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.
Eric Williams, 1944
Williams's 1944 thesis — that the abolition of British slavery was not driven by humanitarian conscience but by economic obsolescence — forced a revision of British imperial historiography that took …
Audre Lorde, 1984
Lorde's 1984 collection of essays and speeches — including 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House' and 'Uses of the Erotic' — is the single most-anthologized text in Black femini…
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, 2022
Táíwò's 2022 book reframes reparations from a domestic American settlement into a global infrastructure question — what the world built by transatlantic slavery and colonialism owes, structurally, to…
Booker T. Washington, 1901
Washington's 1901 autobiography is the founding text of the accommodationist tradition in Black American politics. To read it now, with the benefit of Du Bois's response and a century of consequences…
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1935
Du Bois's 1935 revision of Reconstruction historiography. The central thesis — that the post-Civil-War decade was a serious experiment in interracial democracy, sabotaged by the withdrawal of Norther…
Silvia Federici, 2004
Federici's 2004 reread of the transition to capitalism — arguing that the European witch hunts and the colonial enslavement of African and Indigenous peoples were two faces of the same process of pri…
C.L.R. James, 1938
James's 1938 history of the Haitian Revolution remains the definitive treatment of the only successful slave revolt in modern history. James reads Toussaint Louverture as a revolutionary statesman of…
Frantz Fanon, 1961
Fanon's 1961 final work — written as he was dying of leukemia, during the Algerian war of independence — diagnoses the psychology of colonization and the violence both inherent to the colonial relati…
Frantz Fanon, 1952
Fanon's first book — written in his late twenties, in the immediate aftermath of his medical training and his military service for France — is the psychiatric anatomy of how the Black subject is prod…
Angela Y. Davis, 1981
Davis's 1981 history of the U.S. women's movement, written from inside Black feminist scholarship and against the racial exclusions of the white women's movement she had documented at first hand. The…
Carter G. Woodson, 1933
Carter G. Woodson's 1933 indictment of the American school system is shorter than its reputation suggests and harder than its title implies. The book is a sustained argument that schooling, under con…
Achille Mbembe, 2019
Mbembe's 2019 essay collection — including the 2003 title essay, which named 'necropolitics' as a category of twenty-first-century political theory. The thesis: sovereignty in the contemporary world …