Our Library

 
 

Welcome to our Digital Library 📚

Take a look around, stay awhile, and enjoy time-traveling with us. 

Our assemblage of historical events+moments and inventions, traces the artistic and intellectual legacies of Black women artists, writers, and theorists from the 19th century to contemporary.

This visual and literary historical navigation is an extension of my Graduate Thesis work at NYU Gallatin as I was studying under the tutelage and advisory board of Dr. Deborah Willis, Dr. Sheril Antonio, and Professor Michael Dinwiddie. 

The library is on-going* curation and project. As we continue to learn and uncover our histories, we will continue to add and make revisions therefore this work is a living entity and is never final.

Our work as Lavandula artist-scholars is fluid and rooted in our deep curiosities for knowing more, deep + wide. 

The intersections of where and how our ancestors’ work relate to one another stands in the effervescent light of theory+practice, thus our work as artists and writers and scholars; in contrast to broader societal constructions of our histories, have always been whole and pioneering.

 

Black Feminist Theory

  • Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins

  • Words of Fire edited by Bevery Guy-Sheftall

  • In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker

  • The Black Woman: An Anthology by Toni Cade Bambara

  • Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center by bell hooks

  • Women Race & Class by Angela Davis

Black Queer & Lesbian Studies

  • Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, see "Uses of the Erotic"

  • Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology edited by E. Patrick Johnson, Mae G. Henderson

  • Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics by José Esteban Muñoz

  • Does Your Mama Know?: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories edited by Lisa C. Moore

  • Queer Times, Black Futures by Kara Keeling

  • Mouths of Rain edited by Briona Simone Jones

Film & Video

  • Black Women as Cultural Readers by Jacqueline Bobo

  • Reel to Real by bell hooks

  • Black Looks: Race and Representation by bell hooks

  • Toward a Black Feminist Criticism by Barbara Smith

  • The Witches Flight by Kara Keeling

 

Visual Art + Critcism

  • Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in The Early Nineteenth Century by Jasmine Nichole Cobb

  • Black Women Film & Video Artists (AFI Film Readers) edited by Jacqueline Bobo

  • Art on My Mind by bell hooks

  • Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance (Black Performance and Cultural Criticism) by Christina Baker

  • Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women's Film and Literature. Judylyn S. Ryan

  • Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture by Yvonne D. Sims

  • A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See by Tina Campt

  • Dark Designs & Visual Culture by Michele Wallace

Photography

  • Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present by Deborah Willis

  • The Black Female Body: A Photographic History by Deborah Willis

  • Viewfinders by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe

  • Listening to Images by Tina M. Campt

  • Image Matters, Tina M. Campt

Creative Writing

  • Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison

  • Black Women Writers edited by Mari Evans

  • Black Women Writers at Work by Claudia Tate

PDFs that can be accessed online now:

More Digital Black feminist databases & collections: