Black History Month | Reading List

Book strip #1

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  This Fiction Called Nigeria

  by Adéwálé Májà-Pearce

  In this groundbreaking work, the essayist and critic Adewale Maja-Pearce delivers a mordant verdict on Nigeria’s crisis of democracy. A mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, the most populous coun...
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  Decolonial Marxism

  by Walter Rodney

  Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

  Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean and o...
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  Darkwater

  by W. E. B. Du Bois

  Foreword by Manning Marable

  Introduction by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

  “I have been in the world, but not of it,” W.E.B. Du Bois begins this book, a continuation of the project he began in his celebrated work The Souls of Black Folk, describing the devastation of segr...
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  Black Meme

  by Legacy Russell

  In BLACK MEME, Legacy Russell, awardwinning author of the groundbreaking GLITCH FEMINISM, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and co...
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  A Kick in the Belly

  by Stella Dadzie

  The forgotten history of women slaves and their struggle for liberation.Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. In this riveting work of historical r...
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  Red Africa

  by Kevin Ochieng Okoth

  Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the...
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  The South

  by Adolph L. Reed Jr.

  Foreword by Barbara J. Fields

  The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but ...
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  The Common Wind

  by Julius S. Scott

  The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of o...
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  Organize, Fight, Win

  by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean

  Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete mater...
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  The Reckoning

  by Robin Blackburn

  The Age of Revolution (1776–1848) destroyed the main slave regimes of the Caribbean but a ‘Second Slavery’ surged in the US South, Cuba and Brazil, powered by demand for plantation produce and a sy...
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  Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity

  by Noel Ignatiev

  Foreword by David R. Roediger

  Edited by Geert Dhondt, Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan

  For sixty years, Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of “whiteness” — a social fiction and an unmitigated disaster for all working-class people. This new essay collection from the late fi...
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  Holding aloft the Banner of Ethiopia

  by Winston James

  Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Stokely Carmichael, Louis Farakhan—the roster of immigrants from the Caribbean who have made a profound impact on the development of radica...
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  The Haitian Revolution

  by Toussaint L'Ouverture

  Introduction by Jean-Bertrand Aristide

  Edited by Nick Nesbitt

  Toussaint L’Ouverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century, in which slaves rebelled against their masters and established the first black republic. In this colle...
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  Communities of Resistance

  by Ambalavaner Sivanandan

  Ambalavaner Sivanandan was one of Britain’s most influential radical thinkers. As Director of the Institute of Race Relations for forty years, his work changed the way that we think about race, rac...
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  Reclaiming the Black Past

  by Pero Dagbovie

  In this information overloaded twenty-first century, it seems impossible to fully discern or explain how we know about the past. But two things are certain. Whether we are conscious of it or not,...
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  Heart Of The Race

  by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe

  Introduction by Lola Okolosie

  Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting...
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  C.L.R. James

  by Paul Buhle

  Afterword by Paul Buhle and Lawrence Ware

  Foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley

  C.L.R. James was a protean 20th century Marxist intellectual, widely recognized as a pioneering scholar of slave revolt; a leading voice of Pan-Africanism; a peripatetic revolutionary and scholar w...
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  The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain

  by Ron Ramdin

  This is the first comprehensive historical perspective on the relationship between Black workers and the changing patterns of Britain’s labour needs. It places in an historical context the developm...
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  Development Arrested

  by Clyde Woods

  Foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

  How could the Mississippi Delta, one of the world’s most prolific cultural centres, be demolished by a predictable natural disaster? This revised edition of Clyde Woods’s classic book examines disa...
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  Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts

  by Jules Marchal

  Introduction by Adam Hochschild

  Translated by Martin Thom

  In the early twentieth century, the worldwide rubber boom led British entrepreneur Lord Leverhulme to the Belgian Congo. Warmly welcomed by the murderous regime of King Leopold II, Leverhulme set u...
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  Redemption Song

  by Mike Marqusee

  Foreword by Dave Zirin

  When Muhammad Ali died, many mourned the life of the greatest sportsman the world had ever seen. In Redemption Song, Mike Marqusee argues that Ali was not just a boxer but a remarkable political fi...
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  Beyond Black and White

  by Manning Marable

  Many in the US, including Barack Obama, have called for a 'post-racial' politics: yet race still divides the country politically, economically and socially.In this highly acclaimed work, Manning Ma...
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  Invisibility Blues

  by Michele Wallace

  First published in 1990, Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace’s considerations of the black experience in America include ...
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  If They Come in the Morning

  by Angela Davis

  The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America's most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Ange...
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  Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman

  by Michele Wallace

  Foreword by Jamilah Lemieux

  Originally published in 1978, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman caused a storm of controversy. Michele Wallace blasted the masculine biases of the black politics that emerged from the si...
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  The Beautiful Struggle

  by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  The Beautiful Struggle is an extraordinary memoir from the most important new voice in the US race debate and the author of New York Times bestseller list no. 1 Between the World and Me, hailed by ...
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  Frantz Fanon

  by David Macey

  Born in Martinique, Frantz Fanon (1925–61) trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. He had already experienced racism as a volunteer in the Free French Army, i...
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  News for All the People

  by Juan González and Joseph Torres

  From colonial newspapers to the Internet age, America’s racial divisions have played a central role in the creation of the country’s media system, just as the media has contributed to—and every so ...
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  Rumba on the River

  by Gary Stewart

  There had always been music along the banks of the Congo River—lutes and drums, the myriad instruments handed down from ancestors. But when Joseph Kabasele and his African Jazz went chop for chop w...
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  Toward Freedom

  by Touré Reed

  For many progressives, racial identities are the engine of American history, and by extension, contemporary politics. They, in short, want to separate race from class. While policymakers and pundit...
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  Abolition Geography

  by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

  Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, of...
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  Racecraft

  by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

  Praised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft "ought to be positioned," as Bookforum put it, "at the center of any discussion of race in American life." Most p...
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  Racial Fictions

  by Hazel V. Carby

  Drawing on a rich tapestry of historical analysis, literary criticism, and cultural theory, Hazel V. Carby interrogates our racial fictions, which have been constructed, maintained, and weaponized ...
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  After Black Lives Matter

  by Cedric G. Johnson

  Why did a movement as powerful as the one inspired by the murder of George Floyd fall short of securing its most militant demands? After Black Lives Matter argues that the core of the movement itse...
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  Cultures in Babylon

  by Hazel V. Carby

  Bringing together multi-award-winning author Hazel Carby’s most important and influential essays, Cultures in Babylon addresses the political dilemmas of representing Black women as sexual subjects...
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  Toussaint Louverture

  by C.L.R. James

  Illustrated by Sakina Karimjee and Nic Watts

  The end of slavery started in what was then San Domingo. In 1791, the enslaved people of the most prized French sugar plantation colony revolted against their masters. For over twelve years, agains...
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  What Is Antiracism?

  by Arun Kundnani

  Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and...
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  Making the Revolution Global

  by Theo Williams

  Making the Revolution Global shows how black radicals transformed socialist politics in Britain in the years before decolonisation. African and Caribbean activist-intellectuals, such as Amy Ashwood...
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  Elegy for Mary Turner

  by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams

  In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, ten black men and one black woman, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time, were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens. Through hauntingly det...