The archive
Texts the dominant story under-stocked. Filterable by region, era, and theme. Public-domain works are reproduced in full; in-copyright works are excerpted with source links.
Edward W. Said, 1978
The opening of Said's 1978 book, which named — and reorganized around — the Western academic and literary apparatus that produces 'the Orient' as a category of European …
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Aimé Césaire, 1939
From the long poem first published in Volontés in 1939 — the founding text of Négritude, written by a colonial subject of Martinique on his way back from Paris. Both an …
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Booker T. Washington, 1901
Washington's 1895 address at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, reprinted as Chapter XIV of his 1901 autobiography. The speech that Du Bois would later name 'the A…
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Cheikh Anta Diop, 1974
Diop's argument, defended at his 1960 Sorbonne doctoral examination and reissued in English in 1974, that ancient Egypt was a Black African civilization — and that the s…
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W.E.B. Du Bois, 1935
The closing chapter of Du Bois's 1935 monumental revision of Reconstruction historiography. The chapter is an audit of how American textbooks were taught to lie about th…
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James Weldon Johnson, 1900
James Weldon Johnson's 1900 hymn, set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson. Adopted as the Black National Anthem by the NAACP in 1919. Three stanzas of memory, …
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