A celebration of the achievements of black women across the world. Richly illustrated with colour and b/w images, photographs and drawings, the author looks at the impact of women from Cleopatra and untold numbers of slave women to Rosa Parks and Halle Berry. Index, sources, maps, 255pp, USA. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY, 0792261658

Analysis of the roles played by women in seven revolutionary movements: Algeria, Kenya, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe and South Africa. How did these revolutionary movements define women s liberation? What is the linkage between feminist theories of liberation and national liberation? Did the national liberation movements betray women? And what has been the fate of the original commitments (and impulses) toward women s liberation and gender equality? Index, notes, bib, 296pp, USA. AFRICA WORLD PRESS.

Explorations of contemporary art have focused on issues of identity and race for some time. Few, however, have sought to investigate these themes by juxtaposing historical and contem-porary frameworks. Black Womanhood examines an especially charged icon - the black female body - and contemporary artists' interventions upon historical images of black women as exotic Others, erotic fantasies, and super-maternal Mammies. This book presents icons of the black female body as seen from three separate but intersecting perspectives: the traditional African, the colonial, and the contemporary global. The display and contemplation of such iconic images addresses complex and often competing forces of self-presentation and the representation of others.Peeling back layers of social, cultural, and political realities, Black Womanhood explores how historic icons inform contemporary artistic responses to the black female body through an examination of themes such as beauty, fertility and sexuality, maternity, and women's roles and power in society. More than 200 historical and contemporary images accompany written contributions by artists, curators and scholars. 374pp, USA. WASHINGTON U P (HOOD MUSEUM OF ART).

This is the first single-authored book to survey the role of gender in the 'new imperial history'. Through key topics and episodes across a broad range of British Empire history, Angela Woollacott examines how gender ideologies and practices affected both sexes and saturated imperial politics and culture. Essential reading for all students of world history, imperial history and gender relations. 176pp, UK. PALGRAVE.

The core of the dictionary is the formal entries on topics, individuals, organizations, events, and publications. Opens with an essay on African women's history, and includes a chronology of African women's history, a list of acronyms, and a country index to facilitate finding entries on particular topics. There is also an extensive bibliography organized first into historical periods and then into twenty topical categories, including art, education, health, human rights, literature, marriage, slavery, and urbanization. 448pp, USA. SCARECROW.

Lavishly illustrated in colour, this volume weaves together oral tradition, folk legends and stories, songs and poems, historical accounts, and personal writings from North and South America and the Caribbean from the 15th to the 19th Century. These women of the slavery era include Aqualtune, a princess from Congo enslaved in Brazil, who led an army of ten thousand warriors in the Battle of Mbwila; Anastasia, an African slave in Brazil, who today is considered the patron saint of Brazil's blacks; Solitude, a slave in the French West Indies, the leader of the survivors of La Goyave and legendary in Guadeloupe to this day; Phillis Wheatley, a slave in Boston, a child prodigy and brilliant woman whose poetry is among the finest of the early American era; Harriet Tubman, heroine of of the Underground Railroad, who helped hundreds of other slaves escape to freedom in the United States and Canada; Ellen Craft, a slave who successfully escaped to Philadelphia with her husband;

Sojourner Truth, famed orator on behalf of the rights of women and the abolition of slavery: and many others.

256 pp, USA, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS.

The third volume in the tribute to Black women across the world describes the lives of some of Africa's most important women, and the societies and environments with shaped them. The authors look at the lives of Madam 'Yoko, Yaa Asantewa, Zauditu, Alinsiitowe Diata N'Galifourou, Mariama Ba, Princess Kesso, Buchi Emecheta, Alice Lenshina, Bessie Head, Ellen Kuzwayo, Dulcie September, Miriam Makeba and Winnie Mandela. Richly illustrated with contemporary and modern photographs, paintings and sketches. Refs, ix, 256pp, USA. UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS.

Eleven essays on broad themes of gender, land and centre periphery relations as part pf an ongoing disciplinary effort to redefine and recontextualise the African past by participants at OSSREA's sixth annual conference in Dar es Salaam in April 2000. 178pp, ETHIOPIA. OSSREA.

A complete history of prostitution from Mary Magdalene to international sex workers, showing how attitudes to the profession mirror changing notions of sex, love, morality and sexuality. Issues addressed include the parallel growth of globalisation and sex trafficking, and the development of prostitution in Africa following colonialism and international wars. Refs, b/w illus, 435pp, UK. ATLANTIC BOOKS, 1843543141

2004 Hardback

A political, cultural, and intellectual study of race, sex, and Western empire. Greg Thomas interrogates a system that represents race, gender, sexuality, and class in certain systematic and oppressive ways. By connecting sex and eroticism to geopolitics both politically and epistemologically, he examines the logic, operations, and politics of sexuality in the West. The book focuses on the centrality of race, class, and empire to Western realities of gender and sexuality and to problematic Western attempts to theorize gender and sexuality (or embodiment). Index, bib, notes, 200pp, USA. INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS.

A new contribution to the study of black women's experiences in Africa and the diaspora. Each theme explored, such as migration, activism and religion is described from the African and diasporan perspective. This allows both the similarities and differences between them to be understood. Index, notes, xxiii, 331pp, USA. OHIO U P.

A collection of essays scrutinising the role of women in the evolution of states and critically addressing traditional views of male and female roles. The authors uses archaeological case studies from Predynastic Egypt to ancient Zimbabwe to determine what can be argued from the evidence often used to sustain political ideology about race and gender. Index, refs, 242pp, UK. ROUTLEDGE.

A study of feminism and colonialism using the story of May French Sheldon and her travels in east Africa to discuss new theories about race, modernity, feminism and national identity. Dubbed the first female explorer of the region, the author looks at how French Sheldon's travels and its reaction in America and Europe influenced the formation of early American feminism and how it became tied to the imperialist cause. Index, bib, notes, b/w illus, xiv, 258pp, USA. INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS.