In A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference, Emily S. Lee offers a courageous analysis of the fleshy theories of women of color using major themes in Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology. Within this forging of phenomenology, Lee is moved by women of color, disclosing their multiple-situated embodied experience in which their very movement is marked, as well as by their desire for coalition anchored in heterogeneous commonality. To follow Lee’s phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of race is to take seriously the critical promise of phenomenology, daring the reader to listen to women of color in an intellectual and political climate that undervalues their lives and thought.

Mariana Ortega, Penn State University

Emily S. Lee has become one of our leading philosophers of race, making use of the phenomenological tradition to complexify racial identities and understand the dynamic character of their embodiment. This book presents her fully developed view and shows how the lens of women of color enhances the potential of phenomenology itself to address relationality and the varied forms of oppression.

Linda Martín Alcoff, Hunter College