Women from Black, South Asian and other ethnic minority groups experience gendered racism. Gender and race intersect in such a way that Black and ethnic minoritised women are not only sometimes afraid of seeking help from mental care, but also are invisible to services and their needs are ignored. There has been a significant tension in feminism between respecting culture and faith and attention to women’s human rights (cultural relativism). However, when women feel entrapped within their families and culture and are subject to forced marriage, domestic violence or FGM, resulting in major mental health problems and suicide, we cannot condone abuse and violence. Black women’s mental health and wellbeing is an important focus for Black feminism, which was largely excluded from second-wave feminism. Concepts of ‘mental illness’ do not always fit easily with personal healing that focuses on emotional and spiritual growth and overcoming oppression. Cultural humility is essential and its crucial for services to collaborate with NGOs that are trusted by the women in communities and run by them. As women we must call out discrimination and racism and challenge it.

Toussaint Louverture, hero of the Haitian Revolution, occupies a key space in the imagination of Black masculinity across his own time up through the present day.This chapter traces the way Toussaint Louverture’s body, in particular, is reimagined and represented both as a symbol for Black heroism and, taken together as an oeuvre, as a figure that undoes this masculine paradigm of Black politics. In texts as varied as C. L. R. James’s, The Black Jacobins, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Édouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint, and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls, as well as visual art, cinema, public monuments, performances, children’s books, and his own memoir, Louverture’s body reads across various times, spaces, and forms as a site of desire, vulnerability, and contested lineage for Black masculine “freedom dreams.” His continued embodied celebrity is more complex than an individual text’s objectification, and instead acts as a recurring scenario of Black political negotiation across key historical moments.

Set in the midst of the quotidian anti-Black terrorism that circumscribed Black life in Jim Crow America, the HBO series Lovecraft Country seamlessly combines Black history and graphic horror to tell a story through a distinctly Black creative and reflective lens. A reading of the journey of Hippolyta Freeman in episode 7, “I Am,” reveals how the means of embodiment, speculative fiction, and elements of Black feminist Afrofuturism are used as a fulcrum to shift the critical weight away from the grim reality of oppression and towards the possibility of escape and liberation. The episode offers a revolutionary representation of the Black body as a conduit for self-discovery, a tool for circumventing anti-Blackness, and ultimately a vehicle for affirming a broader spectrum of Black aliveness that reverberates far beyond the realm of speculative fiction.

This chapter examines key works of contemporary literature to argue that Black American literature has borne witness to how medical advancement has, and continues, to be made over and through Black bodies. Whereas dominant historical narratives erase the (often coerced) contributions of Black people, and Black folks, by and large, have failed to reap the social, financial, and embodied benefits of the technological progress enabled by their abused and sacrificed flesh, Black literature forces us to confront the impoverished ethics of medical practice. Authors such as Kwoya Fagin Maples, Bettina Judd, and Toni Morrison feature characters whose bodies document the long history of racist medical indifference and violence against Black bodies, despite this history’s archival misrepresentation and erasure. These writers craft a counter-history of Black life that refuses to gaslight those whose bodies continue to founder within racist medical systems in the wake of slavery.

Among the challenges to Black feminist tradition today is a gap between the visibility of intersectional disparities faced by Black women and nonbinary people, and the mobilization of this knowledge to meet problems such as economic precarity and sexual and gender discrimination. Ironically, as the rhetoric of intersectionality has become central to diversity and equity initiatives in academia and publishing, in its institutional iterations, intersectionality has moved away from earlier Black feminist commitments to dismantling systems of inequity, discrimination, and oppression. Contemporary African American literature reflects anxiety about intersectionality’s conflicted service to the individualistic values of neoliberal capitalism while recognizing it remains powerful for critiquing and refining Black feminist priorities and politics surrounding solidarity. This ambivalence is seen in the narratives discussed in this chapter, in particular, in the way they turn to intersectional logics to think through problems of transnational coalition building, gender and sexual discrimination, and economic precarity. This chapter argues that contemporary African American literature reflects anxiety about Black feminist ideas without commensurate gains in equality, safety, and freedom for Black women, providing stark representations of Black female personhood that articulate the urgency of moving beyond this impasse to face the challenges of our time.

Understanding contemporary African American literature, this chapter argues, requires accounting for the rich, multifaceted dialogue between Black literary production and the visual arts. This chapter traces what Toni Morrison called the “alliances and alignments” between literature and the other arts by analyzing the aesthetics and themes of contemporary African American writing and examining the cross-arts influences that shaped it. The dialogue between African American literature and visual culture is part of a much longer tradition, and contemporary writers have built on many earlier precedents. But this chapter also unpacks how important historical changes, including developments in media technology and the rise of Black art institutions, have generated new and more numerous intersections between Black literary and artistic cultures since the 1970s. Focusing on three key spaces that provided material support and thematic inspiration for Black writers’ experiments with visual art – the home, museum, and university – this chapter examines how authors working in a range of literary genres, including novels, poetry, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and essays, engaged with a variety of visual arts, including painting, film, sculpture, and photography. The influences and aesthetics of visual culture, the chapter shows, powerfully infuse the work of many writers today.

Margaret Bonds’s Credo sets the nine articles of W. E. B. Du Bois’s iconic manifesto for global equality – first penned in 1904, revised in 1920, and modeled on the sacred symbol of the arch – as a symmetrical set of seven movements for soloists, chorus, and piano (1965) or orchestra (1965–67). This chapter offers a close reading of Du Bois’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, pacifist text and examines the means by which Bonds translated it into a musical structure all her own that reflects diverse influences ranging from gospel song through the cantatas of J. S. Bach (whom she called “the father of all good music”), also emphasizing womanist themes that are at best minimally present in Du Bois’s text.

Black feminist anthropology has been and continues to be rooted in intellectual engagements with transnational Blackness, transnational feminism, queer politics, global anti-Blackness, anti-imperialism, and anticapitalism. Black feminist anthropology is a global endeavor that applies theory and lived experience to restructure ethnography and praxis that is engaged in an intersectional analysis of various oppressions and strategies for resistance, survival, and freedom. This chapter builds on those studies that identify the importance of including transnational Black feminism in the anthropological canon and supporting scholars who center Black women’s experiences throughout the diaspora. The aim is to encourage the use of a transnational Black feminist analytic to transform anthropological approaches to the study of Africa and its diaspora; constructions of labor, production, and reproduction; racialized identity formation; the performance of those identities across gender and sexuality; and narratives of oppression, resistance, and survival. The author centers transnational Black feminist frameworks that see the formation of diaspora as a site for solidarity that coalesce as a result of, around, and between women-led and gender-based political movements. For Black feminist anthropologists it names what was already possible, while providing an intentional epistemic framework and methodology for collaboration with Black feminists throughout Africa and its diaspora.

This chapter outlines the main theoretical contributions of the book and introduces military exceptionalism and institutional gaslighting as key concepts.

Given their intersecting, historically oppressed identities, Black women are more likely to be exposed to traumatic experiences than other racial groups. In this chapter we review the historical, systemic and institutional, and individual trauma that impacts the mental health of Black women. We provide a framework for treating trauma with Black women that is based on intersectionality and Black feminist theory. Further, we share the key components of providing trauma-informed care and best practices clinicians can use when supporting Black women in healing from trauma.

When Mônica Santana’s solo performance Isto Não É Uma Mulata (2015) premiered at Casa Escafandro in Salvador Bahia, the poet/playwright/performer led her audience through a multilingual interrogation of the mulata trope, denouncing Brazil’s literary canon and founding narratives of mestiçagem while claiming agency over the terms of how and when the mulata’s body would be put to work. Calling on a trans-hemispheric sisterhood of feminist icons of the Black diaspora from Queen Latifah to MC Carol, Santana’s Isto Não É Uma Mulata exemplifies the type of cultural nation-making that is forged in the shared consciousness of the Black Atlantic. This essay opens Santana’s play to a comparative reading of sex-radical feminist performances enacted by mulatas of popular music and culture, examining the political openings that are seized when Black women work their bodies in the interest of protest. Santana performs in tune with artists such as Brazil’s infamous funkeira MC Carol, manipulating her spectator’s disdain for satirical crudeness and boundless sexuality in order to infuse pointed social commentary with tracks such as “Não Foi Cabral” and her collaborative manifesto with Karol Conká, “100% Feminista.”

Brigitte Fielder’s “Radical Respectability and African American Women’s Reconstruction Fiction” begins with the serialization of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Sowing and Reaping and then considers additional work by Harper and Julia C. Collins in exploring tensions between radical anti-racism and what has become known as “respectability politics.” Tracing contemporary assumptions about respectability and its limitations in reverse chronology, Fielder asserts that African American women’s Reconstruction fiction did not simply embrace the politics and processes of respectability but often refused respectability’s directionality toward outward approval. Examining concepts of self-respect and self-interest, the chapter highlights moments when texts refuse to prioritize white and/or male characters over Black women’s perspectives – a radical deviation from the usual politics of the respectable. Fielder thus locates the roots of respectability’s critique as more fully present and available to African American women writers of the late nineteenth century than most critics have acknowledged.

From their initial explosion, African American women’s literary societies would go on to outnumber men’s organizations from the 1830s through the 1850s. Literary societies were also sites for the imbrication of oratory and print, since they included not only reading but also listening to texts read aloud, so that members of literary societies need not have been textually literate. Taking Maria Stewart’s first letters to the editor, in Freedom’s Journal in 1827 and The Liberator in 1832, this chapter will argue that the social gospel that would go on to define her career includes a prototypical Black feminist politics that we see emerging in the interconnected female-dominated Black literary societies and fledgling Black press around this time and reaching into the decades that follow. Stewart saw reading newspapers as essential to responsible citizenship for Black women, and understood both literary societies and newspapers as ways to forward her radical politics.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s 1869 serialized novel Minnie’s Sacrifice offers a critique of white feminism’s failures at antiracism. This chapter reads Harper’s critiques of white feminism within the historical context of her and other black women’s intersectional activism and the larger print context of the Christian Recorder. Harper’s work within the women’s rights movement made her familiar with white feminism’s failures, in which women like Harper’s character Camilla, the antislavery daughter of an enslaver family, prioritize their own interests, claim positions of victimization, and foist labor onto Black people, all while claiming to be allies. Harper’s novel is not a narrative of white feminist progress but demise, as her mixed-race Black characters distance themselves from white feminist ideals. Harper’s novel illustrates how – even while discussing the extreme anti-Black racism of slavery, disenfranchisement, and lynching – Black women activists were not fooled by insufficient forms of allyship.