Minna Salami debut publication Sensuous Knowledge, published by Zed Books and HarperCollins US, is set to make its official debut on March 15, 2020.
Minna Salami is a journalist and blogger with a focus on African feminist issues, about the African diaspora, and Nigerian women through her award-winning blog MsAfropolitan.com which she created and has been editing since 2010. The issues covered in the blog range from polygamy to feminism to relationships. She also writes on social issues in publications like the Guardian (UK), The Guardian (Nigeria), the Huffington Post, The Independent, Al Jazeera and the New Internationalist among many others. She frequently speaks at international events and platforms including TEDx, the Oxford Union, Yale University, UN Women as well as the BBC and Channel 4.
The Nigerian signed a deal with Zed Books and HarperCollins US for her debut first essay collection which has the following blurb;
‘For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.’
Taking Audre Lorde’s influential essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House’ as a central inspiration, Minna Salami explores what Audre Lorde raised, but never answered: If not the master’s tools, then what? ‘Sensuous Knowledge’ is her attempt to provide a new ‘toolkit’ for challenging the status quo that is at once empowering, transcendental and practical. Combining the playfulness of a storyteller with the interrogating gaze of a social critic, the book pries open and questions systems of imperialist, patriarchal power that have dominated cultures and ways of thinking for centuries, and puts forward a new approach to knowledge. As Salami herself puts it: ‘I realised that to change society, one must first change oneself. But to change myself, I did not merely need new knowledge; I needed a new understanding of knowledge.’
Drawing on a range of traditions, including personal narrative, feminist theory, popular culture, philosophy and African myth, Sensuous Knowledge offers a bold, Africa-centred and feminist vision of hope for a world in crisis, and shatters our illusions around gender, race and power.
The new publication is already getting love with Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo calling it, “a probing, challenging and imaginative book that dares position black feminism as the prism through which we can all better experience and understand the world.”
The book is available to all who love the written word from March 15 and can be pre-ordered from Amazon here.
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