Toil and Laughter is the third book in the innovative series In Words of Our Own: Black Women and Being, by and about Black Canadian women that centres Black feminist perspectives. This vital text examines the long legacy of Black women's work, exploring how anti-Black racism, patriarchal systems, and systemic inequities shape the experiences of Black families, communities, students, and educators. By situating Black women's labour as both political and transformative, this text illuminates the histories, lived realities, and mobilizations of Black women navigating complex educational, workplace, and social systems.
Through thirteen interdisciplinary and multi-genre chapters, Toil and Laughter reimagines work as a site of resistance and creative possibility. This collection highlights how Black women's labour is often perceived as invisible or hyper-visible depending on social convenience, while also demonstrating how Black women respond to systemic injustice through practices such as othermothering, educational advocacy, and community organizing. Rather than presenting labour as a neutral activity, this collection frames work as relational, historically grounded, and inseparable from collective struggle and liberation.
Contributors centre Black feminist perspectives, storytelling, and collective mobilizations as strategies for challenging systemic oppression and imagining new futures for Black women and their communities. By bridging academic analysis with lived experience, this text offers students and scholars in Black Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, Diaspora Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Labour Studies a critical framework for understanding Black women's labour as central to justice, care, and collective empowerment.
