This Bridge: The BlackFeministCompositionist's Guide to the Colonial and Imperial Violence of Schooling Today

Abstract

© 2018 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois In March 2015, the State University of New York Press published the fourth edition of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, one of the most cited books in feminist theorizing that arguably turned the tide into what we today call intersectional feminism. This Bridge is an anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa first published in 1981 by Persephone Press and then published again in 1983 by Kitchen Table (Women of Color Press). The third edition, published by Third Woman Press, was in print until 2008. For seven years, new reprints were virtually unavailable. Reissued nearly thirty-five years after its birth, the current fourth edition contains an extensive new introduction by poet/ playwright/cultural activist Cherríe Moraga, along with a previously unpublished statement by Gloria Anzaldúa. Hailed as a crucial space for offering a serious and collectively articulated challenge to white feminists by women of color and to the very notion that “woman” could ever be a stable, monolithic category outside of specific constructions of race, sexuality, culture, and history, This Bridge fundamentally reconceptualized what we do in women’s and gender studies (Alarcon; Sandoval; Barbara Smith; Anzaldúa and Keating). Fall 2015 was the first school semester where the book was back in press again, and so it took a prominent, foundational role in my courses for both content and philosophical disposition. In those classes where I actually assigned the text, I was curious to see how students would respond to this canonical book that had never been assigned in my own college coursework, though a large part of that work centered on WGS. The conceptual frameworks of even the WGS courses that mark my own education have seldom included black bodies, notwithstanding the obligatory curricular add-ons where theory and critical discourse often seemed to disappear since neither the syllabus, classroom of students, or professors’ backgrounds offered any deep engagement with or rigorous knowledge of the materials. In fact, I have never had sustained or critical discussions in any of my college courses—from undergraduate to PhD—about contributors to This Bridge like Cherríe Moraga, Nellie Wong, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Cheryl This Bridge: The BlackFeministCompositionist’s Guide to the Colonial and Imperial Violence of Schooling Today