This annotated bibliography serves to outline some of the most significant books and essays by Black authors and scholars. Within this collection you will find links that enable you to purchase the works from independent bookstores and publishers. Some texts can be found as free PDFs online. Also included is a national and online list of Black owned bookstores, often championing topics such as Liberation, Afro-futurism, Prison Abolition, Multiculturalism, and Radical Histories.
Davis, Angela Y. 2010. Are Prisons Obsolete?
With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.
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Morrison, Toni, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. 2017. The Origin of Others.
America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines.
In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today’s struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today’s struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Cullors’ first book cowritten by asha bandele, is a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. A New York Times Best Seller – necessary and timely, Patrisse’s story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful. In this meaningful, empowering account of survival, strength, and resilience, Patrisse Cullors and asha bandele seek to change the culture that declares innocent black life expendable.
Rankine, Claudia. 2015. Citizen: An American Lyric.
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV–everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named ‘post-race’ society.
Davis, Angela Y. 1983. Women, Race & Class.
A powerful study of the women’s liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis.
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AUDRE LORDE: DREAM OF EUROPE elucidates Lorde’s methodology as a poet, mentor, and activist during the last decade of her life. This volume compiles a series of seminars, interviews, and conversations held by the author and collaborators across Berlin, Western Europe, and The Caribbean between 1984-1992. While Lorde stood at the intersection of various historical and literary movements in The United States–the uprising of black social life after the Harlem Renaissance, poetry of the AIDS epidemic, and the unfolding of the Civil Rights Movement–this selection of texts reveals Lorde as a catalyst for the first movement of Black Germans in West Berlin. The legacy of this “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” has been well preserved by her colleagues in Germany. These selected writings lay bare struggles, bonds, and hopes shared among Black women in a transnational political context, as well as offering sometimes surprising reflections on the US American counter culture with which Lorde is associated. Many of the poems that were important to Lorde’s development are excerpted in full within these pages, serving as a sort of critical anthology.
hooks, bell. 1981. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism.
A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain’t I a Woman has become a must-read for all those interested in the nature of Black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on Black women during slavery, the devaluation of Back womanhood, Black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the Black woman’s involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this book a critical place on every feminist scholar’s bookshelf.
Hooks, Bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation.
In the critical essays collected in Black Looks, bell hooks interrogates old narratives and argues for alternative ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness. Her focus is on spectatorship – in particular, the way blackness and black people are experienced in literature, music, television, and especially film – and her aim is to create a radical intervention into the way we talk about race and representation. As she describes: ‘The essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert.’ As students, scholars, activists, intellectuals, and any other readers who have engaged with the book since its original release in 1992 can attest, that’s exactly what these pieces do.
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Snorton, C. Riley. 2018. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity.
In ‘Black on Both Sides’, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.
Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, this collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, ‘the complex confluence of identities–race, class, gender, sexuality–systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.
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Angelou, Maya. 1969. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
A phenomenal #1 bestseller that has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three years, this memoir traces Maya Angelou’s childhood in a small, rural community during the 1930s. Filled with images and recollections that point to the dignity and courage of black men and women, Angelou paints a sometimes disquieting, but always affecting picture of the people-and the times-that touched her life.
Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.
Using the multiple meanings of “wake” to illustrate the ways Black lives are determined by slavery’s afterlives, Christina Sharpe weaves personal experiences with readings of literary and artistic representations of Black life and death to examine what survives in the face of insistent violence and the possibilities for resistance.
PDF Available: Here
Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches is a collection of essential essays and speeches written by Audre Lorde, a woman who wrote from the particulars of her identity: Black woman, lesbian, poet, activist, cancer survivor, mother, and feminist writer.
PDF Available: Here
Morrison, Toni. 2019. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations.
One of the most celebrated and revered writers in the history of American literature gives us a new nonfiction collection–a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades. The Source of Self-Regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style, the literary prowess and moral compass, that are Toni Morrison’s hallmarks. It is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11, the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King Ir., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin.
X, Malcolm, and Alex Haley. 1965. The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published in 1965, the result of a collaboration between human rights activist Malcolm X and journalist Alex Haley. Haley coauthored the autobiography based on a series of in-depth interviews he conducted between 1963 and Malcolm X’s 1965 assassination.
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Fanon, Frantz, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Constance Farrington. 1965. The Wretched of the Earth.
Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence, Frantz Fanon’s classic text has provided inspiration for anti-colonial movements ever since. With power and anger, Fanon makes clear the economic and psychological degradation inflicted by imperialism. It was Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, who exposed the connection between colonial war and mental disease, who showed how the fight for freedom must be combined with building a national culture, and who showed the way ahead, through revolutionary violence, to socialism. Many of the great calls to arms from the era of decolonization are now purely of historical interest, yet this passionate analysis of the relations between the great powers and the Third World is just as illuminating about the world we live in today
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Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony.
Achille Mbembe is one of the most brilliant theorists of postcolonial studies writing today. In On the Postcolony he profoundly renews our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa. In a series of provocative essays, Mbembe contests diehard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of postcolonial theory. This thought-provoking and groundbreaking collection of essays-his first book to be published in English-develops and extends debates first ignited by his well-known 1992 article “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,” in which he developed his notion of the “banality of power” in contemporary Africa. Mbembe reinterprets the meanings of death, utopia, and the divine libido as part of the new theoretical perspectives he offers on the constitution of power. He works with the complex registers of bodily subjectivity – violence, wonder, and laughter – to profoundly contest categories of oppression and resistance, autonomy and subjection, and state and civil society that marked the social theory of the late twentieth century. This provocative book will surely attract attention with its signal contribution to the rich interdisciplinary arena of scholarship on colonial and postcolonial discourse, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism
Marriott, D. S. 2012. On Black Men.
Mutilated, dying or dead, black men have a role to play in the psychic life of culture. There is a demand that black men perform a script. This study explores the legacy of that demand on the image of black men, and its effects on how black men have learned to see themselves and one another
This collection of essays points to ways in which notions of identity can inform changing conceptions of democratic politics. Categories of identity – gender, race, class and sexuality – are re-examined to allow a move away from a fixed moralistic approach to identity politics, towards a recognition of difference, autonomy and interdependence. Contributors include Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer, Pratibha Parmar, Jonathan Rutherford, Andrea Stuart, Simon Watney and Jeffrey Weeks.
Baldwin, James. 1963. The Fire Next Time.
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters, ” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose, ” The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.
PDF Available: Here
Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.
Fred Moten investigates the provocative connections between jazz, sexual identity, and radical black politics. He focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself is improvisation.
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Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
In this work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people’s history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on western continents, Robinson argues, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.
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The Combahee River Collective, a group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the anti-racist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles.
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2016. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.
Activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation
In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation during slavery and its aftermath, Saidiya Hartman illumines the forms of terror and resistance that shaped black identity. Scenes of Subjection examines the forms of domination that usually go undetected; in particular, the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment, protection, rights, and consent. By looking at slave narratives, plantation diaries, popular theater, slave performance, freedmen’s primers, and legal cases, Hartman investigates a wide variety of “scenes” ranging from the auction block and minstrel show to the staging of the self-possessed and rights-bearing individual of freedom. While attentive to the performance of power–the terrible spectacles of slaveholders’ dominion and the innocent amusements designed to abase and pacify the enslaved–and the entanglements of pleasure and terror in these displays of mastery, Hartman also examines the possibilities for resistance, redress and transformation embodied in black performance and everyday practice.
PDF Available: Here
Hartman, Saidiya V. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.
In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history
Frank B. Wilderson III, Saidiya V. Hartman, Steve Martinot, Jared Sexton, Hortenese J. Spillers, Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction.
In the wake of uprisings and public outrage at the continual murder of Black people by the police, discourse is incrementally acknowledging racialized police violence and discrimination in all areas of society. Yet there is a fissure between the prescriptions offered to rectify these issues and the failure to bring that about. Afro-Pessimism offers an analytical lens to examine this gap and the ways in which society is structured through anti-Black racism. Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction is a collection of articles compiled for the purpose of offering an overview of this theory. The collected articles span three decades of thought and cover, in addition to police violence, topics ranging from the labor of Black women and the slave’s transformation following the emancipation to the struggles of the Black Liberation Army and the elements of anti-Blackness in Indigenous struggles for sovereignty
PDF Available: Here
James, C. L. R. 1963. The Black Jacobins; Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution.
This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.
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Claudia Jones, intellectual genius and staunch activist against racist and gender oppression founded two of Black Briton’s most important institutions; the first black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Times and was a founding member of the Notting Hill Carnival. This book makes accessible and brings to wider attention the words of an often overlooked 20th century political and cultural activist who tirelessly campaigned, wrote, spoke out, organized, edited and published autobiographical writings on human rights and peace struggles related to gender, race and class.
Vitale, Alex S. 2017. The End of Policing.
Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression—most dramatically in Ferguson, Missouri, where longheld grievances erupted in violent demonstrations following the police killing of Michael Brown. Among activists, journalists, and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself. “Broken windows” practices, the militarization of law enforcement, and the dramatic expansion of the police’s role over the last forty years have created a mandate for officers that must be rolled back.
Ebook Available: Here
Fanon, Frantz, and Charles Lam Markmann. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks.
Fanon, born in Martinique and educated in France, is generally regarded as the leading anti-colonial thinker of the 20th century. His first book is an analysis of the impact of colonial subjugation on the black psyche. It is a very personal account of Fanon’s experience being black: as a man, an intellectual, and a party to a French education
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