Feminism
Jacobs's account of her life as a slave and her escape, focusing on sexual exploitation of enslaved women.
Set in the Karoo region of South Africa, this novel explores feminist themes, religious questioning, and the harsh realities of colonial farm life.
Essays, sketches, and poems on race, gender, and labor including famous 'The Souls of White Folk'.
Two light-skinned Black women reunite, one passing as white, exploring race, identity, and desire.
Story of John Pearson, a Baptist preacher whose gifts are undermined by his weakness for women, inspired by Hurston's father.
Poetry sequence following Annie Allen from childhood to womanhood in Chicago.
Novel-in-vignettes following a Black woman's ordinary life in Chicago, examining colorism and dignity.
Driss Ferdi rebels against his overbearing father — who represents traditional Moroccan patriarchy — while navigating the world of the French colonial system. Morocco's first significant novel of psychological revolt.
Analysis of Algerian revolution's social transformations including role of women and radio.
Ghana's first published play by an African woman. An African American woman marries a Ghanaian and returns with him to Africa, where she is caught between two worlds, belonging fully to neither.
A Luo family migrates from Kenya to Tanzania in search of a better life, but the husband's obsession with wealth leads into a terrifying encounter with a supernatural curse, a collision of ambition, tradition, and the unknown.
The story of Ebla, a young Somali woman who flees an arranged marriage, exploring women's rights and traditional practices in Somali society.
First major anthology of Black women's writing including Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker.
A story of profound conjugal love in an Igbo community. Idu loves her husband Adiewere so completely that when he dies she chooses death rather than life without him.
Four generations of women in Guadeloupe, from slavery to the mid-20th century, told through the voice of Télumée. A lyrical, feminist celebration of Black women's resilience rooted in Creole culture.
The story of two Black women friends in Ohio whose lives take vastly different paths, exploring good and evil, community, and independence.
Poetry for young readers including the iconic 'Ego Tripping' celebrating Black women's power.
In an Egyptian village ruled by a corrupt mayor and pious hypocrisy, a peasant family's daughters are exploited and destroyed. El Saadawi's scathing indictment of patriarchy, class, and religious complicity.
Adah follows her husband to London only to find exploitation, racism, and domestic abuse. She writes a novel; he burns it. A fierce, semi-autobiographical account of immigrant life, motherhood, and the will to survive.
Semi-autobiographical novel following Elizabeth, a South African exile in Botswana, through a descent into psychosis. Head navigates racism, exile, gender, and spiritual suffering with extraordinary intensity.
Based on Saadawi's meeting with a female prisoner, the novel tells the story of Firdaus, an Egyptian woman condemned to death for killing a pimp, exploring themes of patriarchy and female oppression.
Novel following a civil rights worker's spiritual journey and political awakening in the 1960s South.
Choreopoem of 20 poems performed by seven women exploring Black women's experiences with love, abandonment, and empowerment.
A groundbreaking feminist analysis of women's oppression in Arab society, combining personal memoir with medical observations and political critique. Addresses female genital mutilation, virginity codes, prostitution, and the politics of religious law.
Thirteen short stories drawing on Botswana village life, women who endure violence, men who abdicate, and communities that hold together through traditional values and collective memory, illuminating ordinary lives with extraordinary dignity.
El Saadawi's landmark feminist work examining female genital mutilation, sexuality, prostitution, and the oppression of Arab women through history, psychology, and personal testimony.
Ojebeta is sold into domestic slavery by her brother in colonial Nigeria. The novel traces her servitude and eventual 'freedom' — only to be bound again by marriage. A damning portrait of women's double enslavement.
Poetry collection drawing on African mythology and goddess traditions to explore Black womanhood.
Poem celebrating Black womanhood and female confidence, rejecting conventional beauty standards.
The story of Nnu Ego, an Igbo woman struggling with motherhood and marriage in Lagos during the 1930s-1950s, critiquing traditional expectations of women.
An epistolary novel written as a letter from Ramatoulaye to her friend Aissatou, exploring themes of polygamy, women's rights, and Islamic traditions in Senegal.
When a government official drives beggars from the city streets for an international summit, they go on strike — and the city's devout Muslims can no longer fulfill their religious obligation to give alms. A sharp satire.
Nine stories and an essay about Algerian women before and after independence, exploring how women were promised liberation by the revolution and then confined again. Named for Delacroix's famous painting.
Examination of sexism's impact on Black women during slavery through modern feminism's failures.
Historical analysis of racism and sexism in America from slavery through women's suffrage movement.
Mireille, a French woman, marries the Senegalese Ousmane despite opposition from both families. When Ousmane takes an African second wife, Mireille's world collapses. A tragedy about cultural collision and betrayal.
Epistolary novel following Celie, a Black woman in rural Georgia, who finds her voice through relationships with other women.
Lorde's 'biomythography' of growing up Black, female, and queer in 1950s New York, through her relationships with women, her political awakening, and the Caribbean inheritance of her mother.
Collection of essays introducing the term 'womanist' and exploring Black women's creativity and spirituality.
Collection of essays and speeches on racism, sexism, homophobia, and difference, including 'The Master's Tools.'
Critique of mainstream feminism's exclusion of women of color and working-class women.
Li and Faku, two village girls, dream of escaping their rural lives in northern Nigeria. Li marries a man who goes to the city and is transformed by it. A quiet tragedy of aspiration and its costs.
Autobiographical novel weaving together the author's childhood memories with the history of French colonization of Algeria, exploring women's voices silenced by history.
A Moroccan merchant registers his eighth daughter as a son. Narrated in a Marrakech storytelling circle, the novel follows Ahmed/Zahra's journey through a life lived between genders, questioning identity, faith, and desire.
Novel giving voice to Tituba, the enslaved woman accused of witchcraft in Salem, exploring slavery and Black womanhood.
Poetry collection that earned Goodison the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Grounded in Caribbean landscape, female experience, and Jamaican vernacular, these poems celebrate womanhood across generations.
A multigenerational story of three Grenadian women spanning the colonial era, independence, and the 1979 Grenadian Revolution. Collins, who participated in the revolution herself, writes with insider political passion and communal voice.
The coming-of-age story of Tambu, a young Shona girl in 1960s-70s Rhodesia, exploring themes of colonialism, gender, and education.
Collection of Sankara's revolutionary speeches on anti-imperialism, women's liberation, and African unity.
Two women share a prison cell in Cameroon — Tanga, a teenage prostitute dying of AIDS, and Anna-Claude, a French woman of Algerian origin. As Tanga tells her story, Anna-Claude assumes her identity.
Collected speeches of Thomas Sankara, who renamed Upper Volta as Burkina Faso and led an extraordinary revolutionary government from 1983-1987. On women's liberation, imperialism, debt, and African dignity.
Essays on coming to voice as Black feminist intellectual, challenging white supremacy and patriarchy.
Landmark essay coining 'intersectionality' to describe how Black women face compounded discrimination.
A comprehensive collection of Palestinian Arab oral folk tales, collected from women storytellers across Palestine, preserving a tradition under threat of erasure.
Systematic analysis of Black feminist thought and the 'matrix of domination'.
Sankara's speeches on women's emancipation as essential to revolutionary transformation.
Esi, a successful Ghanaian professional, leaves her first husband after he rapes her and enters a polygamous marriage believing it will grant more freedom, Aidoo's unsentimental exploration of love, work, and feminist possibility in contemporary Accra.
A multigenerational saga following four generations of a Luo family from pre-colonial Kenya through colonialism and independence to the AIDS crisis. Traces African women's strength across a century of change.
Set during Zimbabwe's liberation war, following Mazvita who flees her burned village to the city, is raped, and makes a terrible choice about the child she carries. A spare, devastating novel about war's violence against women.
Third volume of the Algerian Quartet, weaving together the story of a filmmaker's love affair and the 146 BCE destruction of Carthage, exploring how women's voices are lost to history and recovered.
Story of an all-Black town in Oklahoma and the convent of women nearby that the town's men attack, exploring purity and exclusion.
A Ugandan family is torn apart by political violence, forced displacement, and the AIDS crisis. One of the earliest Ugandan novels by a woman to address the intersection of war and women's bodies.
Sammar, a Sudanese woman working as a translator in Aberdeen after the death of her husband, falls in love with a Scottish academic studying Islamic politics. A quiet, luminous novel about faith and belonging.
Ali and Kauna are neighbors in the Namibian village of Oshaantu. When Kauna's abusive husband dies, the village is divided. A quiet, powerful examination of gender, culture, and community.
Rami discovers her husband has four other wives and brings them all together, forging an unexpected sisterhood. A comic, sensual, and deeply political novel about marriage, female solidarity, and what women owe themselves.
Enitan and her neighbor Sheri grow up in Lagos through the 1970s-90s, their friendship shaped by Nigeria's political upheavals, military rule, and the private violences of gender, a deeply feminist coming-of-age epic.
Linked stories following three sisters in Uganda — their adolescence, their encounters with HIV/AIDS, their searches for love and meaning. One of the finest debuts in East African fiction.
Set before, during, and after the Biafran War, the novel follows several characters whose lives are impacted by the Nigerian Civil War of the 1960s.
Maathai's memoir of founding the Green Belt Movement — which planted over 50 million trees across Africa — her years of persecution under Moi, imprisonment, and the Nobel Peace Prize she received in 2004.
When Baba Segi takes a fourth wife, an educated woman who upsets the household's balance, the secrets of all the wives are put at risk. A sharp, funny, feminist novel about polygamy in contemporary Nigeria.
A lioness is killing women in a remote village. An outsider hunter and the village headman's daughter try to understand the attacks in this haunting exploration of colonial wounds and gendered violence.
Adapted from Adichie's 2012 TEDx talk, this essay defines feminism for the 21st century from an African woman's perspective — personal, specific, and unapologetic.
Twelve short stories blending the fantastical and the real, spanning Nigeria, diaspora, and invented futures — women who knit grief out of the bereaved, scientists who calculate human emotion, mothers and daughters across generations.
Roy is wrongfully imprisoned shortly after his marriage to Celestial. The years of separation change both of them. A love story about mass incarceration, Black ambition, and what prison does to a people.
Korede is always cleaning up after her beautiful sister Ayoola, who keeps killing her boyfriends. A darkly comic thriller about sisterhood, beauty, and complicity set in contemporary Lagos.
Historical novel about Ethiopian women who fought against Mussolini's 1935 invasion, following Hirut who rises from servant to soldier.
Intimate histories of Black women in early 20th century Philadelphia and New York, using 'critical fabulation'.
Novella about underwater people descended from pregnant African women thrown from slave ships.
Twelve characters — mostly Black British women — whose lives intersect in modern Britain. Evaristo's formally inventive prose-poetry creates a chorus of voices spanning generations and social classes.
A debut poetry collection by a Ghanaian-American poet exploring inherited trauma, Blackness in America, and the body as site of racial and gendered violence.
A novel about a Ugandan woman who builds a community center as a center of resistance and solidarity, connecting generations of women across Uganda's turbulent history.