Black FeminismBooks

One of Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2023. Continuing the trajectory of the Combahee River Collective, this collection brings together scholars, activists, and writers to examine how carceral liberalism masquerades as freedom while perpetuating oppression, critiquing the confluence of neoliberalism, incarceration, and patriarchy.

This collaborative work traces abolition feminism through women-of-color, queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist movement histories.

Andrea N. Baldwin reads the US university through Black feminism, affect, and decolonial theory, showing how inclusion coexists with institutional indifference and developing shade as a critical method.

A record of liberation and transformation by Tarana Burke, the founder of the 'Me Too' movement. With overwhelming honesty, it depicts the deep wounds as a survivor of sexual violence, the reality of silenced Black women, and how the hope of 'empowerment through empathy' was born.

We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice connects punishment, gender, race, and community safety, strengthening FemRes coverage of abolition feminism and transformative justice.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs learns Black feminist survival from marine mammals, linking breath, sound, collective protection, and ecological crisis.

Reveals the forgotten history of enslaved women, reconstructing their pivotal role and indomitable spirit in the struggle against slavery in the Caribbean region.

Isabel Wilkerson compares U.S. racial hierarchy, Indian caste, and Nazi Germany to describe caste as a hidden grammar of domination.

A powerful critique of mainstream feminism's failure to address the basic needs of marginalized women, advocating for housing, food, education, and other survival issues to be at the core of feminist agenda.

Short Anti-racist Guide is a bestselling book by Brazilian Black feminist philosopher Djamila Ribeiro. This concise yet powerful book not only explains the structural origins of racism but, more importantly, provides 11 concrete practical guidelines, teaching readers how to actively practice anti-racism in their daily lives.

Harriet A. Washington links environmental racism and toxic exposure to health and cognitive harm, challenging claims that racial inequality is biological.

Ruha Benjamin’s New Jim Code framework shows how racial hierarchy can be engineered, hidden by defaults, intensified through surveillance, or repackaged as a benevolent technical fix.

Emily L. Thuma reconstructs the anticarceral politics developed from the 1970s into the early 1980s by criminalized women and Black, queer, prisoner, and psychiatric-survivor organizers.

brown gathers essays and conversations linking pleasure, consent and collective practice, while asking when enjoyment supports freedom and when it remains consumption or privilege.

Safiya Umoja Noble begins with the stigmatization of Black girls in commercial search to expose how advertising markets, platform monopoly, and knowledge classification produce algorithmic oppression.

From slavery, gynecological medicine, fugitivity, and public memory, C. Riley Snorton argues that blackness and transness are not parallel histories that later intersect but categories produced together in the United States.

Andrea Ritchie documents police violence against Black women, Indigenous women, immigrant women, sex workers, and trans women whose experiences are often erased from public narratives.

'To transform silence into language and action' - . A definitive collection covering the representative works of Audre Lorde, who fought against discrimination, illness, and power while upholding her identity as Black, lesbian, mother, and warrior. An incredibly powerful intellectual legacy for turning difference into the power of solidarity.

Liberating 'motherhood' from middle-class privilege to reconstruct it as the most radical practice of social transformation. A groundbreaking anthology on love, survival, and collective liberation by women of color, queer people, the poor, and low-wage caregivers.

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools connects punishment, gender, race, and community safety, strengthening FemRes coverage of abolition feminism and transformative justice.

Connecting liberation movements across different eras and regions, from abolitionism to Palestine, demonstrating the importance of intersectional analysis in contemporary social movements.

A hybrid of prose and poetry, Claudia Rankine's memoir-like art book provides uncompromising insights into the living conditions of 21st-century Black Americans - particularly Black women. From microaggressions to intentional acts of bias, Rankine creates a taxonomy of daily offenses against Black Americans, challenging all of us to consider our own complicity.

The final autobiography written by the legendary poet Maya Angelou. Addressing her early abandonment by her mother, years of estrangement, and a dramatic eventual reconciliation, this work beautifully maps how one woman learned to be independent, to forgive, and to blossom into a world-renowned writer through the complexities of maternal love.

Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation connects punishment, gender, race, and community safety, strengthening FemRes coverage of abolition feminism and transformative justice.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness connects punishment, gender, race, and community safety, strengthening FemRes coverage of abolition feminism and transformative justice.

Deeply analyzes how patriarchy harms men, explores how men can participate in feminist movements, and advocates for building new masculinity based on love and equality.

Angela Y. Davis’s classic short book denaturalizes prisons as historical institutions and asks readers to imagine justice and safety beyond incarceration.

Redefining the meaning of love, exploring how love can become the foundation for resisting oppression and building a just society, proposing an ethic of love as the core of social transformation.

bell hooks' accessible introduction to feminism that articulates the core concepts of feminist thought in clear, simple language, emphasizing that feminism is not just for women but a political movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and sexist oppression that benefits everyone.

A record of the soul's cry and intellectual legacy of Black women thinkers from the 19th century to the present. A monumental anthology that can be called a canon of Black Feminism, gathering the 'Words of Fire' spoken to shatter the triple constraints of racism, sexism, and class oppression.

Amina Mama traces how psychology helped construct the racialised ‘Other’, then develops a Black feminist account of subjectivity through the histories, conversations and relationships of Black women in Britain.

Almost any Octavia E. Butler novel is feminist required reading: her Afrofuturistic science fiction published between 1976 and 2005 offers visionary explorations of new worlds and eternal ethical dilemmas. We recommend starting with 'Parable of the Sower,' the first novel in Butler's post-apocalyptic Earthseed duology.

Patricia Hill Collins links Black women’s knowledge and self-definition to resistance and social justice, examining work, family, motherhood, and controlling images.

An important collection of speeches and essays by veteran political activist Angela Y. Davis, focusing on transformations in conversations about sexism, racism, and economic equality in the late 20th century. From stories of female circumcision in Egypt to examinations of rap lyrics, to the personal politics of race, Davis's sharp and accomplished essays establish her place among the important contemporary feminist voices.

A classic collection by the master of science fiction feminist literature Butler, featuring the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning titular novella that explores gender roles, power relationships, and identity through interspecies dynamics.

bell hooks argues that feminism must center poor women and women of color and transform, not merely gain acceptance within, institutions shaped by race, class, and gender.

A foundational work of intersectional feminist theory. Through fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde explores the intersectional oppression of race, gender, class, and sexuality, creating a revolutionary theoretical framework for understanding multiple identities.

A collection of essays, speeches, and reviews spanning 20 years by Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker, focusing on the intersection of personal and political, from civil rights movement to anti-nuclear sentiment, from literary criticism to personal reflections of Black women, mothers, and feminists. Called 'womanist prose' by the author, it provides profound perspectives for understanding late 20th-century feminism.

This groundbreaking work examines the experiences of Black women from slavery to the present, analyzing how the intersection of sexism and racism creates unique forms of oppression. hooks critiques both the racism of white feminism and the sexism of Black liberation movements, arguing that anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles are inseparable, laying the foundation for later intersectionality theory.

Analyzes the history of the American women's movement from a historical materialist perspective, revealing the interconnections of racial, class, and gender oppression.

Maya Angelou recounts a Black girlhood shaped by racism, sexual violence, and abandonment, tracing how memory and language help form a self beyond imposed silence.

A feminist reading of Hurston’s 1937 novel through Janie’s narration to Pheoby, her changing relationships, Black Southern idiom, and the limits of treating one fictional life as universal.

Through education, women’s status, and racial politics, Anna Julia Cooper asks who may speak for Black communities and how Black women can reshape knowledge and public life.

Writing as Linda Brent, Harriet Jacobs shows how slavery governed Black women's bodies, motherhood, and family - and how concealment, labor, and authorship became means of survival and testimony.

This 1850 dictated narrative follows Truth’s escape from slavery in New York, her pursuit of a son illegally sold south, and her efforts to claim authority through religious interpretation and public speech.