Roundtable: Bridge Turns 40

Join Las Maestras Center, Bridge contributors, and virtual participants near and far for an evening of remembrance and celebration of the fifth and 40th Anniversary Edition of This Bridge Called My Back – Writings by Radical Women of Color. Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, “the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.”

This livestream event will revisit this seminal work and discuss the anniversary edition, which contains a new preface by Moraga reflecting on Bridge‘s “living legacy” and the broader community of women of color activists, writers, and artists whose enduring contributions resonate with its radical vision. Further features help set the volume’s historical context, including an extended introduction by Moraga from the 2015 edition, a statement written by Gloria Anzaldúa in 1983, and visual art produced during the same period by Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, Yolanda M. López, and others, curated by their contemporary, visual artist, Celia Herrera Rodríguez. Bridge continues to reflect an evolving definition of feminism, one that can effectively adapt to and help inform an understanding of the changing economic and social conditions of women of color in the United States and throughout the world.

Cherríe Moraga is a Professor in the Department of English at UC Santa Barbara and Co-Director of Las Maestras Center for Xicana[x] Indigenous Thought, Art & Social Practice.

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Sponsored by the SUNY Press, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Chicano Studies Institute, Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies, Multicultural Center, Department of English, Department of Feminist Studies, Hull Chair for Women and Social Justice, UCSB Graduate Division, and Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative