Pailey, Sumana Roy and Lina Mounzer, among several others.
Bhakti Shringarpure co-founded Warscapes magazine in November 2011 and it has now transitioned into the Radical Books Collective.
Veruska Cantelli is a writer, translator, editor, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Champlain College in Vermont, USA.
Insurgent Feminisms is refreshingly bold and emotive, pulling at the heartstrings —and a rich literary delight to boot. As you turn the pages, you will be enlightened, awed, triggered, outraged, guilt-tripped… Diverse women from the global South gift us the rare privilege to glimpse into the incredibly minute details of their experiences of literal and metaphorical wars; they break exciting new ground in knowledge production. The book jolts you out of the narrow focus of your existence and reminds you of the amazing power of women’s resilience. What a gem! – Sylvia Tamale, Decolonial feminist scholar, Uganda
Crimes against humanity, war crimes and their justification through imperial-racist civic and state action are not as distant as we would like to believe. Resistance, hope, and the tenacious will to return, too, survive in the most unimaginable ways. Insurgent Feminisms drives this point home in searing, poignant re-tellings from across the world. – Kalpana Kannabiran, author, sociologist and legal scholar, India
-
Weaving Our Stories: Return To Belonging – An Anthology
“We are lovingly tethered to each other’s struggles, liberation and survival…This is the mantra sweetly embedded across this profound heartfelt body of work. Weaving our Stories is a beautifully curated montage of community voices committed to the preservation of their indigenous lands and culture. Here is an anthology that collectively teaches us how to resist, build and dream toward a liberated future. What Luanna Peterson and the contributors offer us is a divine vision to walk with our communities ancestors and descendants with a collective vision to world making. Throughout the anthology lives a chorus of powerful voices that are amplified in a series of interwoven manifestos, stunning visual art and spirited poetics often echoed in their mother tongue. Like strands of sweetgrass, these stories are interlocked and bound up across a multitude of lineages. Hawaii, like many of our homelands, has been a site of settler colonialism, US imperialism and pillaging of its most abundant lands. Every page of Weaving Our Stories gives us an opportunity to reimagine, regenerate and reclaim our legacies! What Weaving our Stories does is make visible the histories and possibilities of freedom for its people and living cultural archive. Upon reading this anthology, I began to realize that each of the contributors in the book serves as a griot of the oral history and creative traditions…which has always been an instrument of change and freedom! Add this to your 2024 booklist.” – Tarisse Iriarte Medina, independent curator, and consultant working in New York City and Puerto Rico
Weaving Our Stories: A Return to Belonging, edited and introduced by Luanna Peterson, is a book sewn seamlessly of art and heart. Every story stands bravely alone but is a part of the gripping whole. These are survivor stories, and they aren’t easy to tell. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The message will come home to you, as it did so beautifully to me. — Debra Lape, author of Looking for Lizzie – The True Story of an Ohio Madam, Her Sporting Life and Hidden Legacy and Factory Girl in the Rubber City – The Journal of Mary Cable.
Weaving Our Stories is a drenching of Spirit that helped me remember the shared purpose I have with the world and now with beloved Kalihi, Waipahu, Ko‘olauloa, and all of Hawaii. It is indeed an anthology that “… celebrates the radical and revolutionary role stories [play] in supporting our healing and liberation.” Mahalo, dear poets, artists, writers, and evolutionary revolutionists, for putting this collection together. Mahalo nui Luanna Peterson for holding the center with the grace of our kupuna – all of them. Time for us to heal. It is an honor to be connected to this kaupapa. — Dr. Manu Aluli Meyer
Full of strength and loving provocation, Weaving our Stories gathers poems, visual art, and stories of a new generation of Hawai‘i change-makers. The collection reminds us that we can seek liberation in our ancestral stories, that we reach for liberation by carrying the stories of others, and that we find liberation when we learn and extend the common patterns among us. It is a brilliant representation of Hawai‘i’s own. — Dr. Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua
We are lovingly tethered to each other’s struggles, liberation and survival… This is the mantra sweetly embedded across this profound, heartfelt body of work. Weaving our Stories is a beautifully curated montage of community voices committed to the preservation of their indigenous lands and culture. Here is an anthology that collectively teaches us how to resist, build and dream toward a liberated future. What Luanna Peterson and the contributors offer us is a divine vision to walk with our communities’ ancestors and descendants with a collective vision of world-making. Throughout the anthology lives a chorus of powerful voices that are amplified in a series of interwoven manifestos, stunning visual art and spirited poetics often echoed in their mother tongue. Like strands of sweetgrass, these stories are interlocked and bound up across a multitude of lineages. Hawai‘i, like many of our homelands, has been a site of settler colonialism, US imperialism and pillaging of its most abundant lands. Every page of Weaving our Stories gives us an opportunity to reimagine, regenerate and reclaim our legacies! What Weaving our Stories does is make visible the histories and possibilities of freedom for its people and living cultural archive. Upon reading this anthology, I began to realize that each of the contributors in the book serves as a griot of the oral history and creative traditions…which have always been an instrument of change and freedom! Add this to your 2024 booklist. — Tarisse Iriarte Medina, independent curator and consultant working in New York City and Puerto Rico
The young leaders and storytellers featured in Weaving Our Stories inspire and encourage us to move beyond received narratives that nourish bigotry or diminish one’s capacity for compassion and imagination. With powerful pedagogical and artistic impacts, the stories create space for us to name ourselves and heal out loud. The voices simultaneously remember and innovate as we re-familiarize ourselves with one another as well as ‘aina, to weave a tapestry of shared feeling and responsibility. Although the anthology speaks of loneliness and attempted erasure, its words also speak of deep belonging and strength—of the artistry, energy, ingenuity, and wisdom of people, place, and culture; of our commitments to one another; and the healing that comes from washing our eyes – and seeing our truth. — Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng
Weaving Our Stories is a Hawaii-rooted abolitionist program that utilizes storytelling as a vehicle for liberation. Our mission revolves around teaching storytelling as an act of resistance, dismantling harmful existing narratives, and nurturing our ability to weave counter-narratives that acknowledge and celebrate the inherent beauty and brilliance within our storytellers. Through our stories, we advocate for justice and liberation.
This anthology follows the trail of esteemed works such as “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color” and “Na Wahine Koa: Hawaiian Women for Sovereignty and Demilitarization.” This anthology includes poetry, essays, visual art, and narratives penned by authors and artists who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color from Hawaii and beyond. While our contributors span a diverse spectrum of experiences and identities, they all share a common commitment to individual and collective well-being. Our contributors astutely showcase how their expressions of resistance and liberation, whether through visual art or written text, align with one or more of the central themes of Weaving Our Stories: resistance through cultural memory, accountability, resisting false binaries, and countering hegemony.
In tandem with the community collection of stories that revolve around resistance, this anthology also highlights the remarkable achievements of our six accomplished Black youth organizers. These young individuals dedicated a year to the Weaving Our Stories Youth Series during the pandemic, delving into the power and relevance of storytelling in our journey of resistance and liberation. Each of the six youth activists provides an overview of their Community Impact Design Projects.
These culminating endeavors addressed community issues by proposing interventions that harness our resistance themes and our three Pillars of Liberation—namely, institutions, structures/methodology, and people.
This anthology offers celebrations of our triumphs, our joys, and our unwavering resilience. Simultaneously, they advocate for our ongoing resistance, insisting on justice and a sincere confrontation with the often-overlooked lived experiences that deserve acknowledgement.
-
Lenin150 (Samizdat): 2nd expanded edition
For all the official historiographic efforts at forging a mythologised image of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov as the austere, no-nonsense, professional revolutionary, the really existing flesh and blood Lenin understood and appreciated that the most materialist action an individual must carry out without fault to metabolise the struggle for communism is to breathe. Not just biologically respire but consciously breathe. Breathe for oneself and breathe for and with others. If it is indeed our desire to breathe new life into the long choking red star, a new oxygenic Communist politics of walking and breathing is what we must aspire to, inspire, respire and encourage.
See the Description below for further details.
-
Strategic litigation and the struggle for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual equality in Africa
There has been a rise in the use of strategic litigation related to seeking equality for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) persons. Such developments are taking place against the backdrop of active homophobia in Africa. The law and the general public should, argues the author, treat LGB persons in the same way that heterosexuals are treated. In the past two decades,30 strategic cases have been fi led by LGB activists in the Common Law African countries, namely in Botswana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda. While the majority of the cases have been successful, they have not resulted in significant social change in any of the countries. On the contrary, there have been active backlashes, counter-mobilisations, and violence against LGB persons, as well as the further criminalisation of same-sex relations and constitutional prohibitions on same-sex marriages in some of the jurisdictions. The author argues that activists in Common Law Africa have to design LGB strategic litigation in such a way as to fi t within the actual social and political conditions in their countries if strategic litigation is to spur social change.
Adrian Jjuuko is an exceptional scholar. A rare combination of intellectual brilliance, commitment and hard work. The book is born of this. It reflects his incisive analytical skills, anchored in solid knowledge of the law and jurisprudential developments in the field. His ventures into political theory, philosophy, and the social sciences give the analysis additional clarity and empirical grounding.
—Siri Gloppen, Norwegian political scientist, professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen and Director of the CMI-UiB Center on Law and Social Transformation.
Adrian Jjuuko’s meticulously researched examination of the use of strategic litigation not only celebrates the many victories which have been realized in a range of African courts of law, it also reviews and critiques the losses. He demonstrates that the law can be both an effective tool for liberation, just as it can consolidate minority oppression, gender injustice and sexual tyranny. This book is a deeply engaging and highly recommended text for those interested in shaping the evolving rights and struggles of sexual minorities on the continent for decades to come.
— J. Oloka-Onyango, Professor of Law Makerere University School of Law
-
Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (New and Expanded Edition)
First published in 1978, and winning the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for that year, Finding a Voice established a new discourse on South Asian women’s lives and struggles in Britain. Through discussions, interviews and intimate one-to-one conversations with South Asian women, in Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and English, it explored family relationships, the violence of immigration policies, deeply colonial mental health services, militancy at work and also friendship and love. The seventies was a time of some iconic anti-racist and working-class struggles. They are presented here from the point of view of the women who participated in and led them.
This new edition includes a preface by Meena Kandasamy, some historic photographs, and a remarkable new chapter titled ‘In conversation with Finding a Voice: 40 years on’ in which younger South Asian women write about their own lives and struggles weaving them around those portrayed in the book.
An amazing review of the book can be read here: https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2023/03/03/book-review-amrit-wilson-finding-a-voice-asian-women-in-britain/
Here is an extract:
This book is a call to collective action and sisterhood, a memorial and an instruction to keep going. In her Reflections, Wilson points out White feminists need to let Asian women work on their own problems while standing in support, not intrude and try to sort their issues out for them, and the valuable material she gathers in this book is indeed because she was part of the communities she was studying, speaking to the women in their kitchens in their own languages. I was so pleased to be able to revisit this wonderful work. – Lix Dexter @LyzzyBee_Libro
A great interview with Amrit Wilson in Montreal Serai (October 4, 2020).
‘This book is a wonderful, important and necessary reminder of all the black feminist work behind us and all that is left to do.’ —Sara Ahmed, feminist writer and independent scholar, and author of Living a Feminist Life
‘Finding a Voice acquires a new significance in this neoliberal era…an indispensable archive as well as a narrative of a past that is not past but reactivated and recast…’ —Kumkum Sangari, William F.Vilas Research Professor of English and the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
‘A ground-breaking book, as relevant today as it was in the seventies – and evidence, if ever such were needed, that the struggles of Asian, African and Caribbean women remain inextricably linked.’ —Stella Dadzie, founder member of OWAAD and author of Heart of the Race
‘Finding a Voice… was affirmation that our lives mattered, that our experiences with all their cultural complexities, mattered.’ —Meera Syal, British comedian, writer, playwright, singer, journalist, producer and actress.
‘This new edition comes at a time…when we are experiencing the growth of the surveillance state and when our narratives are being co-opted and used against us. Finding a Voiceis not only welcome, it is necessary.’ — Marai Larasi, Director, Imkaan; Co-Chair of UK’s End Violence Against Women Coalition.
Amrit Wilson is a writer and activist on issues of race and gender in Britain and South Asian politics. She is a founder member of South Asia Solidarity Group and the Freedom Without Fear Platform, and board member of Imkaan, a Black, South Asian and minority ethnic women’s organisation dedicated to combating violence against women in Britain. She was a founder member of Awaz and an active member of OWAAD. She is author, amongst other books, of Dreams Questions Struggles—South Asian women in Britain (Pluto Press 2006) and The Challenge Road: Women and the Eritrean revolution (Africa World Press 1991). The first edition of Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain won the the Martin Luther King Jr award.
It is the impact of oppression, racism and class which unifies South Asian women and the book comes at a time where we see the continued rise of the far right, misogyny, issues of class and the gig economy here and across the globe being played out in the media and perpetuated by male leaders going unchallenged by the state.
These new voices confirm how groundbreaking the book has been as a reference point for south Asian women now through listening to the voices of women from four decades ago, honouring their contribution and speaking in solidarity with them. As Wilson says in her introduction, it “reclaims our collective past as an act of resistance.”
An excellent read.
‘Reclaiming our collective past’: Amrit Wilson reflects on 40 years of anti-racist feminist work
By Sophia Siddiqui ARCHIVESPOLITICS 30th October 2018
http://gal-dem.com/collective-past-amrit-wilson-reflects-anti-racist-feminist-work/?fbclid=IwAR2qF13MA82F-9hztnRg4hN8ry5EEiZ2rYUtzX4OPuG7CELOzffhCTBjm4o