30 oktober: 📚💌 Here’s an excerpt from the powerful November & December @oursharedshelf letter written by Brittney Cooper (@professor_crunk) & Rebecca Traister.
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“Dear Our Shared Shelf Readers,
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We are honored to be able to begin a conversation with you about the power and consequence of women’s rage, both personal and political. We could not be prouder or more excited that Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, and Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger have been selected as the Our Shared Shelf books for November/December 2018.
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The famed feminist activist, poet, and essayist Audre Lorde was one of the foremost thinkers on the importance of anger. In her essay, “The Uses of Anger,” which you will get to read in her book Sister Outsider, she wrote, “every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”
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To encounter these words is to be changed by them. We have been changed by them. And we hope that women’s anger, put to use within progressive coalitions in which fury is expressed and treated as instructive, will in turn have the power to change the world.
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In this period, as we reckon with the rise of hard right authoritarian regimes around the world, many determined to roll back human rights—the very freedoms generations of angry women before us worked to win—today’s women are again being called to embrace our rage–its force, its potential, its messy complications. The fight against global patriarchy is far from over. Violence abounds but so does the possibility of building a new world from the wreckage of the old one.”
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✊🏾📝✊🏼 You can read the rest of their letter here: tiny.cc/OSSLetter