Wanting to Know More of the Hues of Purple
15 Womanist Books every Reader must have
Editor’s Note: In last week’s issue, I shared that I’m experimenting with sending out our letters weekly either on Wednesdays or Thursdays. Based on the feedback I got from y’all, it looks like Wednesdays are the preferred days! As always, thanks for sharing your feedback with me.
Reading, for me, has been an avenue of thoughtful escape. It’s been a way for gaining clarity of the world around us, and, it’s been one of my treasured acts of feeling at home, wherever I’m at.
In this season of transition, moving has a way of subtly showing me the things that no longer work and where I can expand. One of the ways this has been realized has been through detoxing and re-categorizing my personal library.
As a growing Womanist reader and practitioner, collecting this reading list reminds me of where I’ve started and what’s to come.
This list is by no means comprehensive of the countless Womanist literature that’s available. However, this list contains core Womanist literature that every reader should have in their personal library. To note, there are some crossovers in this list with Black Feminist literature.
Whether you’re working on your personal library right now or in the future, I hope this collection affirms, liberates, expands, and gives reprieve to your lived experiences.
Womanism is a social change perspective rooted in Black women’s and other women of color’s everyday experiences and everyday methods of problem-solving in everyday spaces, extended to the problem of ending all forms of oppression for all people, restoring the balance between people and the environment/nature, and reconciling human life with the spiritual dimension.
Womanist methods of social transformation cohere around the activities of harmonizing and coordinating, balancing, and healing. These methods work in and through relationship, reject violence and aggression but not assertiveness, and readily incorporate “everyday” activities. These overlapping methods include, but are not limited to, dialogue, arbitration and mediation, spiritual activities, hospitality, mutual aid and self-help, and “mothering”.
- Layli Phillips Womanist Reader
Books:
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose - Alice Walker
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves - Clenora Hudson-Weems
Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community - Katie Cannon
Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society (Religion, Race, and Ethnicity) - Stacey Floyd-Thomas
A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering - Emilie Townes
Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation - Emilie Townes
Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk - Delores S. Williams
Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English - Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches - Audre Lorde
Sula - Toni Morrison
Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth Honoring Faiths - Melanie L. Harris
Re-Inventing Africa Matriarchy, Religion, and Culture- Ifi Amadiume
I Found God in Me: A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader- Mitzi Smith
Some of Us Did Not Die: New & Selected Essays - June Jordan
Additional Reads:
Black Women Writers as Dynamic Agents of Change: Empowering Women from Africa to America - Lena M. Ampadu
What's in a name? Womanism, black feminism, and beyond - Patricia Hill Collins
Must I Be Womanist? - Monica Coleman
Black Women, Books, and the Quest for Liberation: A Reading List - Ashley Tisdale
The Legacy of Buchi Emecheta in Nigerian Women’s Fiction - Shalini Nadaswaran
What book would you recommend to add to this list?
Until next time,