A counter-narrative library
An archive of primary-source documents, reviews of the canon (Fanon, Rodney, Ngugi, hooks, Lorde, Césaire, Du Bois), audio essays, and reader circles. The dominant story is well-funded. This is the other side of the page.
From the archive
Frederick Douglass, 1852
Douglass's 1852 Rochester address — invited to speak on the meaning of the Fourth of July, he asks instead what the holiday signifies to a people still in chai…
Read the document →Patrice Lumumba, 1960
Lumumba's unplanned reply at the Congolese independence ceremony, after King Baudouin had delivered a paternalistic speech praising Leopold II. Lumumba, prime …
Read the document →Kwame Nkrumah, 1965
Nkrumah's 1965 thesis that political independence in Africa, without economic sovereignty, produces a new form of imperial control — exercised through capital,…
Read the document →Recent reviews
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903
A review of the whole 1903 book — the fourteen essays and the closing 'sorrow song' chapter — beyond the famous opening on double consciousness. The book in its full shape is more…
Edward W. Said, 1978
Said's 1978 book is the founding text of postcolonial studies as a field. It documents, in granular detail, how European academic and literary discourse produced 'the Orient' as a…
Anna Julia Cooper (re-issue ed.), 1998
A 1998 academic re-issue of Cooper's writings, with apparatus by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan. The collection is the most accessible way into Cooper's full corpus beyond the 1892 …
bell hooks, 1981
bell hooks's first book, written while she was an undergraduate at Stanford and published when she was twenty-eight. The book named what the white-led second-wave feminist movemen…
In your ear
Read by Editorial board
Lorde's most-quoted line, recovered from the slogan into the argument it lives inside. Twenty-four minutes on the full essay, the conferenc…
Read by Editorial board
Twenty-two minutes drawing on Stuart Hall's posthumous memoir Familiar Stranger and the 1958 Notting Hill riots as the moment Hall identifi…
Read by A guest reader
A dramatic reading of Amílcar Cabral's 1970 Syracuse University address 'National Liberation and Culture,' framed by ten minutes of context…
Scheduled · opens with subscriptions
Hosted by Dr. A. Adebayo (visiting scholar, decolonial psychology)
We read 'The Fact of Blackness' — the chapter Fanon writes from inside the train compartment — together, and discuss what it me…
Read the schedule →Hosted by Prof. M. Stewart (development economics, retired)
Fifty years after How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, what does Rodney's framework tell us about contemporary China-Africa infrastructure dea…
Read the schedule →Hosted by Ms. L. Whitfield (poet, educator)
Sister Outsider, the essay 'The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.' We read closely; we discuss how Lorde's distinction between ang…
Read the schedule →