FREE RESOURCES TO AID IN BLACK STUDY (I will update this as I go along):

‘Faces at the Bottom of the Well’ by Derrick Bell

The text argues through allegory that racism is a permanent fixture of the United States. Best of all it is Black science and speculative fiction that conveys theory- critical race theory.

https://uniteyouthdublin.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/facesatbottomofw00bellrich.pdf

“Flesh in the Machine: She’s Egungun Again” by Jennifer A. González

This is an art analysis of artist Wangechi Mutu’s work.

https://havc.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/10.%20Wangechi%20Mutu-Reduced.pdf

Piece: Wangechi Mutu, "She's Egungun Again", 2005, Ink, acrylic, collage and contact paper on mylar, 87" x 52 1/2"

“Bye, Bye Black Girl: Lorna Simpson’s Figurative Retreat” by Huey Copeland

This work analyzes artist Lorna Simpsons’ work and along with her works reception by the white art world; it is complicated.

Guarded Conditions, Lorna Simpson, 1989

http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2013/08/bye-bye-black-girl-lorna-simpson-en/

“The Race for Theory” by Barbara Christian

“I think we need to read the works of our writers in our various ways and remain open to the intricacies of the intersection of language, class, race, and gender in the literature.”

https://pullias.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/christian.pdf

“Coming Apart” by Alice Walker

In this narrative that addresses the concern of Black gender, sexuality and the relationality between Black women and men, Alice Walker coins “Womanism.”

http://feminist-reprise.org/docs/WALKER_TBTN.pdf

“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” by Audre Lorde

This concise essay discusses Black women, particularly Black queer women’s relationship with the erotic as a particular labor. Lorde critiques pornography and addresses consent.

http://www.peacewithpurpose.org/uploads/8/2/1/6/8216786/audre_lorde_cool-beans.pdf

“Black Anality” by Jennifer Nash

“The essay attends to the “other” black hole—the one that is both over-determining and undertheorized—& asks how Black sexualities generally, & Black female sexualities particularly, become tethered... to the anus.”

https://www.docdroid.net/51gFbYD/black-anality-pdf

‘Assata: An Autobiography’ by Assata Shakur

This book is an autobiography written by revolutionary activist and escaped political prisoner Assata Shakur. She was a former Black Panther Party member and a member of the Black Liberation Army.

https://ia803003.us.archive.org/27/items/Assata/assata%20shakur%20an%20biography.pdf

‘The Black Atlantic’ by Paul Gilroy

“The history of the Black Atlantic yields a course of lessons as to the instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade.”

(Think of Blackness through terms of modernity)

http://kemetdevelopment.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Paul-Gilroy-The-Black-Atlantic.pdf

“”Everything I know about being femme I learned from Sula”
or
Toward a Black Femme-inist Criticism”
by Sydney Fonteyn Lewis*

This looks toward Toni Morrison’s Sula as a site where the complexities of Black femme identity are articulated and delineated.

http://sites.uci.edu/transscripts/files/2014/10/2012_02_09.pdf

‘Scenes of Subjection’ by Saidiya Hartman

“Therefore, rather than try to convey the routinized violence of slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes...”

https://thebasebk.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/saidiya-hartman-scenes-of-subjection-terror-slavery-and-selfmaking-in-nineteenthcentury-america-1.pdf

‘Black Marxism’ by Cedric J. Robinson

“The Black Radical Tradition was an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle.”

https://libcom.org/files/Black%20Marxism-Cedric%20J.%20Robinson.pdf

Fred Moten’s Lecture at Three Walls https://m.soundcloud.com/threewallls/fred-moton-lecture-3-13-14

Accompanied by:

http://haroldmendez.com/filter/Fred-Moten/Fred-Moten-but-I-sound-better-since-you-cut-my-throat

Saidiya Hartman & Fred Moten at Episode 6: Make a Way Out of No Way 2014 https://vimeo.com/167878745 

Tina Campt: Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity

"This talk uses a black feminist conception of practice to think beyond... notions of resistance as the primary model for understanding the relationship of marginalized subjects to power." https://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/tina-campt-black-feminist-futures-and-the-practice-of-fugitivity/

”The B-Side of Blackness:
SEARCHING IN SOUND FOR THE LOUDNESS AND QUIET OF MOURNING”

By Zandria F. Robinson

“I wanted to mourn loudly, for myself and for the others, just like I’d wanted to catch the holy ghost as a child, and so when I died, I did.”

https://believermag.com/the-b-side-of-blackness/

‘The Black Body in Ecstasy’ (The Intro, which is rich)

Jennifer C. Nash

“Nash’s innovative readings of hardcore pornographic films from the 1970-1980s develop a new method of analyzing racialized pornography that focuses on BW's pleasures in Blackness”

https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/298/The-Black-Body-in-EcstasyReading-Race-Reading

The exhibition catalogue for Adrian Piper’s “Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967-1987”

“The works in this exhibit span twenty years, and testify to the remarkable intelligence and commitment of this artist.”

http://www.alternativemuseum.org/exh/archives/piper_0587.pdf

‘Black Power’ by Kwame Ture & Charles V. Hamilton

“The work defines Black Power, presents insights into the roots of racism in the United States and suggests a means of reforming the traditional political process for the future.”

https://mygaryislike.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/black-power-kwame-ture-and-charles-hamilton.pdf

WOMANISM:

Please visit @GoldWomyn’s website. She provides a wealth of resources “for Black girls considering womanism because feminism is not enuf.“

She also provides a Womanist packet!

‘’A Taste for Brown Sugar’ (The Preface and Intro)

By Mireille Miller-Young

“It is based on Mireille Miller-Young's extensive archival research and her interviews with dozens of women who have worked in the adult entertainment industry since the 1980s.”

https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/200/A-Taste-for-Brown-SugarBlack-Women-in-Pornography

Please check out @BlkWomenRadical’s Black and Asian-American Feminist Solidarities: A Reading List: http://bit.ly/2ZiO8Q4 

“On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre : Black Studies Toward the Human Project” by Sylvia Wynter

Wynter discusses the contemporary genre of the Human and Black Studies.

https://trueleappress.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/wynter-on-how-we-mistook-the-map-for-the-territory.pdf

Shared by @autotheoryqueen

“Coming out of the long tradition of Freedom Schools, I focused on these three questions as an organizer....”

- @tourmaliiine

https://www.vogue.com/article/filmmaker-and-activist-tourmaline-on-how-to-freedom-dream/amp?__twitter_impression=true

“Venus in Two Acts”
by Saidiya Hartman

“This essay examines the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery and wrestles with the impossibility of discovering anything about her that hasn’t already been stated.”

https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/1/2296/files/2017/09/Saidiya-Hartman-Venus-in-Two-Acts-1a1v7bq.pdf

“The Time of Slavery” by Saidiya Hartman

“...to remember is as much the faith it bespeaks in the redressive capacities of memory, as the confidence it betrays in the founding distinction or break between then and now.”

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/ontheroadtocollapse/syllabus2018_19/hartman_timeofslavery.pdf

“A Glossary of Haunting” by Eve Tuck & C. Ree

“This is a glossary written by two women, both theorists and artists, in the first person singular.”

“ ...about righting (and sometimes wronging) wrongs; about hauntings, mercy...”

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557744ffe4b013bae3b7af63/t/557f2d6ce4b029eb4288a2f8/1434398060958/Tuck+%26+Ree%2C+A+Glossary+of+Haunting.pdf

The Feminist Art Coalition presents “Notes on Feminisms” with an essay by Saidiya Hartman entitled “The Plot of Her Undoing”

“The plot of her undoing begins with his dominion.”

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c805bf0d86cc90a02b81cdc/t/5db8b219a910fa05af05dbf4/1572385305368/NotesOnFeminism-2_SaidiyaHartman.pdf

“Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity” by C. Riley Snorton

“in this book “trans” is more about a movement with no clear origin & no point of arrival, & “Blackness” signifies upon an enveloping environment & condition of possibility.”

https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/2019-03-17_5c8e04a08bf86_c-riley-snorton-black-on-both-sides-a-racial-history-of-trans-identity.pdf

“Putting Hypersexuality to Work: Black Women and Illicit Eroticism in Pornography” by Mireille Miller Young

“In this article I examine the structural inequalities and social biases Black women face in the adult industry.”

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.885.321&rep=rep1&type=pdf

“Africa Speaks?: Black Monsters
and Revisionary History in
Horror Films” by Arlette Hernandez

“This paper analyzes three [horror] films... within the context of postcolonial theory.”

http://bsuenglish.com/dlrOLD/current/issue4_hernandez.pdf

“Black Masculinities and Postmodern Horror” by Jessica Baker Kee

“I employ Kristeva’s (1992) theories of affect and abjec-tion to analyze two postmodern horror films (i.e., Night of the Living Dead, 1968, and Candyman, 1992).”

http://vcg.emitto.net/index.php/vcg/article/view/94/96

“Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman” by Anne Anlin Cheng

“This essay is driven by the haunting of a different kind of racialized female body whose “flesh” survives through abstract and synthetic... means...”

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bc849e8c2ff615809f5d3a7/t/5cb09761a4222f855ffaa1cc/1555076994140/Ornamentalism.pdf

SHORT FILM:

‘En Vogue’ directed by Jenn Nkiru

“Study of voguing and ballroom subculture.”

https://vimeo.com/99941572 

‘Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture’ (The Intro) by Tamura Lomax

“...Lomax traces the use of the jezebel trope in the black church and in black popular culture...”

https://www.dukeupress.edu/jezebel-unhinged

VIDEO (Art) :

“Can an artist induce trauma to fight trauma?”

“Artist Doreen Garner forces audiences to face the profound racism underlying the life and work of Dr. J. Marion Sims.”

https://art21.org/watch/new-york-close-up/doreen-garner-sculpts-our-trauma/

“Black Ontology and the Love of Blackness” from @LiquidBlackness (Volume 3, issue 6 DECEMBER 2016)

This “...was conceived as the culmination of a research project on Arthur Jafa’s 2013 essay film ‘Dreams are colder than Death’.”

http://liquidblackness.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/LB6-FINAL.pdf

An audiovisual piece & essay by @thinglygrammar on what I call "JAWN THEORY”:

"A jawn needs no explanation, bc even if she or they are considered excessive or nothing at all, by definition she or they are everything; a person, a place, or a thing."

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/jawn-theory

ARTIST:

@idee_fixe_ is a Detroit-based harpist, singer, artist, organizer and femme queen.



http://www.kresgeartsindetroit.org/portfolio-posts/ahya-simone

‘Listening to Images’ by Tina Campt

This text “explores the lower frequencies of transfiguration en- acted at the level of the quotidian, in the everyday traffic of black folks with objects that are both mundane and special: photographs.”

https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-6270-8_601.pdf

The previous reading is the intro.

‘Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe’ (Intro) by Tina Campt

“This book tries to understand the complex relationship between how Black people image and how they imagine themselves.”

https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-5074-3_601.pdf

“Love Is The Message, the Plan Is Death” by Arthur Jafa & Tina Campt

This is a conversation between Jafa and Campt regarding Jafa’s seven-minute short film “Love Is The Message, the Plan Is Death.”

http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_126451.pdf

“Black visuality & the practice of refusal” by Tina Campt

“This article engages the practice of refusal collaboratively articulated by the Practicing Refusal Collective.”

https://www.womenandperformance.org/ampersand/29-1/campt

Phonic Substance/Arthur Jafa’s playlist for Campt’s words
https://www.womenandperformance.org/29-1/jafa 

Black Visual Frequency: A Glossary
By Tina Campt

“Tina Campt’s blog posts... will seek to define a series of keywords that Campt finds crucial to thinking with, through, and alongside contemporary articulations of Black visuality.”

(Go to each post)

https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/series/154906_black_visual_frequency_a_glossary

“Surface-becoming: Lyle Ashton Harris and brown jouissance” by Amber Musser

“In Billie #21, it is significant that many of the elements that shine—pearls, eye shadow, and lipstick—decorate or cover Harris’s body.”

https://www.womenandperformance.org/bonus-articles-1/28-1-harris

“Introduction: Skin, Surface, Sensorium” by Uri McMillan

“In short, the authors and artists featured here prompt us to ask: how have we failed to perceive the liminal, luscious, and dark points of possibility summoned by the surface?”

https://www.womenandperformance.org/bonus-articles-1/mcmillan-28-1

“Reading and Feeling after Scenes of Subjection” by Sampada Aranke & Nikolas Oscar Sparks

“‘Scenes of Subjection’s’ publication marked a moment in which the language of blackness and performance entered our critical vocabularies anew.”

https://www.womenandperformance.org/bonus-articles-1/27-1-introduction

‘Ghostly Matters’ (Intro and Chapter 1) by Avery Gordon

“Haunting is a frightening experience. It always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present.”

https://people.ucsc.edu/~stamp/200a/FILM_200A/Readings_files/Gordon,%20Ghostly%20Matters.pdf

‘The Archive and the Repertoire’ by Diana Taylor

“Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowl- edge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated... Is performance always and only about embodiment?”

https://palestinianstudies.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/taylor-the-archive-and-the-reportoire.pdf

“Re-Framing Hottentot: Liberating Black Female Sexuality from the Mammy/Hottentot Bind” by Shaweta Nanda

“White,cis-hetero-patriarchal cultural & visual imagination still represents B. women either as asexual & maternal mammies or as the deviant ‘Other’”

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/8/4/161/htm

“The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances”
by André Lepecki

“ ...in order to probe re-enactments in dance as a mark of experimentation that defines contemporaneity”...there must be a “will to archive.”

https://www.lettere.uniroma1.it/sites/default/files/2260/42.2.lepecki.pdf

‘Black Skin, White Masks’ by Frantz Fanon

“Man is not.. a possibility of recapture or of negation. black is a black man; that is,as the result of a series of aberrations of affect,he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated.”

http://abahlali.org/files/__Black_Skin__White_Masks__Pluto_Classics_.pdf

‘We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement’ by Akinyele Umoja

“Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the Southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement.” - NYU Press

https://bibliotecadaluta.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/akinyele_omowale_umoja_we_will_shoot_back_armedb-ok-org.pdf

‘All About Love: New Visions’ by bell hooks

http://wtf.tw/ref/hooks.pdf 

“As the title ‘All About Love: New Visions’ indicates, we want to live in a culture where love can flourish. We yearn to end the lovelessness that is so pervasive in our society.”

Trap Door ed. by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, & Johanna Burton

“We are living in a time of trans visibility. Yet we are also living in a time of anti-trans violence. These entwined proclamations- lived in the flesh- frame the conversations...analyses”

https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/2019-03-31_5ca10a725996e_reina-gossett-trap-door-trans-cultural-production-and-the-politics-of-visibility.pdf

‘The Undercommons’ by Stefano Harney & Fred Moten

“In this series of essays” the authors “draw on the theory & practice of the Black Radical Tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social & political thought and aesthetic critique.”

https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf

“black (beyond negation)”
By KEGURO MACHARIA

“I am uninterested in investigating, documenting, theorizing, and inhabiting my own negation—black negation.”

https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/black-beyond-negation/

“Keisha Scarville, The Placelessness of Echoes (and kinship of shadows)” by Daniella Rose King and Keisha Scarville

“The Placelessness of Echoes (and kinship of shadows), 2016–2018, is an ongoing visual journey into the metaphysical depth of darkness.”

https://www.womenandperformance.org/ampersand/28-3-rose-king-scarville

Placelessness of Echoes (2019) by Keisha Scarville | BRIC Media Arts Fellowship, 2019

@CiteBlackWomen ‘s Season 2 Episode 1 featuring a conversation with Drs. Carole Boyce Davies, Yomaira Figueroa and Bedour Alagraa

https://m.soundcloud.com/user-211649525/s2e1-a-conversation-with-carole-boyce-davies-yomaira-figueroa-and-bedour-alagraa

"No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues” by Sylvia Wynter

“How did they come to conceive of what it means to be both human and North American in the kinds of terms (i.e. White, is Euroamerican culture and descent, middle-class...)”

http://carmenkynard.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/No-Humans-Involved-An-Open-Letter-to-My-Colleagues-by-SYLVIA-WYNTER.pdf

“The Combahee River Collective Statement” by Combahee River Collective

“As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”

https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf

“Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia” by Angela Davis

“... it is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.”

https://capturingthecrisis.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/afro-images-nostalgia-by-angela-y-davis.pdf

‘Women, Race & Class’ by Angela Y. Davis

“... they often failed to grasp the complexity of the slave woman’s condition.”

https://legalform.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/davis-women-race-class.pdf

‘Afropessimism: An Introduction’ (various authors)

“SLAVERY IS THE THRESHOLD OF THE POLITICAL WORLD, ABOLITION THE INTERMINABLE RADICALIZATION OF EVERY RADICAL MOVEMENT.”

https://www.ithaca.edu/sustainability/docs/anthony/Afropessimism.pdf

“The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism” by Jared Sexton

“...what is the nature of a human being whose human being is put into question radically and by definition...”

https://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jaredsextonarticle.pdf

‘Onticide: Afropessimism, Queer Theory, & Ethics’ by Calvin Warren

“The “black queer” throws into sharper relief a deep problem between ontology, freedom, and ethics.”

https://illwilleditions.noblogs.org/files/2015/09/Warren-Onticide-Afropessimism-Queer-Theory-and-Ethics-READ.pdf

“Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Trans. Studies”

“...each essay in this special issue, “Postpotsttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,” revolves around a particular keyword or concept.”

https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article/1/1-2/19/91761/Abjection

‘The Black Studies Reader’ edited by Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley & Claudine Michel

“Between 1968 and 1975 over five hundred academic units (programs and departments) offering Black Studies courses were in place across the country.”

http://armytage.net/pdsdata/[Rhoda_Barnes,_Patrick_Bellegarde-Smith,_Elsa_Bark(BookFi.org).pdf

“San Francisco State Strike 1968, Black Students & Third World Liberation Front”

“Two and a half years ago they began trying to get Black Studies instituted into the College...”

‘Black Feminist Thought’ by Patricia Hill Collins

“Black Feminist Thought as Critical Social Theory”

https://uniteyouthdublin.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/black-feminist-though-by-patricia-hill-collins.pdf

“Transitionings and Returnings” by Dora Silva Santana

Santana, ”a Brazilian Black trans woman...experiments with the poetics of Atlantic water to let the text...be a transitioning space of poetics-autoethnography-cosmology-water-energy-memory tissue.”

http://www.blackfeministpedagogies.com/uploads/2/5/5/9/25595205/santana.pdf

“Closing the Loop” by Aria Dean

RE: Selfies, Blackness and feminisms...

“As hooks notes, “white racist ideology has allowed white women to assume that the word women is synonymous with white women, for women of other races are perceived as others.””

https://thenewinquiry.com/closing-the-loop/

“The Case of Rihanna: Erotic Violence & Black Female Desire” by Nicole R. Fleetwood

“positioned... to show the tattoo of the gun aimed at her breast, & that her fingers claw into her flesh, commingle sexual pleasure & pain, erotic desire and violence.”

https://amerstudies.rutgers.edu/images/faculty_docs/Fleetwood_CaseofRihanna_AAR.pdf

“LEANING INTO INSECURITY AND UGLINESS AS AN ESSENTIAL POLITIC” by Da’Shaun Harrison ( @DashaunLH)

“It was when I developed a politic around fatness, desirability, and ugliness that I began to form a different relationship to the aforementioned terms...”

https://dashaunharrison.com/leaning-into-insecurity-and-ugliness-as-an-essential-politic/

“THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THICK AND FAT” by Da’Shaun Harrison ( @DashaunLH)

“On social media, it has been almost impossible to scroll through your timeline without someone being referred to as “thicc,” “thick,” or some other variation of the word.”

https://dashaunharrison.com/the-conflict-between-thick-and-fat/

“The "Batty" Politic” by Janell Hobson

“I assess representations of black women's derrieres, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic...”

https://www.mikemcguigan.com/uploads/4/4/2/6/44269247/black_female_body.pdf

“The unforgivable transgression of being Caster Semenya” by Tavia Nyong’o

“Was it her defenders who were perhaps embarrassed and ashamed by her exuberant embodiment, more than her?”

https://movementtheory2017.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/nyongo.pdf