Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets

A treatise of Black women’s transformative influence in media, entertainment, and politics, and why this intersectional movement building, especially on Twitter, is essential to the resistance

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. 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. These online platforms have given those outside the traditional university setting an opportunity to engage with and advance these conversations--and in doing so have created new energy for intersectional movements around the world. It has been a seismic shift, and as Jones argues, no one has had more to do with this renaissance of community building than Black women.

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. 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 places Black women front and center in a new chapter of resistance and political engagement.