Fam,
Welcome to the final edition of our three-part series highlighting Black lesbian feminist collectives and individuals who have helped pave the way for Black folks on our path to liberation. Today, we’re celebrating Kitchen Table Press.
By the 1970s and 1980s, Black women feminists recognized that white people had silenced Black women and women-of-color writers for far too long. Their absence in the literary sphere was a message to the world that their stories didn’t deserve to be told, their imaginations weren’t considered valuable, and their thoughts and ideas weren’t relevant. This absence continued to perpetuate false beliefs about who Black women were choosing to be.
To find a home in our identities, we need representation. Black feminists directly addressed the invisibility and erasure of Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color writers. After white feminists created exclusive press agencies, Black women, in particular, led the charge for all women of color to be supported and recognized for their work.
In 1980, scholar, womanist, writer, and political activist Barbara Smith decided to create a new publishing home “to make visual (and accessible) the writing, culture, and history of women of color.” This decision was spurred by a conversation between Smith and Audre Lorde; Lorde had said, “We really need to do something about publishing.” In response, Smith gathered a group of women in Boston on Halloween weekend, when Lorde and other Black lesbian writers from New York were in town for a poetry reading. Thus, Kitchen Table Press was born.
Though Kitchen Table Press wasn’t active until about a year later, Smith and her colleagues discussed the new publishing home’s mission, vision, and goals that Halloween evening. Smith recalls:
“We chose our name because the kitchen is the center of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other. We also wanted to convey the fact that we are a kitchen table, a grassroots operation, begun and kept alive by women who cannot rely on inheritances or other benefits of class privilege to do the work we need to do.”
At the time of the company’s founding, even though everyone in the room was of Black American or Afro-Caribbean descent, “they made the radical and brave decision to publish writings only by women of color,” according to Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Kitchen Table was purposely taking an inclusive approach. Smith stated, “As women, feminists, and lesbians of color we had experiences and work to do in common, although we also had our differences.”
According to Smith, starting a press for women of color in 1980 seemed to “defy logic” for the mainstream, “but it was one of those acts of courage that characterized Third World women’s lives and the future of Black feminism.”
Smith went on to say:
“On the most basic level, Kitchen Table Press began because of our need for autonomy, our need to determine independently both the content and the conditions of our work and to control the words and images that were produced about us. As feminist and lesbian of color writers, we knew that we had no options for getting published except at the mercy or whim of others—in either commercial or alternative publishing since both are white-dominated.”
Kitchen Table was also conscious of the images used on the covers and throughout the books they published. Historically, the visual representation of women of color, especially Black women, was often inaccurate, hyper-sexualized, and racist. Kitchen Table decided to take a traditional approach, using images from Indigenous African, Asian, Latine, and Native American cultures. This design strategy has continued to influence book designs by women of color.
Over the next 20 years, Kitchen Table’s publications included titles like the 1984 second edition of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Audre Lorde’s I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities, The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties, and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Kitchen Table also published several chapbooks, political pamphlets, and short-story collections.
Kitchen Table forged a path for other feminist publishing companies, such as BrokenBeautiful Press, founded by Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs in 2012.
Kitchen Table Press revolutionized publishing, and more importantly, centered voices that have been integral to our evolution as a society. The writings they went on to publish have been vital for our movements and served as a gateway for the ideas and imaginations of Black, Indigenous, and women of color, inspiring readers globally.
In solidarity,
Movement for Black Lives
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