Join us for the launch of "The Practicing Refusal Collective’s Thinking from Black: A Lexicon."
MoMA PS1, FSG Originals, Columbia University’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, The Institute for Research in African American Studies, and The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy present the launch of "The Practicing Refusal Collective’s Thinking From Black: A Lexicon."
With readings by the book's editors: Tina M. Campt, Kaiama L. Glover, Saidiya V. Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Cameron Rowland and Alexander G. Weheliye.
About the book:
Thinking from Black: A Lexicon
Here is an essential book of fierce, radical visions, full of language for changing the world.
Here is a stunning book that imagines words as much as it defines them, from "anarchy" to "world," "dreams" to "fire," "literature" to "theory," "breath" to "rage" to "tender."
Here is a timely book that enters the world at a critical moment, enlivening language as a space for living.
Here are 77 contributors from four continents and one archipelago - from Paris to Johannesburg, New York to Salvador, Bahia to London, Toronto to Kingston to Nairobi.
Here are prominent Black intellectuals and artists with offerings serious and playful, poetic, academic and musical, making language come alive in the face of violence and fascism.
Here is Thinking from Black. A work to be read with other people, as it was created. A book to live with, and think and act with, in the world.
“A monumental reflection in time, through blackness into light.” —Steve McQueen, artist and filmmaker
“Thinking from Black: A Lexicon performs the unworlding needed for alternate futures. The collection emancipates and facilitates meaning-making away from a colonist orientation toward a globalizing storytelling that sets new frequencies, and logics without outcome. In a moment of great cultural, political, and social uncertainty, Thinking from Black curates, animates, demonstrates how we can language our way to new beginnings. This collection is a necessary inspiration not to be refused.” —Claudia Rankine
About The Practicing Refusal Collective
The Practicing Refusal Collective is an international Black feminist forum of artists and scholars dedicated to initiating dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence and black futurity in the twenty-first century. Formed in 2015 by Professors Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman, the Collective comprises sixteen members from multiple disciplines of the humanities, including two Columbia faculty, four Barnard faculty, and ten additional members from nine universities in the US and Canada. In 2018, the Collective launched an ambitious program of transnational conversations under the title The Sojourner Project. The Project expands the conversations begun by the Collective by creating dialogues in a range of sites in Africa and its diasporas with local artists, activists, scholars and thinkers working to develop their own strategies for addressing black precarity, fungibility, and anti-black violence.
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