CLAIMING AN IDENTITY THEY TAUGHT ME TO DESPISE

Before HOME GIRLS

CLAIMING AN IDENTITY THEY TAUGHT ME TO DESPISE

By Michelle Cliff

(1980)

Inscribed first edition of this poetic prose collection by the postcolonial queer Jamaican-American writer — warmly presented to trailblazing Black feminist Barbara Smith, who would soon anthologize Cliff in the landmark HOME GIRLS Black feminist anthology of 1983.

Very good.

Price: $200.00

CLAIMING AN IDENTITY THEY TAUGHT ME TO DESPISE

Barbara Smith's life and career as a Black lesbian feminist activist has had an immense impact upon multiple fields. She was the author, co-author, or editor of many of the founding documents of Black feminism, from the epochal 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement (a work credited with largely establishing the intersectional theory Davis applies here); to TOWARD A BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM (1977), "the earliest theoretical statement on black feminist criticism" (McDowell); to HOME GIRLS: A BLACK FEMINIST ANTHOLOGY (1983), issued by her Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press (co-founded with Beverly Smith, Cherríe Moraga, and Audre Lorde). Smith's papers were recently placed at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute; the Schlesinger not acquiring duplicate titles, this book directly comes from Smith's remaining library. This book was published by the lesbian collective-run Persephone Press, which would publish THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK the next year, a title later republished by Kitchen Table.

The Object

Watertown, Massachusetts: Persephone Press, (1980). 8.5'' x 5.5''. Original white typographic wrappers. 64, [2] pages. From the library of Barbara Smith, inscribed to her by Cliff on first leaf: "For Barbara / in sisterhood & / with love, / Michelle." Some soil and toning to wrappers.

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