West, Traci. Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 249 pp.

by Shondrah Tarrezz Nash

Violence against women has existed for centuries. Even so, it has been roughly thirty years since feminist activists and researchers first broke their silence regarding intimate partner violence and exposed gender violence as a pervasive social ill. Since then, male-on-female violence has acquired remarkable, broad-based attention. Intimate terrorism, psychological maltreatment, sexual assault, and their criminality increasingly are subjects of self-help media, talk shows, service-based workshops, and academic conferences. Researchers continue to question and debate how societal norms and conditions produce/reproduce the prevalence of such violence and its social, familial, and individual impact. However, in Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics, theologian and social ethicist Traci West's microscopic perusal of social scientific, feminist, and theological approaches shows their collective failure to address the unique traumas that compose Black women's abuse ontology. The result is a critically forged and deliberately culturally specific treatise, which defies the current preoccupation with a singular victim-survivor archetype.