Fans pick 100 books like To Exist is to Resist

Next to a growing body of work on the centuries-old Black human and cultural presence in and contributions to Europe (see among others the work of David Olusoga, Peter Fryer, Paul Gilroy, Olivette Olete, and Jacqueline Nassy Brown), memoirs and autobiography provide an excellent means for understanding the Black lived experience in Europe. In line with a longer, transnational Black tradition of using the genre to counter Black invisibility in history writing and collective memory, such works often expertly combine personal narrative with historical research.

While countless other impressive examples exist (see e.g. Afua Hirsh) and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s work doesn’t fully qualify as a ‘memoir,’ I chose her work because of the honest and insightful way it addresses—and has fueled British discussions on—the meaning of citizenship for racialized subjects in the United Kingdom, and the roles class and the politics of memory play in this. As a time document of… show more.

Written in a riveting style, this book by Black British writer and photographer Johny Pitts likewise combines personal narrative with journalism and historical research. Pitts recounts his journey visiting numerous, often invisible Black urban communities across the European continent. By highlighting their lived experiences and identity formations, Pitts’ account challenges conventional understandings of ‘Black Europe’ and the ‘Black Atlantic.’ These are too often drawn from the Black British experience and its connections to the Americas, even though the majority of Europeans who identify (or are identified) as Black live on the continental mainland, speak languages other than English, and came to Europe after World War II. Memories of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade accordingly are not always central to their identities. Above all, the book uncovers the multi-layered and personal meanings of ‘Blackness,’ while underscoring the poignant ways in which those whom Pitts dubs as ‘Afropeans’ in individual European… show more.

As one of the first scholarly attempts to investigate the Black experience on a continental scale (as opposed to in individual European nations), this edited volume presents a good introduction to the multifaceted questions and approaches that emerge when studying this topic. Offering insights from various scholarly disciplines and 20th and 21st-century case studies from individual countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Britain, and the Netherlands, it provides thoughtful essays that explore the meanings of ‘Blackness’ and belonging in Europe, and the roles the local, national, global, and metaphysical play within (imaginary) diasporic discourse and identity. As such, it invites critical thinking about the strengths and limitations of the usability of ‘Black Europe’ as a concept and unit of analysis.   

This impressively well-researched study focuses on the reception of Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker in post-World War II Germany. Although it only marginally references the Black German perspective (for that I recommend among others the work of Tina Campt, Tiffany Florvil, and Fatima El-Tayeb), it skillfully shows how Europeans perceive notions of race and racism through the prism of (African) Americanization.

Gerund illuminates particularly how White Germans’ interactions with (Black) America can provide pivotal insights into the meaning of ‘Whiteness’ and ‘citizenship’ in a European national context. This matters, because this in turn shapes (mis)understandings of the Black European plight and thus what anti-racism activists are up against. Like the works by Black scholars on the Netherlands, such as Gloria Wekker’s White Innocence and Philomena Essed’s edited volume Dutch Racism, Gerund’s study contributes to our understanding of how (fighting) notions of race must include grasping… show more.

Millicent Johnson (Peaches) has a whimsical imagination and dreams of becoming an artist.

Being raised by her grandmother along with her cousins in 1970s Harlem, their summers are filled with the freedom to wander the neighborhood and get into all sorts of trouble.

Yes, it’s a middle-grade book. I first read this book in seventh grade. I’ve no idea how many books I’d read up until that point but it was literally in the hundreds. This was the first book I’d read that I didn’t have to fully engage my whole imagination.

It realistically reflected my actual life… from the corner store to playing the numbers to even the boys she liked. I loved Peaches’ life. She was me. This is the book that began my writing life…for real.

This book is unlike anything I’d ever read, but I desperately needed it. As the title suggests, the book flows with deep wisdom from within oceans. As a long-time resident of a landlocked state, I’ve always approached large bodies of water with a sense of awe (and, quite honestly, fear).

This creative nonfiction tells the story of possibility, kinship, and collective kindness available in the depths. The book itself is a technology for living well with others and ourselves.

For years, I read memoirs by single women in search of people who would joyfully and unapologetically own their single lives. I found several who were insightful and engaging but ultimately disappointing. Typically, they hedged–sure, they would say, they were fine with being single, but they were not about to commit to staying single. Some were gobsmacked to discover that single life could be fulfilling as if that were the most amazing thing imaginable.

Then, Keturah Kendrick published this book. Kendrick knew who she was from an early age. She owns her singlehood and all her other choices about how to live her life, such as not having children. She brilliantly shatters stereotypes about single people, and her critiques of popular culture are skillful and searing.

This book is reminiscent of Jean Toomer’s Cane. It blurs the lines between poetry, history, and the blues. Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets are at the heart of a book that is both breathtaking and spellbinding. But more than that, this book is a reclamation of the Black female body. Over the centuries the Black female body has been defined by everyone but the Black female. Williams redefines notions of beauty, dignity, and self-worth in a world that is antithetical to the Black female body. This book is a salvo across the bough of social, racial, and political history that has dehumanized Black life throughout the centuries. Not only does Williams, a Nashville native, reclaim all that has been distorted about the Black female body, she celebrates it as well.

Dabiri’s use of history and personal storytelling to deconstruct and illuminate the long story of Black hair is crucial in that it allows readers to understand that our Black hair has history. The movement against natural Black hair is rooted in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and our own structures of government have always backed the anti-blackness that criminalized, scapegoated, or invisibilized our hair; this book celebrates our natural hair but also serves as historical education, which is so important if we’re to see natural Black hair not as a stylish trend but as a necessary part of our liberation. Dabiri reminds us that, while our hair is so often used as a weapon against us, it also has the power to liberate us.

Erika Edwards decenters the study of the African diaspora in Argentina from Buenos Aires by studying Cordoba, at the geographic heart of this country. The author employs gender as a structuring category of understanding conceptions of race, as she examines the actions of Black women who shaped their own sexual experiences and marriage patterns, creating new forms of identity based on the changing conceptions of race and law at the time, as Argentina was transitioning from colony to nation. In doing so, Edwards charters a process beginning in nineteenth-century Cordoba, which then became one of the keys to understanding a gendered conception of Blackness in modern Argentina.