Here are 100 books that Anarcho-Blackness fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a book lover and as a nonfiction writer and researcher, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that a book is truly a portal that can connect people across time and space. I’m a Catholic (stray) by education and tradition, and for me this interconnectivity resonates with the familiar theology of the communion of saints. Whether you are religious or not, if you love words, there is something rather miraculous about how language, past and present, from authors living and dead, can connect and surprise us and spark new conversations even with those yet to be born. You never know who may need to hear what you are putting on the page.
This book made me reflect deeply on whom we praise as trailblazing “rebels” and who we ignore, erase, or brand with criminal status in the stories we inherit and then repeat thoughtlessly.
Hartman reimagines “transgression” through the lenses of race, gender, sexuality, and class in early 20th-century New York and Philadelphia. She immerses us in up-close and poignant stories of women’s nonconformity, showing how their choices were flexes not only for survival but for thriving, a refusal to be defined by the ugliest social denigrations of their time (as well as our own).
Wayward Lives is richly sourced, including recovered photographs with the evocative literary portraits. It is a moving, haunting, unforgettable book.
Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading…
I knew I was an anti-authoritarian before I had words for it, and my education in social justice has been long and slow. I have been researching and writing about anarchism for the better part of three decades, and am now a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Anarchy is a subject that engages me both at the level of intellectual passion, what lights up my mind, and on a visceral level, in my revulsion at the inequalities and iniquities in this world and my yearning for a fully emancipated way of life.
When I opened this book, I knew immediately that I was among friends. This is a handbook for constructing the kind of life in which joyful effects—associated with comradeship and mutual empowerment—might flourish. Eminently practical and down-to-earth, but also informed by a philosophical tradition stretching back through the anarchists to Baruch Spinoza in which life is not reducible to the “recipes” of self-help books but is a creative search for wider possibilities, for the “capacity to participate in something life-giving.” Written in contact with Indigenous and feminist social movements, this is also a guide to avoiding the kinds of blockages and dead ends on which such movements often founder.
"Absolutely what we need in these days of spreading gloom." —John Holloway, author of Crack Capitalism
"A guide to a fulfilling militant life." —Michael Hardt, co-author of Assembly
"Rigid radicalism" is the congealed and debilitating practices that suck life and inspiration from the fight for a better world. Joyful Militancy investigates how fear, self-righteousness, and moralism infiltrate and take root within liberation movements, what to do about them, and ultimately how tenderness and vulnerability can thrive alongside fierce militant commitment.
Carla Bergman co-edited Stay Solid: A Radical Handbook For Youth.
Nick Montgomery is an organizer and writer currently at Queen's…
I knew I was an anti-authoritarian before I had words for it, and my education in social justice has been long and slow. I have been researching and writing about anarchism for the better part of three decades, and am now a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Anarchy is a subject that engages me both at the level of intellectual passion, what lights up my mind, and on a visceral level, in my revulsion at the inequalities and iniquities in this world and my yearning for a fully emancipated way of life.
Translating this book from the French was a slow process, the slowest reading I have ever done, and some of the most rewarding. This book did not just return me to my pre-existing ideas; it changed my way of thinking permanently. Colson writes to us from a world that is full of unexpected possibilities for life, a “world within which many worlds might fit,” as the Zapatistas have it—possibilities for the better and the worse that are screened off from our view. Difficult, demanding reading, but it too suggests a way of living that is premised on finding good connections with others (ones that expand your “collective force”) and withdrawing from relations characterized by “error and sadness,” linking people to “the dominations that, internally and externally, chain them to their own misfortune.” In other words, Colson is drawing from the same Spinozan currents as Bergman and Montgomery, that…
Is the thought of Gilles Deleuze secretly linked to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's declaration: "I am an anarchist"? Has anarchism, for more than a century and a half, been secretly Deleuzian? In the guise of a playfully unorthodox lexicon, sociologist Daniel Colson presents an exploration of hidden affinities between the great philosophical heresies and "a thought too scandalous to take its place in the official edifice of philosophy," with profound implications for the way we understand social movements.
I knew I was an anti-authoritarian before I had words for it, and my education in social justice has been long and slow. I have been researching and writing about anarchism for the better part of three decades, and am now a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Anarchy is a subject that engages me both at the level of intellectual passion, what lights up my mind, and on a visceral level, in my revulsion at the inequalities and iniquities in this world and my yearning for a fully emancipated way of life.
Bottici is another such friend at first reading, another partisan of the Spinozan current, but one deeply immersed in the feminist thought that Colson regrettably ignores. Hers is a fully intersectional feminism, attending especially to the margins of society, where its freaks and pariahs live. Like Colson, she offers opportunities for difficult thinking that reward us with new vistas, new possibilities for life.
How can we be sure the oppressed do not become oppressors in their turn? How can we create a feminism that doesn't turn into yet another tool for oppression? It has become commonplace to argue that, in order to fight the subjugation of women, we have to unpack the ways different forms of oppression intersect with one another: class, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and ecology, to name only a few. By arguing that there is no single factor, or arche, explaining the oppression of women, Chiara Bottici proposes a radical anarchafeminist philosophy inspired by two major claims: that there is…
I first became interested in extremism and terrorism when I was young, following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. As a student and then as an intelligence analyst, I became deeply immersed in terrorism emanating from the Middle East and later served with the 9/11 Commission. In the last decade, I focused on the white supremacist threat, motivated both by its growing lethality and its political impact during the Trump era and today. In this book, I share my insights on the movement’s modern history, global dimensions, presence on social media, and numerous vulnerabilities.
If most Americans are like me, Reconstruction is vaguely remembered from high school history classes as a time when corrupt and incompetent Carpetbaggers and Scalawags reigned while the South struggled to recover from the devastation of the Civil War. Historians have rescued Reconstruction from this neglect and misunderstanding, revealing it as a second American revolution – but one that failed. It was a time of stunning progress in the rights of Black Americans, a reconceptualization of the role of government in society, and staggering violence to preserve white supremacy. Pulitzer Prize-winning Historian Eric Foner’s book is the Bible for this era–lucidly written, carefully researched, and painful in its assessment of this lost moment in American history.
Newly Reissued with a New Introduction: From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America. Eric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed. Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans-black and white-responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political…
I’m a multi-award-winning novelist and Kansas historian. Through reading letters written by African Americans in Kansas, I realized that black people were a major political force. In fact, with the settlement of Nicodemus, for the first time in American history, enough black people had gathered in one place to dominate political decisions and prevail over the white community. No one had told the story of the three black powerhouses who shaped politics on a county, state, and national level. I was thrilled when University of Oklahoma Press published my academic book. It won second place in the Westerner’s International Best Book contest.
W.E.B Du Bois’s magnificent contribution to Post-Reconstrucion history put a stop to the notion that blacks were lightweights when it came to academia. Du Bois is a careful historian but doesn’t hesitate to speak from a black agenda. I’m well aware that this book supports my own ideas that blacks were a force in settling the West, but still, the truth will come out. Black people exerted extraordinary political influence. Du Bois, was a serious scholar, with impeccable credentials, and the founder of the NAACP. This man can write! I’m envious of his matchless ability to present history.
W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history.
Black Reconstruction in America tells and interprets the story of…
One of my long-standing interests, as a political philosopher, has been to examine the deployment of state power and the state forms (what I call states of affairs) the capitalist mode of production takes in order to preserve its economic order. Since I completed my doctorate, which was on the articulation of settler-colonial power in relationship to remaining settler states, I have largely been invested in thinking politics: how dominant politics maintain the current order, how counter-hegemonic politics disrupt this order.
I first read The Undercommons in a virtual reading group during the early months of the COVID pandemic and was quite taken by its poetics and unfolding conceptual terrain. Beginning with an analysis of academia as a significant ideological state apparatus, Moten and Harney also discuss multiple forms of state violence and capture in racial capitalist formations. From the notion of the settler-capitalist garrison responding to “the surround” of the colonized and marginalized, to the connection between policy and policing, to the logic of reified colonial conquest, to logistics and professionalization, The Undercommons is a meditation on methods of state repression and forms of resistance. Arguing that recognition of the “general antagonism” that underlies the state is necessary for revolutionary politics, Moten and Harney end up echoing Lenin’s insights about class antagonism and false reconciliation in The State and Revolution.
Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. Politics. Philosophy & Critical Theory. Introduction by Jack Halberstam. In this series of essays, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in THE UNDERCOMMONS, Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of…
I’m a Philadelphia-based journalist and new author. I’m the Editor at Large for Philadelphia Magazine and President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. As an openly Black gay journalist, I’ve headlined for speaking frankly about intersectional issues in society regarding race, LGBTQIA, and pop culture. Such experiences have awakened my consciousness as an underrepresented voice in the media and have pushed me to explore societal topics. My new book The Case for Cancel Culture, published by St. Martin's Press, is my way of staking my claim in the global conversation on this buzzworthy topic.
This book was the kind of post-Trump election awakening that made me feel unapologetic about the way I saw myself as a Black American.
The writing vividly expresses the rage and determination of marginalized voices in a way that’s beyond poignant, but intentional.
Blow, a respected journalist in his own right, pulls from history and current events to make a case for something ambitious: Reverse Black migration as a means of combating racial injustice in the South.
A New York Times Editor's Choice | A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
From journalist and New York Times bestselling author Charles Blow comes a powerful manifesto and call to action, "a must-read in the effort to dismantle deep-seated poisons of systemic racism and white supremacy" (San Francisco Chronicle).
Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but, racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact. The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one. After centuries of waiting…
I’m a Philadelphia-based journalist and new author. I’m the Editor at Large for Philadelphia Magazine and President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. As an openly Black gay journalist, I’ve headlined for speaking frankly about intersectional issues in society regarding race, LGBTQIA, and pop culture. Such experiences have awakened my consciousness as an underrepresented voice in the media and have pushed me to explore societal topics. My new book The Case for Cancel Culture, published by St. Martin's Press, is my way of staking my claim in the global conversation on this buzzworthy topic.
This is a book that educates and radicalizes you all at once.
Mystal is more than just a bold political commentator, but a man on a mission to make you reconsider everything you thought you knew about America’s most consequential text in a book that holds back no punches.
I will never again see the Constitution as a historical text that guides my life, but now as a document that is currently being weaponized by politicians to infringe upon it.
This book is a loud alarm to all those who have been casually watching the current political mudslinging and not thinking the fire would hit their doorstep.
It’s here, and it’s time to do something about it.
MSNBC legal commentator Elie Mystal thinks that Republicans are wrong about the law almost all of the time. Now, instead of talking about this on cable news, Mystal explains why in his first book.
"After reading Allow Me to Retort, I want Elie Mystal to explain everything I don't understand-quantum astrophysics, the infield fly rule, why people think Bob Dylan is a good singer . . ." -Michael Harriot, The Root
Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how…
I am a theater historian whose research focuses on African American theater of 1940s-50s. While other periods and movements—the Harlem Renaissance (1920s), the Federal Theatre Project (1930s), the Black Arts Movement (1960s), and contemporary theater—have been well studied and documented, I saw a gap of scholarship around the 1940s-50s; I wondered why those years had been largely overlooked. As I dived deeper, I saw how African American performance culture (ie. theater, film, television, music) of the later-20th Century had its roots in the history of those somewhat overlooked decades. I’m still investigating that story, and these books have helped me do it.
We often learn about African American history in the 20th Century in terms of a conflict between nonviolent resistance vs. violent radicalism, integrationism vs. separatism, Martin vs. Malcolm. But this is an over-simplification of a complex and dynamic moment in the history of our nation. More than any other work, Black is a Country helped me think differently about the period that I study, and see African American history and culture of the mid-20th Century in a new way.
Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight. Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central to the history of black struggle.
It is through the words and thought of key black intellectuals, like…
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