num_pages: 192
description: A revelatory work in the tradition of Claudia Rankine's Citizen DaMaris Hill's searing and powerful narrative-in-verse bears witness to American women of color burdened by incarceration.It is costly to stay free and appear / sane.From Harriet Tubman to Assata Shakur Ida B. Wells to Sandra Bland and Black Lives Matter black women freedom fighters have braved violence scorn despair and isolation in order to lodge their protests. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing DaMaris Hill honors their experiences with at times harrowing at times hopeful responses to her heroes illustrated with black-and-white photographs throughout.For black American women the experience of being bound has taken many forms: from the bondage of slavery to the Reconstruction-era criminalization of women; from the brutal constraints of Jim Crow to our own eras prison industrial complex where between 1980 and 2014 the number of incarcerated women increased by 700%.* For those women who lived and died resisting the dehumanization of confinement--physical social intellectual--the threat of being bound was real constant and lethal.In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing Hill presents bitter unflinching history that artfully captures the personas of these captivating bound yet unbridled African-American women. Hill's passionate odes to Zora Neale Hurston Lucille Clifton Fannie Lou Hamer Grace Jones Eartha Kitt and others also celebrate the modern-day inheritors of their load and light binding history author and reader in an essential legacy of struggle.*(The Sentencing Project)
language: English
title: A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland
publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing