Rooted in the ways Black women understand their lives, this collection archives practices of healing, mothering, and advocacy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recognizing that Black women have been living in pandemics as far back as colonialism and enslavement, this volume acknowledges that records of the past—from the 1918 flu pandemic to the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic—often erase the existence and experiences of Black women as a whole. Writing against this archival erasure, this collection consciously recenters the real-time experiences and perspectives of care, policy concerns, grief, and joy of Black women throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nineteen contributors from interdisciplinary fields and diverse backgrounds explore Black feminine community, consciousness, ethics of care, spirituality, and social critique. They situate Black women’s multidimensional experiences with COVID-19 and other violences that affect their lives. The stories they tell are connected and interwoven, bound together by anti-Black gendered COVID necropolitics and commitments to creating new spaces for breathing, healing, and wellness.

Ultimately, this time-warping analysis shows how Black women imagine a more just society, rapidly adapt to changing experiences, and innovate ethics of care even in the midst of physical distancing, which can be instructive for thinking of new ways of living both during and beyond the era of COVID-19.

Contributors
Shamara Wyllie Alhassan
Sharnnia Artis
Keisha L. Bentley-Edwards
Candace S. Brown
Jenny Douglas
Kaja Dunn
Onisha Etkins
Rhonda M. Gonzales
Endia Hayes
Ashley E. Hollingshead
Kendra Jason
Julia S. Jordan-Zachery
Stacie LeSure
Janaka B. Lewis
Michelle Meggs
Nitya Mehrotra
Sherine Andreine Powerful
Marjorie Shavers
Breauna Marie Spencer
Tehia Starker Glass
Amber Walker

For too long feminism has been co-opted by the forces they seek to dismantle. In this powerful manifesto, Francoise Verges argues that feminists should no longer be accomplices of capitalism, racism, colonialism and imperialism: it is time to fight the system that created the boss, built the prisons and polices women’s bodies. A Decolonial Feminism grapples with the central issues in feminist debates today: from Eurocentrism and whiteness, to power, inclusion and exclusion. Delving into feminist and anti-racist histories, Verges also assesses contemporary activism, movements and struggles, including #MeToo and the Women's Strike. Centring anticolonialism and anti-racism within an intersectional Marxist feminism, the book puts forward an urgent demand to free ourselves from the capitalist, imperialist forces that oppress us.

This book brings together activists, artists, and scholars of color to show how Black feminism and Afrofeminism are being practiced in Europe today, exploring their differing social positions in various countries, and exploring the ways in which they organize and mobilize to imagine a Black feminist Europe.
                                              Deeply aware that they are constructed as “others” living in a racialized and hierarchical continent, the contributors explore gender, class, sexuality, and legal status to show that they are both invisible—presumed to be absent from and irrelevant to European societies—and hyper-visible, assumed to be passive and sexualized, angry and irrational.
                                              In imagining a future outside the neocolonial frames and practices of contemporary Europe, this book explores a variety of critical spaces including motherhood and the home, friendships and intimate relationships, activism and community, and literature, dance, and film.