THINKING FROM BLACK

A set of critical tools to further Black resistance to things as they are.

Made up of scholars, writers, and artists from around the world, the Practicing Refusal Collective here gathers essays, poems, art, and other work that speaks to the “practice of refusal,” which, in turn, “names the group’s rejection of the idea that the current status quo of black life is livable.” Akin to Raymond Williams’ classic Marxist lexicon Keywords (1976), the volume locates ways to “think it from black,” to understand a term—say, anarchy, the subject of the first two entries—in the context of Black life and thought. Black anarchism, writes William C. Anderson, was founded by revolutionary activists “who shifted left of leftism after certain critical experiences” and who offered a critique of classical anarchism’s foundations in European thought. In the entry for “Blacksound,” a useful portmanteau, Matthew D. Morrison writes of “the structures and systems that have allowed for the extraction, manipulation, standardization, consumption, exploitation, and absorption of black musical practices by the masses since slavery.” Nyong’o, one of the volume’s editors, examines the term “fascism,” so wide in circulation today, and locates a Black dimension in it. Where some may see it as an aberration, it is business as usual for those who live daily under oppression: “Fascism is not an interruption, but a continuity—a dream of domination that must be refused again and again.” Property, resilience, risk, being seen—these and many more terms, nearly a hundred in all, offer fresh avenues of thought. Altogether, the volume contributes materially to, as J Wortham writes in a charged essay on “Dissociation” in the psychological sense, “the possibility of another world beyond the known one…to do more than escape shame, to create new ways of being.”

A welcome reference, packed with cutting-edge Black thought across a range of disciplines and traditions.