Literary Criticism

This Bridge Called My Back Writings By Radical Women Of Color by Theresa A. Jones

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Fortieth anniversary edition of the foundational text of women of color feminism.Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherr e Moraga writes, ‘the complex confluence of identities-race, class, gender, and sexuality-systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.’Reissued here, forty years after its inception, this anniversary edition contains a new preface by Moraga reflecting on Bridge’s ‘living legacy’ and the broader community of women of color activists, writers, and artists whose enduring contributions dovetail with its radical vision. Further features help set the volume’s historical context, including an extended introduction by Moraga from the 2015 edition, a statement written by Gloria Anzald a in 1983, and visual art produced during the same period by Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, Yolanda L pez, and others, curated by their contemporary, artist Celia Herrera Rodr guez. Bridge continues to reflect an evolving definition of feminism, one that can effectively adapt to and help inform an understanding of the changing economic and social conditions of women of color in the United States and throughout the world.

A Love Letter To This Bridge Called My Back by Gloria J. Wilson

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In 1981, Chicana feminist intellectuals Cherr e Moraga and Gloria Anzald a 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.