Sistuhs in the Struggle
Official Interview with Author
Conducted by Kids ABC News (i.e., her children)
Review
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“In transcribed conversations with African American women from the realm of Black Arts Movement theatre and performance—Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Judy Juanita, and others—La Donna L. Forsgren shares their personal insights into the connection between the arts and the social activism of black power. Sistuhs in the Struggle is a valuable resource for amplifying women’s participation in the Black Arts Movement, while also fleshing out the complexity of the struggle.
—Jo-Ann Morgan,
author of The Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party in American Visual Culture
Review
“Sistuhs in the Struggle’s interviews capture the aesthetic and geographical variety of better-known and less-heralded women working in Black Arts theater. It is an invaluable resource for understanding how gender inflected the day-to-day work in Black Arts performance, shaping its development and legacies.”
—James Smethurst,
author of The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s
Review
"In Search of Our Warrior Mothers is a vital addition to the field of American theatre history. The loss of Ntozake Shange last year reminds us that the toll of life for our warrior mothers is taxing and that we must honor their legacies by gleaning their indispensable knowledge while we can. With that in mind, Forsgren’s methodological commitment to oral history and archival accountability feels bigger than a historiographical impulse; it feels like a war cry."
--Gabrielle Randle,
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Review
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“This is a well-written and highly original study. There currently isn’t another book that covers in such detail the work of these playwrights, and it should therefore make a major contribution to the field of African American theater history.”
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--Sandra Adell,
author of Double-Consciousness/Double Bind:
Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature
Review
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“Anyone interested in the sexual, racial, and aesthetic politics of the Black Arts Movement needs to read
La Donna Forsgren’s In Search of Our Warrior’s Mothers. Combining meticulous textual analysis, archival research, original interviews, and incisive critical sensibility, Forsgren tells a story long overdue. And she tells it brilliantly, disrupting our assumptions about the Black Arts Movement and the woman-centered drama that emerged from it. I closed this book with renewed appreciation of both the plays and the women who wrote them.”
--Mike Sell,
author of The Avant-Garde: Race Religion War
Review
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"This book is necessary for any theatre library and should be required presence on the shelves of all libraries devoted to the feminist cause."
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--Detra Payne,
Studies in Theatre and Performance