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.
bell hooks, 1990
From Yearning (1990), bell hooks's essay on the political work of Black aesthetics — particularly Black home-making, which she argues operated, under conditions of segregation, as a site of subversiv…
Cedric J. Robinson, 1983
Robinson's 1983 magnum opus argues that Marxism, as it developed in Europe, did not have the conceptual equipment to explain the Black radical tradition — and that the Black radical tradition was, th…
Aimé Césaire, 1950
Césaire's 1950 indictment of European colonialism — and of the European humanism that produced it. A short book, an angry book, and one of the founding texts of the Négritude movement. Reads like a v…
Frank B. Wilderson III, 2020
Wilderson's 2020 memoir-cum-theory exposition is the most accessible introduction to the controversial theoretical position called Afropessimism. The book is half autobiography, half philosophical ar…
Assata Shakur, 1987
Assata Shakur's 1987 memoir, written in exile in Cuba after her 1979 escape from a New Jersey prison. The book reads as one long sentence: the political education of a Black woman who joined the Blac…
Kwame Nkrumah, 1965
Nkrumah's 1965 book named a phenomenon — the persistence of imperial economic control after the lowering of imperial flags — and got him sanctioned by the United States State Department for naming it…
Ibram X. Kendi, 2016
Kendi's 2016 National Book Award winner traces the intellectual history of anti-Black racist ideas in America through five biographical figures, from Cotton Mather to Angela Davis. A long book, a use…
Eddie S. Glaude Jr., 2020
Glaude's 2020 reading of James Baldwin's later, less-celebrated work — particularly the writing from the 1970s and 1980s, after the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Medgar Evers —…
Stuart Hall, 2017
Stuart Hall's posthumous memoir, completed by his colleague Bill Schwarz from interviews conducted in the years before Hall's death in 2014. The book is the closest available account of how the found…
Walter Rodney, 1972
Rodney's 1972 thesis — that Africa's underdevelopment is not a natural condition but the active product of European exploitation, compounded by the African elites who collaborated with it — remains t…
Saidiya Hartman, 2007
Hartman's 2007 second book is structured as a travelogue — her journey along the slave route in Ghana — but it is read most usefully as a meditation on the impossibility of return, and on what it mea…
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, 2000
Linebaugh and Rediker's 2000 history of resistance to early Atlantic capitalism — pirates, runaway slaves, dispossessed European peasants, sailors — read as a single, multiracial proletariat that the…