If you are looking for a timely book on feminism, race, and today's political climate check out Brittney Cooper's latest release. It's going on my TBR pile! You can also check out Cooper's TED talk below!
Black women are often considered angry and divisive in their interactions with others in both public and private. In mainstream feminism, our demand to have both our race and gender considered is called divisive from "all women's issues." In Black political spaces, our desire to have our womanhood considered is called a distraction from the real issue. However, the manner in which Black women have always insisted on their right to dignity, their right to be heard, and their desire to be considered on matters of national import has much to teach us about what makes American democracy work.
Eloquent Rage takes up this politics of critical dissent, asking: How do Black women resist stereotypical portrayals of them angry, aggressive, scary and violent? How do Black women dissent from a national narrative about heterosexual Black intimacy that says we are undesirable, unlovable, and unfit for partnerships or marriages? How do we dissent from religious patriarchy? How do we use our participation in politics to resist the march of fascism? How does our embrace of Beyonce act as a kind of dissent against those who would dismiss as frivolous Black women's pursuit of pleasure and joy? Drawing together her funny, poignant, and often heartbreaking experiences of friendship, family, and intimate relationships, with insights from her career as a professor of women's and gender studies, Cooper writes compellingly about how Black women's critical dissent shows up in the everyday lives of women.
With the election of Donald Trump and the massive step backward this signals for both African Americans and women, Eloquent Rage offers a way forward, one that encourages us all not to be cowed or silenced by fear. It looks to the lives of Black women -- one of the nation's most maligned subjects -- for direction. For it is Black women who model critical dissent as a practice of prophetic love not for who America is, but for who she can be.
About the Author
Brittney Cooper is a writer, teacher, and public speaker. She thinks Black feminism can change the world for the better.
Brittney is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. She is co-founder of the popular Crunk Feminist Collective blog. And she is a contributing writer for Cosmopolitan.com and a former contributor to Salon.com. Her cultural commentary has been featured on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes, Melissa Harris-Perry, Al Jazeera’s Third Rail, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, PBS, Ebony.com, Essence.com, TheRoot.com, and TED.com.
Dr. Cooper is co-editor of The Crunk Feminist Collection (The Feminist Press 2017). She is author of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, May 2017) and the forthcoming Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (St. Martin’s, February 2018).
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