A profound offering and call to action--collective stories,
testimonials, and incantations for renewing political and spiritual
liberation grounded in Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and Queer
and Trans healing justice lineages
“We
reclaim the power, resilience, and innovation of our ancestors
through this book. To embody their wisdom across centuries and
generations is to continue their legacy of liberation and healing.”
In
this anthology, Black Queer Feminist editors Cara Page and Erica
Woodland guide readers through the history, legacies, and liberatory
practices of healing justice--a political strategy of collective care
and safety that intervenes on generational trauma from systemic
violence and oppression. They call forth the ancestral medicines and
healing practices that have sustained communities who have survived
genocide and oppression, while radically imagining what comes next.
Anti-capitalist,
Black feminist, and abolitionist, Healing Justice Lineages is
a profound and urgent call to embrace community and survivor-led care
strategies as models that push beyond commodified self-care, the
policing of the medical industrial complex, and the surveillance of
the public health system. Centering disability, reproductive,
environmental, and transformative justice and harm reduction, this
collection elevates and archives an ongoing tradition of liberation
and survival--one that has been largely left out of our history
books, but continues to this day.
In
the first section, "Past: Reckoning with Roots and Lineage,"
Page and Woodland remember and reclaim generations-long healing
justice and community care work, asking critical questions like: How
did our ancestors transform trauma and violence in their liberation
work? What were our ancestors reckoning with--and what did they
imagine?
The
next sections, "Origins of Healing Justice" and "Alchemy:
Theory + Praxis," explore regional stories of healing justice in
response to the current political and cultural landscape. The last
section, "Political + Spiritual Imperatives for the Future,"
imagines a future rooted in lessons of the past; addresses the ways
healing justice is being co-opted and commodified; and uplifts
emergent work that's building infrastructure for care, safety,
healing, and political liberation.