100 books like Searching for Zion

The biracial Vigne twins in this book struggle with the choices before them as to which race they will embrace. I loved the book for its poignancy and honest exploration of the sensitivity involved in having a choice to make, no matter the generation.

This book is similar to the movie Imitation of Life but on a grander scale. The stories moved me and hurt me at the same time. 

Even a casual glance at today’s headlines will show how race continues to be a perplexing issue in our society. And it shouldn’t be. But we need examples of how to navigate the complexities of race and McBride’s powerful memoir shows us how.

His deep love – and appreciation – for his mother and coming to terms with her story while still standing in his own truth as a Black man is instructive and inspiring…and a reminder that there is nothing greater than love.

I have bought multiple copies of One Drop as gifts for biracial family members, as well as friends.

Broyard is the daughter of Anatole Broyard, celebrated New York Times book critic in the 1960s and 70s. Only after his death did even his wealthy white wife and mixed children discover his Black heritage. The public—self included—was equally shocked.

Bliss Boyard researches his Louisiana roots, meets her Black cousins, and writes a fascinating, deeply personal story of “race,” showing its often bizarre contours as some family members may be classified as “white,” others “colored” or any number of other categorizations, from “octoroon” on.

A healing narrative, beautifully told.

Scholars Lewis and Ardizzone write a deeply researched but popularly written non-fiction account of a major 1924 scandal: the marriage of a wealthy white scion of a prominent New York Family to a “colored” woman, who works as a servant.

The trial of the title is one in which the new husband, prodded by his father, sues his wife for annulment, charging that she deceived him about her racial identity.

It is clear she didn’t, but will his money and position dictate the trial’s results? The book probes deeply into racial identity, how it’s defined, and what it means to be Black, white—or ambiguously both.

A page-turner I read in a day and a half.

This book really helped me to look beyond slave trading merchants’ papers to think about the lived realities of the slave trade for those merchants’ victims.

Smallwood follows enslaved people from their initial sale on the African coast, aboard the slave ships, and then through their sale and seasoning in the English Americas—a model that brilliantly exposes the multi-staged way that captive Africans were commodified within the slave trade.

Saltwater Slavery also details the experiences of enslaved people within the trade, especially the mental and physical trauma that they suffered aboard the slave ships. 

This book fills a gap that I didn’t know was missing until I read it.

Not much has been written documenting the history of Black Africans in 20th/21st Century London, but Jimi Famurewa covers the migration, the cultural contributions, the food, the music, the community…ah, it really covers a lot.

Non-fiction is never really my go-to but is immensely readable and the research is thorough and sharp. It filled in some the gaps in the word-of-mouth anecdotes you hear from the older generation, as well as introduced me to corners of our history that I wasn’t as familiar with.

Dominion is a unique black speculative fiction that integrates stories from prominent voices from Africa and the diaspora, including Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Dare Segun Falowo, Mame Bougouma Diene, Dilma Dila, and more. Featuring a foreword by Tananarive Due, the award-winning anthology offers African spirituality, magical realism, Afrofuturistic stories, dystopian worlds and tales that confront in many ways colonialism, social injustice, and capitalism.  

This edited volume studies Black festive traditions in the Americas that are rooted in African interpretations of early-modern Iberian customs. It shows how, from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved and free Africans in the Americas used Catholic brotherhoods as spaces for cultural and religious expression, social organization, and mutual aid. By demonstrating that the syncretic development of certain Black performance traditions in the Americas is a phenomenon that already set in on African soil, it breaks with previous scholarship that (mis)interpreted these festive traditions in the Americas as new, Creole syncretisms. I am convinced that this pioneering book will strongly affect the way future generations of scholars will come to understand Black cultural and religious identity formation in the Americas.

Omenana to Infinity is an anthology of collected works formerly published in Omenana Magazine. The anthology is edited by Mazi Nwonwu and Chinelo Onwualu, like the magazine its stories are culled from. The duo also founded and edited the magazine which is the first African, exclusively speculative fiction magazine. It's important to me because it contains some of the earliest works of speculative short fiction by African writers I would read as an issue of a magazine and did a great lot in platforming speculative fiction writers on the continent. 

This book is a fascinating and well-written book on ‘gender refugees’ –people who make their claim for asylum based on their gender identity.

The book illuminates these refugees’ unique and challenging journeys as gender refugees, from their reasons for leaving their countries, the various violences in the asylum system, the South Africa they imagined, and the South Africa they experienced.

The book de facto deals with urban refugees. South Africa does not practice a system of encampment, while nearly all the participants in the research reside in Cape Town and Johannesburg.