Description
Book SynopsisHow activists in Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil provide inspiration and strategies for combating the gender violence epidemic in the United States
How can the U.S. learn from the perspectives of anti-gender violence activists in South America and Africa as we seek to end intimate violence in this country? The U.S. has consistently positioned itself as a moral exemplar, seeking to export its philosophy and values to other societies. Yet in this book, Traci C. West argues that the U.S. has much to learn from other countries when it comes to addressing gender-based violence.
West traveled to Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil to interview activists involved in the struggle against gender violence. In each of these places, as in the United States, Christianity and anti-black racism have been implicated in violence against women. In Ghana and Brazil, in particular, their Christian colonial and trans-Atlantic slave trade histories directly connect with the socioeconomic d
Trade Review
This book is a gift. Traci C. West synthesizes scholarship, spirituality and searing analyses to challenge the ways we perceive, practice, and oppose violence. West built an international platform between book covers to transform religious, social, and political-economic institutions that structure predatory power. This book helps us to clean old wounds as it offers healing through strategic perspectives to diminish and eradicate gender violence. -- Joy James,author of Seeking the Beloved Community, and editor of The New Abolitionists
Traci West's text is radically innovative, critically startling, and defiantly embodied. Her transnational approach to gender violence takes seriously the role of religion, spirituality, culture, and the wisdom of African women leaders. It utilizes courage, wit, and vast research findings extracted from many parts of the world. -- Fulata Lusungu Moyo,Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians
Africana women fight for their agency. Traci West acts as a griot for this Africana revolutionary becoming, documenting their journeys to freedom. She carefully recovers women’s voices lost to or drowned out by racist and sexist structures and creates a platform on and through which they can tell themselves. In ensuring their visibility Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality makes room for Africana women’s possibility and power. * The Marginalia Review of Books *
Can assist faith-based anti-violence and anti-racist activists in acknowledging religion’s collusion in the social structures that perpetuate sexual & gender based violence... This is a dense book that brings together transnational feminist theological, gender studies, sociological, and activist knowledge and experiences concerning SGBV. It is daring, creative work and an engrossing read for scholars familiar with these fields. * Sociology of Religion *
