I Am Your Sister (March 2009)

Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnetta B. Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds. I AM Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Audre Lorde was not only a famous black poet; she was also one of the most important radical black feminists of the past half century. I Am Your Sister collects her non-fiction prose from 1976 to 1990, and it is the first volume to provide a full picture of Lorde's political work (as opposed to her aesthetic work). The essays cover an impressive variety of topics: sexuality, race, gender, culture, class, parenting, disease, resistance, and power--both within the United States and across the African diaspora. While Lorde is best known as a progenitor of black feminist studies, I Am Your Sister stresses her signal influence in the creation of gay and lesbian studies. Lorde's work presaged the late 1980s shift in the academy toward the emphasis on the tight connections between race, class, gender, and sexuality--and later disability. Accordingly, the breadth of topics Lorde tackles in the various essays in I Am Your Sister capture the spirit of intersectionality that now dominates analysis in the humanities and critical social sciences.

Nice.