Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

The self-help genre has long been associated with personal growth and offering individuals guidance and strategies for enhancing their lives. Historically, self-help literature has primarily focused on individual well-being and success. It tends to offer advice on topics such as personal development, relationships, and career advancement. In the genre’s early days, titles addressing marginalized groups’ targeted struggles or that prioritized the collective instead of the individual were hard to find: “One-size-fits-all American self-help books of the early 1900s didn’t concern themselves with women […] or with concerns that might apply specifically to people of different ages, races and backgrounds” (Cutruzzula, Kara. “The Last 100 Years of Self-Help.” Time Magazine, 2016). As times changed, however, the genre followed. With the evolution of self-help literature, authors started posing their views on the limitations of individualistic apolitical approaches. Many, like brown, seek to inspire collective empowerment and social change instead. Some examples of brown’s predecessors and contemporaries in this field include bell hooks, who wrote Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (1993), and Cara Page, cofounder of the Healing Histories Project, whose work centers on healing justice and self-care’s roots in Black feminism.

brown’s activism directly relates to the reasons why she was prompted to write Emergent Strategy, which her publisher calls “a self-help, society-help and planet-help book” (“Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.” AK Press). Through her engagement in grassroots movements, she witnessed the limitations of traditional approaches that often replicate oppressive systems or fail to address the root causes of inequality. She recognized the need for a paradigm shift, one that challenged hierarchical structures and centered the wisdom and power of marginalized communities. In Emergent Strategy, she addresses not only individual growth but the larger systems and structures that perpetuate inequality and oppression. Her approach calls for aligning personal growth with collective liberation and urges individuals to consider the impact of their actions and choices on the larger social fabric.