Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader

SUNY Series: Philosophy and Race

by Joy James, Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Foreword)

Selected essays on radical social change.

Written over the course of twenty years, the essays brought together here highlight and analyze tensions confronted by writers, scholars, activists, politicians, and political prisoners fighting racism and sexism. Focusing on the experiences of black women calling attention to and resisting social injustice, the astonishing scale of mass and politically driven imprisonment in the United States, and issues relating to government and civic powers in American democracy, Joy James gives voice to people and ideas persistently left outside mainstream progressive discourse—those advocating for the radical steps necessary to acknowledge and remedy structural injustice and violence, rather than merely reforming those existing structures.

“…this Joy James reader is at its core a portrait of ‘the making of a dissident voice’ … What we most desperately need in a world that fears and silences opposition—or worse—are revolutionaries who speak truth to power and beckon us to stand with them in solidarity. A luta continua. The struggle continues.” — from the Foreword by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

“These broad-ranging essays circle around the topic of building community under siege. Communities can be ‘thorny ties,’ as Joy James notes, yet are vital for developing a critical consciousness on one’s society. James also provides an astute analysis of the antirevolutionary trends in social theory today. Herein one will find the voice of a dissident humanist in full flower.” — Linda Martín Alcoff, coeditor of Constructing the A Race and Nationalism Reader

Genres: Feminism, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Race, Theory

352 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2013

About the author

Joy James is the John B. and John T. McCoy Presidential Professor of Humanities and College Professor in Political Science at Williams College. She is the author of Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture, and her edited works on incarceration and human rights include States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons and Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion.

Reviews

[Zach Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Dr. Joy James at her best. I became familiar with her work through the podcasts she did with Millennials are Killing Capitalism and Groundings, and was instantly captivated. Seeking the Beloved Community is a feminist race reader in which she brilliantly weaves together issues of capitalism, racial genocide, heterosexism, liberalism/radicalism/revolution, and violence, and does it in a way that offers critique, vision, and self-reflection. In the Feminist Race Theory section, her analysis of Angela Davis and Assata Shakur was really clarifying. Another of my favorite sections was on Obama and the 2008 election, where she looks at race and gender through the imperial and colonial lens. Overall this was a tremendously insightful book that I know I will go back to.

[rayon · Rating 5 out of 5]

icl i ate this up. i know she's been accused of harm but until we can find a clearer articulation of breakdown of the liberal influences of radicalism and drifts towards conservatism within political positionalities we're going to have to credit her analysis bc it's the clearest I've ever read. neoradicalism gave me a whole new framework to articulate what i continue to witness around me in terms of cultural organisations performing revolution for apolitical consumption in the name of culture while not pushing the masses towards any liberational politics acts for actual freedom. the succinct breakdown of the use of symbology was so pertinent and assistive to me in my arena. much more to say but i can't take away from the sheer vastness of this work. will be studying for a long time to come

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not the same after reading this book. Joy James makes the reader look deeply at their political positions and question rather they have true radical positions. Ms. James points out how one can be a liberator but accept capitalism, state violence and institutions. She made realize how much I needed to read and study the works of political prisoners.