Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches

Audre Lorde

In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope.

Killing the Black Body

Dorothy Roberts

In a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies, Killing the Black Body exposed America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies. Killing the Black Body remains a rallying cry for education, awareness, and action on extending reproductive justice to all women.

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey

Kristine Stiles and Greg Tate

A richly illustrated catalogue published by the Nasher Museum on the occasion of the exhibition Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey. The catalogue includes images that highlight the most important and iconic works Wangechi Mutu has created since the mid-1990s, as well as portraying newer collages, drawings, videoes, and site-specific installations.

The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho’s masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of worldly treasure. Santiago’s journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life’s path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.

A Burst of Light and Other Essays

Audre Lorde

From reflections on her struggle with cancer to thoughts on lesbian sexuality and African-American identity in a straight white man’s world, Lorde’s voice remains enduringly relevant. Those who practice and encourage social justice activism frequently quote her exhortation, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work

Grey Gundaker & Judith McWillie

Dating from their earliest habitation in North America, people of African descent have used visual and material means to express their ethical values and beliefs about the intersecting worlds of matter and spirit. No Space Hidden combines oral testimony and firsthand documentation to explore African American devotional arts centered in domestic landscapes.

Parable of the Sower

Octavia E. Butler

Sustained by skillful characterizations and an all-too-uncomfortable realism, Butler’s narrative holds a mirror up close to our own contemporary blight of moral and economic disintegration and implicitly poses the question, Can we really let it get this bad?

Meaning Matter Memory: Selections from the Studio Museum in Harlem Collection

Thelma Golden, Connie H. Choi, Mary Schmidt Campbell, and Kinshasha Holman Conwill, et al

Meaning Matter Memory is a catalogue of artworks in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s permanent collection. It features illustrations of significant works by over 250 artists of African descent accompanied by original texts from more than 100 voices in the art world, including writers, scholars, artists, and critics.

The Game of Life and How to Play It

Florence Scovel Shinn

First published in 1925, The Game of Life and How to Play It has inspired people around the world to find a sense of purpose and belonging. It asserts that life is not a battle but a game of giving and receiving, and that whatever we send out into the world will eventually be returned to us. This little book will help you discover how your mind and its imaging faculties play leading roles in the game of life.

Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

Tricia Hersey

What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine‑level pace — feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own relentless benefit.

ain’t i a woman

bell hooks

A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain’t I a Woman has become a must-read for those interested in Black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on Black women during slavery, Black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the Black woman’s involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions.

Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations

Retha Powers

A comprehensive, all-new collection bringing together the most thoughtful, inspiring, and wisest voices from the Black diaspora across history. Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations paints a rich canvas of Black history through time. Five thousand quotes are culled from the time of Ancient Egypt through American slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Era, Apartheid, to the present day.

Some of Us Did NOT Die

June Jordan

Some of Us Did Not Die brings together the seminal essays of June Jordan, the widely acclaimed Black American writer known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism. Spanning the length of her extraordinary career, and including her last writings, the essays in this collection reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of injustice, democracy, and literature.

Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis

Katherine McKittrick

The Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter is best known for her diverse writings that pull together insights from theories in history, literature, science, and black studies, to explore race, the legacy of colonialism, and representations of humanness. The contributors explore Wynter’s stunning reconceptualization of the human in relation to concepts of blackness, modernity, urban space, the Caribbean, and migratory politics.

The West and the Rest of Us

Chinweizu Ibekwe

The book critiques Western imperialism, tracing its impact on Africa and other colonised regions over five centuries. Chinweizu identifies how African political elites enabled domination by mimicking Western institutions and ideologies. He calls for epistemological decolonisation and autonomous development by learning from non-Western models such as Japan, China and Russia.

Dark Designs & Visual Culture

Michelle Wallace

Beginning with a new introduction in which Wallace reflects on her life and career, this volume includes other autobiographical essays; articles focused on popular culture, the arts, and literary theory; and explorations of issues in black visual culture. Wallace discusses growing up in Harlem; how she dealt with the media attention and criticism she received for Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman; and her relationship with her family.

Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: Un(becoming) the Subject

Kevin Everod Quashie

In Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory, Kevin Everod Quashie explores the metaphor of the “girlfriend” as a new way of understanding three central concepts of cultural studies: self, memory, and language. The analysis throughout interacts with schools of thought such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and post-colonialism, but ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic, one that ultimately aims to center black women and their philosophies.

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood:
African American Children in the Antebellum South

Crystal Lynn Webster

Drawing evidence from the urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Crystal Webster’s innovative research yields a powerful new history of African American childhood before the Civil War. Reading her sources against the grain, Webster reveals a complex reality for antebellum Black children. Lacking societal status, they nevertheless found meaningful agency as historical actors, making the most of the limited freedoms and possibilities they enjoyed.

The Body Keeps The Score

Bessel Van Der Kolk

Trauma is a fact of life. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.

African American Environmental Thought

Kimberly K. Smith

African American intellectual thought has long provided a touchstone for national politics and civil rights, but, as Kimberly Smith reveals, it also has much to say about our relationship to nature. In this first single-authored book to link African American and environmental studies, Smith uncovers a rich tradition stretching from the abolition movement through the Harlem Renaissance, demonstrating that black Americans have been far from indifferent to environmental concerns.

Black Skin, White Masks

Franz Fanon

A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

Safiya Umoja Noble

Algorithms of Oppression challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. The author argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a small number of search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See

Tina M. Campt

In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze. Their work–from Deana Lawson’s disarmingly intimate portraits to Arthur Jafa’s videos of the everyday beauty and grit of the Black experience, to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson– requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity.