A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland

Author(s):
DaMaris B. Hill
Book summary:

A Publishers Weekly Top 10 History Title

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 era's 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.

Publication year:
2019
Publisher:
Bloomsbury USA and Bloomsbury Academic
Award(s):
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 History Title
Praise:
Quote:
"A memorable book that is neither easy to classify nor dismiss."
Credit:
Kirkus Review
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
DaMaris B. Hill is the author of The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland, \ Vi-zə-bəl \ \ Teks-chərs \(Visible Textures), and A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing (Bloomsbury, Jan 2019). She has a keen interest in the work of Toni Morrison and theories regarding ‘rememory’ as a philosophy and aesthetic practice. Hill has studied with writers such as Lucille Clifton, Monifa Love-Asante, Natasha Trethewey, Nikky Finney, Marita Golden, Deborah Willis and others. Her development as a writer has also been enhanced by the institutional support of the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Key West Literary Seminar/Writers Workshops, Callaloo Literary Writers Workshop, The Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, The Project on the History of Black Writing, The Watering Hole Poetry, The Furious Flower Poetry Center and others. Similar to her creative process, Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary. Hill is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.
Book URL:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/a-bound-woman-is-a-dangerous-thing-9781635572629/