Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray!: Feminist Visions for a Just World, and: This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (review)

These two volumes contain a rich collection of essays, poems, and images that follow the tradition of the groundbreaking publication This Bridge Called My Back some twenty years ago. The editors promise new visions for the future of feminism, a future that is presented as inclusive of the many different voices of women—always present but not acknowledged. Certainly, the pioneering publication of This Bridge Called My Back opened our senses to the many women's languages, voices of oppression, and discrimination. But This Bridge Called My Back was also about acknowledging agency, resistance, and empowerment. As Gloria Anzaldúa points out in this earlier volume, "even though we go hungry we are not impoverished of experiences" (22), and food for thought these voluminous anthologies are, indeed.

Accomplished scholars, writers, and artists like Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Angela Davis, Janice Gould, Joy Harjo, and AnaLouise Keating unite their voices to those of anonymous women to build a new extended bridge twenty years later. The symbolic meaning of the bridge is very valuable in the wake of September 11. A bridge helps us, now shaken by uncertainty, in crossing to an unknown terrain yet keeps us connected with the past. In the words of Anzaldúa, "Bridges are primal symbols of shifting consciousness. They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transforming, crossing borders, and changing perspectives. Transformations occur in this in-between space. Nepantla es tierra desconocida. Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it has become a sort of home" (Anzaldúa and Keating 1).

This Bridge We Call Home is successful in its attempt to further the dialogue triggered two decades ago by This Bridge Called My Back. The challenge now is globalization, reaching out to those others across the world. The new volume edited by Anzaldúa and Keating takes the discussion of race, class, and genders a step further to pose questions such as "what are we doing to each other, to those in distant countries and to the environment?" (2).

This Bridge We Call Home is much more than an anthology on feminism and its colors. In this volume the categories "white" and "women of color" are further problematized. We are enlightened into considering whiteness as a consciousness that may not be applied to all whites as much as color consciousness can be applied to women of color. Certainly, class difference is key in this equation as much as religion and sexual orientation. Far from perpetuating a dyadic analysis, the 87 voices in this volume lead us down a path in which identity is a fluid concept that knows no easy categorizations. Following the star of This Bridge Called My Back, the new anthology includes underrepresented voices of transgendered, Arab, and South Asian/Indian Americans; 87 voices in total transmit knowledge and wisdom in this text.

Tatiana de la Tierra's statement in This Bridge We Call Home, "I am and always have been, Other" (358), is a reminder of our inner otherness, and in the aftermath of September 11, we need more than ever to humanize others. "Bridging is the work of opening the gate to a stranger, within and without" (3), states Gloria Anzaldúa. "I am another yourself," with eloquent simplicity says Chela Sandoval (26), a radical feminist woman of color, a woman of words, born, she reminds us, out of the 1970s' U.S. third-world feminist social movement.

And Becky Thompson in Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray! convincingly disputes the common notion "that feminism among women of color emerged in reaction to (and therefore later than) white feminism" (398). Reading these two volumes we realize how the experiences and contributions of women of color, lesbians, working...