Reading the canon
Reviews of the texts that shaped decolonial thought. Each review links to Bookshop.org, where a small affiliate share supports independent bookstores and this archive.
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 varied, more theolo…
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 coherent object of …
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 Voice from the South.
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 movement had been doing wro…
Cheikh Anta Diop, 1974
Diop's defended doctoral thesis, translated into English by Mercer Cook in 1974. The argument: ancient Egypt was a Black African civilization, and the systematic European refusal to say so is politic…
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 1986
Ngũgĩ's 1986 declaration that he would no longer write fiction in English — a language imposed on him in colonial Kenya — and his argument for the centrality of language to political self-determinati…
Steve Biko, 1978
The collected essays of Steve Biko, killed in South African police custody at thirty in 1977. The book is the founding document of the Black Consciousness Movement and the clearest available statemen…
Saidiya Hartman, 1997
Hartman's 1997 first book — the dissertation that introduced 'the afterlife of slavery' as a concept and reorganized Black studies around it. The most-cited monograph in American Black studies of the…
Angela Y. Davis, 2003
Davis's 2003 short book — a hundred pages of distilled abolitionist argument — is the most widely-circulated single text in the contemporary prison-abolition tradition. Written for a general audience…
Carol Anderson, 2016
Carol Anderson's 2016 history reframes American racial politics around the recurring pattern of white reaction to Black advancement. The book argues that every period of Black political progress in U…
Christina Sharpe, 2016
Sharpe's 2016 book is one of the most-discussed works of contemporary Black studies. The wake of the title is the slave ship's wake — the disturbance the ship leaves in the water and the long mournin…
Robin D.G. Kelley, 2002
Kelley's 2002 history of the Black radical imagination — Marxist, surrealist, Pan-Africanist, feminist, abolitionist — argues that the political content of Black freedom struggles has always exceeded…