Wings of Gauze is a multidisciplinary anthology of original essays written about the experiences of women of color in the United States - African American, Hispanic American, Native American, and Southeast Asian American. Written by social science and humanities scholars, community activists, and health professionals, the essays illustrate a variety of approaches from a range of academic disciplines, theoretical models, and individual perspectives. Testimony to the many layers of experience by women of color concerning health and illnesses, the essays broaden our understanding of the connections that exist between those experiences and the health issues and cultural standpoints that frame them. With some notable exceptions, recent feminist scholarship about women's health and the history of health care has focused primarily on the experiences of white middle-class women. Literature by health professional about people of color has focused upon illness and perceived deviance from white-defined norms rather than upon the political economy of health and alternative concepts of well-being. It also has focused on men rather than women, and on African Americans to the exclusion of other peoples of color. This collection - the first of its kind - is a shift away from this standard paradigm and instead makes women of color and their perceptions the central reality. The book includes creative writing, participant-observer perspectives, personal narratives, survey studies, and studies based on oral history. Specific health issues, including AIDS, domestic violence, substance abuse, cancer, reproductive health, surgery, sickle cell disease, infectious disease, mental health, and the economic dimensions of physical and psychological health, are addressed. While the focus of the book is on experiences of health and illness and on health policy, there are also essays on the experiences of women of color as health practitioners - ethno-therapists, healers, midwives, health aides, and community social workers.

This collection of original essays brilliantly interrogates the often ambivalent place of Africa in the imaginations, cultures and politics of its "New World" descendants. Combining literary analysis, history, biography, cultural studies, critical theory and politics, Imagining Home offers a fresh and creative approach to the history of Pan-Africanism and diasporic movements. A critical part of the book's overall project is an examination of the legal, educational and political institutions and structures of domination over Africa and the African diaspora. Class and gender are placed at center stage alongside race in the exploration of how the discourses and practices of Pan-Africanism have been shaped. Other issues raised include the myriad ways in which grassroots religious and cultural movements informed Pan-Africanist political organizations; the role of African, African-American and Caribbean intellectuals in the formation of Pan-African thought-including W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James and Adelaide Casely Hayford; the historical, ideological and institutional connections between African-Americans and South Africans; and the problems and prospects of Pan-Africanism as an emancipatory strategy for black people throughout the Atlantic.