Poetry, Memoir, and Scholarship Collide in the Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities Reading List

Sponsored by AAWW's The Margins, among others, a new collaboration between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective commits to practicing solidarity. As part of the launch of Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities, leaders from each group have created a reading list, reflecting "on books that have shaped, catalyzed, and transformed their understandings and practices of solidarity." 

Titles by more familiar writers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Cathy Park Hong meet other works: Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, by Dr. Carole Boyce Davies; The Intimacies of Four Continents, by Lisa Lowe; and the poetry collection Love Cake, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, for instance. About the latter, Senti writes:

I’d write a love poem to Leah for this collection if I could. Love Cake explores survival, beauty, desire, belonging, violence, resilience, and what it means to rebuild and love yourself and your people. These poems are love songs for queer people of color, for femmes healing from trauma, for those of us who struggle with the notion of home. Maybe my favorite from this book is “femmes are film stars”. These poems make me want to dance, kiss, cook for people, organize, and put on lipstick. I love being reminded that the revolution is all of these things, that solidarity is sweet.

Check out the full reading list at The Margins.