Everything’s Connected

In this interview, the writer, activist, and well-known woman of color feminist and participant in grassroots left movements Aurora Levins Morales explores the action and language of participatory social change, considered through the lens of her social location and experience. With a focus on intergenerational communication among feminist and Left movement participants, Brooke Lober asks Levins Morales to share her method of writing and activism, based in histories of family and place; to comment on the term and practice of “identity politics”; to assess the current upsurge of feminist movements; and to revisit her historical and contemporary contributions to internationalism, women of color feminism, and Jewish organizing in the Palestine solidarity movement. Levins Morales offers insightful reconsideration of her life, work, and philosophy, with descriptions of the context and motivation of her published writing.

Coming into Being

In this chapter, the author bears witness to the life-changing effects of the self-liberating theory and practice of women of color feminism. By way of Alice Walker, she honors and describes the pedagogical approaches, as well as the spirituality, of four professors whose womanist attitudes—which were implied through their required reading assignments and classroom discussions—informed and liberated her personhood. Written in an epistolary style, her essay is a narration of her experiences in each of her professors’ graduate studies classrooms. She also includes original poems inspired by both classroom readings and her professors’ humanity in order to illustrate her transformation. Clearly, as she writes from a deeply heartfelt location, her “professors” of womanism made a life-changing impression on her.