Laura McTighe and Women With a Vison’s Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South offers a compellingly intimate account of the complex and sometimes fraught labor of Black feminist abolitionist organizing. Written from the perspective of Women With a Vision (WWAV)—a grassroots, Black woman-led, New Orleans-based organization that has a long history of community organizing—the book tells an important story about, among other things: the spatial and temporal dimensions of racial capitalism, the politics of memory (generated and negotiated at multiple scales), the workings of a prefigurative politics, and relatedly, the role of love in politics. In electing to map their analysis across these and other various coordinates, McTighe and WWAV reflect a sentiment I find to be central to Black Political Thought (and one expressed repeatedly by W.E.B. Du Bois across the body of his work), which is that questions and matters having to do with racism and other forms of oppression are complex, imbricated, and sometimes obscured by the very methods and technologies used to study and address them. As such, conveyed throughout this text is the attitude that thinkers and researchers most interested in unsettling these logics would do well to marshal all one has, thinking and learning across a range of different sites, in service of calling forth a new, more human-oriented world. The urgency of doing so—in light of the persistence of what the authors refer to as “everywhere issues” (p. xv), that is, those that have the whole world engulfed in fire—demands us to reevaluate the limits of existing methods for doing social science research and community engagement. We should ask ourselves: what must we do differently to create the world necessarily otherwise along lines of justice, equity, and human liberation? In this way, then, McTighe and WWAV’s work is academically and ethically demanding. By implicitly raising the question of responsibility, the book’s important appeal is for us to refuse (or, at minimum, interrogate) an attitude of detachment both in our work and in our living—and to instead allow the methods by which we seek to understand the world and to create meaningful change be genuinely guided by the interests of the people and communities around whom our work and attention claims to center.

This text is therefore a slow, layered, and thoughtful work on methods. While considerably different in content and in form from several other social science methodological works, McTighe and WWAV’s contribution to these discussions is no less rigorous nor significant. It is in their walking through WWAV’s history—opening, in medias res, with the story of the 2012 racially motivated arson attack on its New Orleans office that left the organization struggling for years to rebuild—that the authors tutor their readers on the everyday labor and sustained care involved in attending to the very values and principles associated with democratic life that many claim to extol and, indeed, embody. In that way, their work zooms in on the quotidian, ongoing, and sometimes painful (and yet, often joyful) work of helping to create a society animated by a genuine regard for all. This is an especially difficult task, they remind us, when operating within contexts shaped and reshaped by racial capitalism’s logics of group (and therefore place)-differentiated value. The book pays special attention to WWAV’s decades-long harm reduction programs, reproductive justice undertakings, post-Hurricane Katrina efforts at decriminalizing sex-work, and minimizing Crimes Against Nature (CANS) sentences among sex-workers (80% of whom with these convictions, they specify, are Black). The authors demonstrate how WWAV is carrying forward a Black feminist tradition (such as reflected in the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement) by carving out entry points into politics for many of society’s forgotten populations. Doing so, they make clear, demands a kind of methodological resourcefulness and a willingness to be oriented by what one discovers when in touch with people and communities, so as to understand the range of their needs, the depths of their loss, and visions for what they have determined constitutes a meaningful life and future. For McTighe and WWAV, this represents a turn away from a more positivist-informed mode of engaging communities and doing research, and toward an approach where the theories that emerge “from the ground,” as they call them—those “developed in the midst of lived struggle” (p. 17)—are what instruct on how they are to perform their work. It is the string of lessons from the field—learned across decades of organizing and liberation-focused work, through moments of both immense failure and success—that WWAV and McTighe share with their readers, urging us into dynamic relation whereby we may feel so led to accompany them in “liberatory study and struggle” (p. 21).

Central among these lessons is the importance of situating ourselves in “deep, committed relationship with one another” (p. 13) a way of being they note that requires a commitment to slowness, careful repetition, and reconciling ourselves to a different relationship with the concept of failure (hence the need for both slowness and repetition). Echoing the sentiments of Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, Audre Lorde, and (I would add) Grace Lee Boggs, McTighe and WWAV insist that if our future is to be authentically one of liberation, then we must extricate ourselves from a belief in the singularity of ours and others’ sociopolitical problems and instead see them as interrelated and our futures as linked. Related to this, they stress the question of space repeatedly throughout the book, attending therefore to the where of politics (i.e., to the acknowledgment that politics invariably happens somewhere, someplace). In other words, they urge their readers to reflect on the kind of spaces we might gather around and in, and the range of spatial practices necessary to build and nurture the relationships critical to shaping the “future otherwise.” It is with that sensibility in mind that McTighe and WWAV devote considerable time to articulating the role their office’s front porch(es) played in their organizing and movement-building. Linking what they call their “front porch strategy” to a Southern history of Black women’s congregational practices of porch-sitting, the authors convey how this in-between site—the space, as they say, between home and the streets—operates as a relationship-building technology. Dialing in on the labors of Catherine and Danita, two of the group’s leaders, McTighe and WWAV reflect on the fact that “front porches are where they sat talking with members of their communities who had at best been forgotten and at worst had been left to die. Front porches are where they brought their community members into networks of care and hope” (p. 44). Here, the authors demonstrate how these everyday Black geographies have been and remain critical to a capacity to contest, reimagine, and I would say actively redraw the bounds around who it is we believe constitutes the civic “we” of society. They are sites where what Melvin Rogers in his 2023 book, The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in American Political Thought, refers to as the “people’s constituent power” (p. 5) can be exercised. In the way it invites the performance of a range of spatial practices such as lingering, pausing, sitting, and (yes) listening, the front porch creates a context from which to resist racial capitalism’s demand to alienate and render unseeable those who, according to its logic of group-differentiated otherness, are not worthy of care and regard, and thus are situated as beyond the registers of democratic concern.

In a political moment so profoundly marked by othering rhetoric and both the articulation and manifestation of a political vision molded around such oppositional language, Fire Dreams is especially resonant. What Laura McTighe and Women With A Vision have provided us are, I believe, a set of methods we might employ to shape this world more into what it is we so urgently need.