Whose Beloved Community?

About the Book

Martin Luther King Jr.’s idea of “the beloved community” focused on the hoped-for new relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed after the success of a nonviolent movement. But the vision excluded, and sometimes still excludes, LGBTQIA+ people and Black women.

The editors curate essays that see beloved community as a generous space that centers justice. Taking inspiration from the radical moral vision of figures like Bayard Rustin and Audre Lorde, the contributors look at how Black queer, feminist, and trans thought and practice can cultivate belonging across lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, and region. Essayists use a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives that includes archival recovery, institutional critique, cultural analysis, ethnography, and political theory. The contributors define beloved community for themselves while offering entry points—through art, culture, activism, policy, pedagogy, and theory—for exploring what it means to belong, to resist, and to build.

Expansive and interdisciplinary, Whose Beloved Community? begins the process of advancing toward truly inclusive communities that are more honest, more complex, and more loving.