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    In Praise of Black Women is a magnificent tribute to women in Africa and the African diaspora from the ancient past to the present. Lavishly illustrated, with text written and selected by the celebrated Guadeloupian novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, this four-volume series celebrates remarkable women who distinguished themselves in their time and shaped the course of culture and history.
    Volume 1: Ancient African Queens weaves together oral tradition, folk legends and stories, songs and poems, historical accounts, and travelers’ tales from Egypt to southern Africa, from prehistory to the nineteenth century. These women rulers, warriors, and heroines include Amanirenas, the queen of Kush who battled Roman armies and defeated them at Aswan; Daurama, mother of the seven Hausa kingdoms; Amina Kulibali, founder of the Gabu dynasty in Senegal; Ana de Sousa Nzinga, who resisted the Portuguese conquest of Angola; Beatrice Kimpa Vita, a Kongo prophet burned at the stake by Christian missionaries; Nanda, mother of the famous warrior-king Shaka Zulu; and many others.
    These extraordinary women's stories, narrated in the style of African oral tradition, are absorbing, informative, and accessible. The abundant illustrations, many of them rare archival images, depict the diversity among Black women and make this volume a unique treasure for every art lover, every school, and every family.

The countless retellings and reimaginings of the private and public lives of Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, Mary Seacole, and Sarah Forbes Bonetta have transformed them into difficult cultural and black feminist icons. In Infamous Bodies, Samantha Pinto explores how histories of these black women and their ongoing fame generate new ways of imagining black feminist futures. Drawing on a variety of media, cultural, legal, and critical sources, Pinto shows how the narratives surrounding these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century celebrities shape key political concepts such as freedom, consent, contract, citizenship, and sovereignty. Whether analyzing Wheatley's fame in relation to conceptions of race and freedom, notions of consent in Hemings's relationship with Thomas Jefferson, or Baartman's ability to enter into legal contracts, Pinto reveals the centrality of race, gender, and sexuality in the formation of political rights. In so doing, she contends that feminist theories of black women's vulnerable embodiment can be the starting point for future progressive political projects.

Inside the Body of Black Feminism connects historical studies of medical racism with Black feminist theories of the body to reimagine the material and metaphoric possibilities for political subjectivity across race, gender, and culture.

Inside the Body of Black Feminism charts a cultural genealogy of antiracist and feminist engagement with some of the most objectified internal “parts” of racist medical and scientific inquiry: bones and blood, brains and hearts, guts and wombs. In a move counterintuitive to Black feminism’s emphasis on externalized representations of the body, Samantha Pinto reinterprets the relationship between embodiment, health, and race through cultural archives that reimagine the inside of the Black body. Working through materials such as medical textbooks, memoirs, data visualizations, museum displays, speculative fiction, and horror films, Pinto explores how a visually inaccessible corporeal interior becomes discernible and racialized in the public sphere. Inside the Body of Black Feminism engages expressive cultural work to ask how we might know the inside of the Black body differently through Black feminist theory and how scientific and medical inquiry might enable us to understand political subjectivity anew.