“Smart, savvy, and unapologetically fierce.” – Kirkus Reviews
“Part memoir, part tactical guide to internet activism, Jones’s entertaining book advises black women on how to make their voices heard and everyone else on best practices for being an ally.” – Publishers Weekly
“A complex exploration of the intersections of class, race, gender, orientation, access, and media” – AfroPunk
“If you want to understand the rising preeminence of black women in our modern day sociopolitical landscape, you would be smart to start with Feminista Jones, a black woman writing and working at the forefront of our movements.” — Ijeoma Oluo, author of the New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race
“Reclaiming Our Space is an invaluable contribution to long-overdue conversations about race, gender, and intersectionality in America. Feminista Jones combines empathy and wisdom with intellectual rigor and historical analysis to explain clearly and compellingly the central role that Black feminists play in the fight for democracy and social justice.” —Soraya Chemaly, director of the Women’s Media Center SpeechProject and author of Rage Becomes Her
It’s Our Time
A treatise of Black women’s transformative influence in media and society, placing them front and center in a new chapter of mainstream resistance and political engagement
In Reclaiming Our Space, social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black women’s innovations, from well-known movement-building hashtags (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic) to the now ubiquitous use of threaded tweets as a marketing and storytelling tool. For some, these online dialogues provide an introduction to the work of Black feminist icons like Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, and the women of the Combahee River Collective. For others, this discourse provides a platform for continuing their feminist activism and scholarship in a new, interactive way.
Complex conversations around race, class, and gender that have been happening behind the closed doors of academia for decades are now becoming part of the wider cultural vernacular–one pithy tweet at a time. With these important online conversations, not only are Black women influencing popular culture and creating sociopolitical movements; they are also galvanizing a new generation to learn and engage in Black feminist thought and theory, and inspiring change in communities around them.
Hard-hitting, intelligent, incisive, yet bursting with humor and pop-culture savvy, Reclaiming Our Space is a survey of Black feminism’s past, present, and future, and it explains why intersectional movement building will save us all.