A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back

Description

In 1981, Chicana feminist intellectuals Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published what would become a touchstone work for generations of feminist women of color--the seminal This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. To celebrate and honor this important work, editors gloria j. wilson, Joni B. Acuff, and Amelia M. Kraehe offer new generations A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back. In A Love Letter, creators illuminate, question, and respond to current politics, progressive struggles, transformations, acts of resistance, and solidarity, while also offering readers a space for renewal and healing. The central theme of the original Bridge is honored, exposing the lived realities of women of color at the intersections of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, advancing those early conversations on what it means to be Third World feminist conscious. A Love Letter recognizes the challenges faced by women of color in a twenty-first-century world of climate and economic crises, increasing gun violence, and ever-changing social media constructs for women of color. It also retains the clarion call Bridge set in motion, as Moraga wrote: "A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives--our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longing--all fuse to create a politic born of necessity." Cover Series Info Title page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: On the Bridge Between Intimacy and Collectivity / wilson, Acuff, and Kraehe PART 1. TAKING HEED OF THE SACRED, SPIRITUAL, AND ANCESTRAL 1. Old and Black, a Prayer / Charlene A. Carruthers 2. Unbought and Unbossed: Black Womanist Resistance / Keya Crenshaw 3. Alight / elizabeth jones 4. This Is My Body, This Is My Blood: Reimaging Ritual in the Creation of Mexica-Feminine Sacred Spaces / Raquel Hernandez Guerrero 5. Tales Left Untold: Tribal Women and Their Windows to the World / Ami Kantawala PART 2. FRAGMENTS, FRACTURES, AND FUMBLINGS 6. A Black* Composition / gloria j. wilson* 7. How to Survive Lightweight Trauma and Death Threats: Home Is Where You Can Live Now / Vivian Fumiko Chin 8. Becoming Middle Girl / Amelia M. Kraehe 9. Flesh, Skin, and Bones @marimachaspeaks / Tanya Diaz-Kozlowski 10. Nochipa Ipan Noyoltsin (Always in My Heart)—Batallas Cotidianas / Liliana Conlisk Gallegos PART 3. PEDAGOGIES OF LIBERATION AND RESISTANCE 11. Generation After Generation / Sama Alshaibi 12. When Love Is Not Enough: Choosing to Heal Ourselves When the World Wants Us to Burn / Martinez and Tonantzin Zamora 13. Professor Becky and I / Sana Rizvi 14. Put It on Blast / Aram Han Sifuentes 15. A Note to Self: Ruminations of Black Womanhood X Leadership X Resistance / Portia Newman PART 4. DIASPORAS, DEPARTURES, AND DISPLACEMENT 16. Can’t You Speak Perfect English?: The Language That Troubles Me / Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis 17. Stitches in the Flesh: Subversive Rewriting / Michelle Bae-Dimitriadia 18. Levels to This Shit: Racial Categorization, Mixed Skin, and the Isolation of Bridging / Vanessa López 19. Feeling Out of Place: Friendship and Community Building Across Difference / Nozomi (Nakaganeku) Saito 20. Where Are You From? / Adriane Pereira 21. Karachi, “First Worlds,” and the Spaces in Between / Saba Fatima and Sana Rizvi 22. Asian American Feminism, Letter Writing, and the Possibility of Brea(d)th / Lan Duong 23. The Water and the Bridge: Dilemmas of In-betweenness / Manisha Sharma PART 5. MOTHERING AND SISTERING 24. Sissy My Playmate; Sissy My Enemy; Hand-Check-Slap / Sama Alshaibi 25. The Difference Is—My Lived Experience! / Sonia Bassheva Mañjon 26. Not So Micro / Rae Scott 27. All of It / Dionne Custer Edwards 28. we work / we sweat / Kaliah D. Pitts PART 6. PARADOXES AND PERSONIFICATIONS OF EXPRESSION 29. Ain’t We Clever Too? / Pamela Harris Lawton 30. Julia Pastrana and the Eye of the Beholder / Woodard and Anderson Barbata 31. Consent and Female Desire in India / Nisha Ghatak 32. Dear BLACK Woman / Amber C. Coleman 33. For Rachel Dolezal Who Performs Black Womanhood When White Privilege Isn’t Enuf / Tyiesha Radford Shorts PART 7. SPEAKING INTERSECTIONAL TRUTHS 34. Toward a Politic of Preemptive Care / Tahereh Aghdasifar 35. In the Name of Diversity—A Sisters’ Conversation / Sister Scholars 36. Open Love Letter to My Younger Self, a Young Black Butch Working Through Her Shit / Brittney Edmonds 37. From Paperback to Praxis: In Search of Filipina/x Feminisms in the Diaspora / Batac, Stohner, and Villanueva Danan 38. “Ain’t I a Woman?”: Sojourner Truth in 1851 vs. a Black Sex-Trafficked Woman Survivor in the Present / Jacquelyn C. A. Meshelemiah 39. A Love Letter to Ourselves: Self-Love as a Revolutionary Act, Theories of the Flesh, and (In)Compatible Identities / Hernández and De Los Santos Upton PART 8. SENSE MAKING AND EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE 40. This Bridge: Intergenerational Story Archive, Re-rooting Solidarity / Susy Zepeda 41. Excavating and Embracing Anger: An Abolitionist Practice Within / Stephanie Cariaga 42. How to Make Collard Greens / Olivia Richardson 43. Recognize / Kaia Angelica Lyons 44. Endarkened Preludes to Womanhood / Kendra Johnson 45. The Black Woman Coalition / Lisa Whittington PART 9. JUSTICE AND HEALING IN TIMES OF CRISIS 46. To Healing Heridas con Corazónes of Generations: A Testimonio / Gabriela Arredondo 47. Hasta Encontrarlos / Until We Find Them / Gia del Pino 48. El Nuevo Mundo / Johanna Castillo 49. ¡No Más Babosadas! Realigning Central American Femme Subjectivity in Our Narratives / Chela E. Hernandez 50. Say Her Name / Ashley Crooks-Allen PART 10. REMEMBERING THIS BRIDGE: LOVE LETTERS 51. Bridge Work Ahead: Women of Color Liberatory Pedagogies, Then and Now / Mel Michelle Lewis 52. My Black is Beautiful / Gertrude Swan 53. A Declaration of Gratitude for the Tongues We Speak / Fabiane Ramos 54. Coming into My Feminista Ways with This Bridge Called My Back / Judith Flores Carmona 55. Wa Gago: An International Student’s Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back / Kholofelo Theledi Postscript: Meditations and Musings / wilson, Acuff, and Kraehe Contributors