Decolonial FeminismBooks

A contemporary collection placing street movements, Black and decolonial theory, Indigenous ecological knowledge, queer practice, and art across the Americas on one political map.

Jules Gill-Peterson locates transmisogyny in colonial statecraft, racial ordering, policing, sex work, and global histories of transfeminized people.

Kit Heyam challenges modern, white, medicalized origin stories of gender variance while demonstrating how to write trans history without imposing definitive identities on people in the past.

Gregory D. Smithers traces Indigenous gender traditions through colonial suppression, survival, and renewal, locating the modern reclamation of Two-Spirit identity within language, spirituality, and sovereignty.

Drawing on Maya Ch’orti’ and Binnizá family memory, environmental science, and community cases, Jessica Hernandez critiques ecocolonialism and reimagines stewardship through Indigenous science.

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.

An extraordinary work of memoir and investigative journalism by award-winning Gitxsan journalist Angela Sterritt who survived life on the streets. Combining personal narrative with in-depth investigation into Canada's missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG), this book reveals how colonialism and racism created a society where Indigenous women's lives are ignored and devalued, while proving that Indigenous women's strength and brilliance is unbroken.

Max Liboiron uses plastic pollution research to show how environmental science can presume access to land, while modeling anticolonial research ethics.

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

Suraj Yengde combines personal narrative and social analysis to show caste not as India’s past, but as power still operating in education, love, labor, and diaspora.

Through treaties, dispossession, food and water, sacred sites, and Standing Rock, Dina Gilio-Whitaker rebuilds environmental justice around Indigenous sovereignty.

Kathryn Yusoff critiques Anthropocene narratives that erase slavery, extraction, and racialized geologic violence behind an abstract “humanity.”

Arundhati Roy revisits the conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi to expose the caste question muted inside Indian nationalist narratives.

Vandana Shiva extends democracy to land, seeds, water, and community, showing how corporate globalization turns the commons of life into property.

Ifi Amadiume’s study of Nnobi society separates social roles such as daughter and husband from anatomical sex, while tracing how colonial rule narrowed women’s political and economic authority.

An oral-history account of Indigenous women’s participation in the Zapatista movement and their unfinished struggle to transform political leadership, domestic life, land, health, and education.

Nigerian writer Adichie's pamphlet expanded from her TED talk redefines 21st-century feminism through personal experiences and sharp observations, making this concept more accessible and relatable.

Bama’s Karukku begins from Tamil Dalit Christian women’s experience to write caste, religious institutions, education, and self-recovery in conflict.

Lila Abu-Lughod dismantles the rescue narrative that turns Muslim women into a uniform victim class and uses their suffering to authorize war, humanitarian intervention, and moral superiority.

Combining Indigenous wisdom with scientific knowledge to explore the relationship between humans and nature, proposing ecofeminist practices based on reciprocity and gratitude.

Srividya Natarajan and Aparajita Ninan use stark images, satire, and historical narration to remake Jotiba Phule’s Slavery while weaving Savitribai’s struggle back into anti-caste thought.

Gail Omvedt traces five centuries of anti-caste social visions, from Bhakti traditions to Phule, Periyar, and Ambedkar.

Through biography, letters, poetry, and student writing, this collection reconstructs Savitribai Phule’s anti-caste pedagogy and asks why her thought was excluded from national and feminist histories.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd and Durgabai Vyam reclaim labor, technique, and knowledge devalued by caste in a form accessible to younger readers.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty moves from a critique of the Western gaze to anticapitalist solidarity, grounding transnational feminism in history, labor relations, and shared struggle.

Maria Lugones collects influential essays on plural identities, coalition, travel between worlds, and decolonial feminist resistance.

miriam cooke reads Muslim women’s literary and public interventions as the making of Islamic feminism, a contested space in which religious belonging and demands for gender justice are claimed together.

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí argues that Western scholarship projected a body-centered gender hierarchy onto Yoruba society, forcing feminist analysis to confront the colonial history of its own categories.

A foundational transnational feminist anthology tracing colonial legacies through labor, state power, erotic autonomy, Indigenous sovereignty, and grassroots democratic organizing.

Amina Mama exposes psychology’s role in producing racist images and develops a historically grounded account of how Black women create subjectivity against racial and gender domination.

Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva place patriarchal capitalism, colonial development, women’s unpaid labor, and ecological destruction in one political economy, proposing a life-centered subsistence perspective.

Val Plumwood dissects the masterful dualisms of Western philosophy, showing how human/nature, reason/body, and man/woman turn dependency into a warrant for control.

This foundational work of ecofeminism reveals how the development paradigm threatens survival itself through violence against nature and women. Through the experiences and perspectives of rural Indian women, Shiva demonstrates how patriarchal development models simultaneously destroy ecosystems and marginalize women, arguing for women's central role as biodiversity custodians in ecological regeneration.

A groundbreaking collection of writings by radical women of color that brought together diverse racial voices, critiqued the limitations of white feminism, and advanced intersectional feminist development.

A groundbreaking novel by Egyptian feminist pioneer Saadawi that exposes the violence and oppression faced by women in Arab society through the story of a woman sentenced to death.

Nearly 200 years after Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was published, it has quite rightly earned the status of a classic feminist novel. If Jane Eyre is a classic, then Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea - the 1966 novel that gives life to the abandoned woman in Brontë's story - is a masterpiece. By re-examining the character of Bertha Rochester and imagining her life before the events of the original novel, Rhys gives agency and dignity to literature's archetypal 'madwoman in the attic'.