Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South

by Laura McTighe, Women With A Vision

For 35 years, the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With A Vision (WWAV) has fought for the liberation of their communities through reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice, and sex workers' rights. In 2012, shortly after one of their biggest organizing victories, arsonists firebombed and destroyed their headquarters. Fire Dreams is an innovative collaboration between WWAV and Laura McTighe, who work in community to build a social movement ethnography of the organization’s post-arson rebirth. Rooting WWAV in the geography of the South and the living history of generations of Black feminist thinkers, McTighe and WWAV weave together stories from their founders’ pioneering work during the Black HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and their groundbreaking organizing to end criminalization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with other movements for liberation around the globe. Together, they refuse the logics of racial capitalism and share WWAV’s own world-building knowledges as well as their methods for living these Black feminist futures now. Fire Dreams is a vital toolkit for grassroots organizers, activist-scholars, and all those who dream to make the world otherwise.

352 pages, Hardcover

Published March 5, 2024

Reviews

[Aimee Thorne-Thomsen]

Just finished this book, and I'm in awe. Its this fascinating combination of academic rigor, oral history, and community organizing toolkit. I would recommend this to anyone who cares about Black women and girls, collective liberation, and community organizing. And if you have the chance to see Laura and Deon in-person at a local book tour stop, please do!

[Matea Polojac]

Favourite book I’ve read in my MA so far