Books like Black Awakening in Capitalist America — picked by fans

Fanon is one of my heroes.

He was a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, political activist, philosopher, and a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front involved in the fight against French colonialism. He sadly died following a short illness when he was just 36 years old. He wrote two seminal books that had a profound effect on my understanding of the psychological impact of discrimination and colonisation on both the coloniser and the colonised.

I found his writing to have a visceral quality, and having come from a colonised country (Iraq) to live in the coloniser country (Britain), I could "feel" in my body and mind the psychodramas he was describing.

The first time I read Césaire, I was not prepared for his complete evisceration of Western colonialism. It compelled me to reexamine my understanding of Western culture and philosophy and to accept that colonialism is at the heart of modern Western civilization.  

Before reading Césaire, I tended to think of racism as a psychological problem that could be fixed through education or some similar individual intervention. After reading Césaire, I came to understand racism as a symptom of a broader colonial economic and political structure. 

I think Césaire’s most compelling and relevant argument is his interpretation of fascism as colonialism-turned-inward. Western powers practiced colonial policies on colonized people for centuries, with little protest among Western publics until fascists turned colonial methods against Western publics themselves.

The first time I read Cleaver, I winced at his controversial personal history of sexual violence, but when I re-read the book, I found Cleaver to be a fascinating prison intellectual with compelling theories about literature, history, and human nature. 

Because I read the book philosophically rather than for its literary merits, I found the organization of the book—which begins with personal letters—difficult to follow. The second time I read the book, I essentially read it backward, starting with the theoretical essays and moving to the examples, and the book made more sense. 

I do not fully accept Cleaver’s theories of race, gender, and sexuality, but there are enough nuggets of truth in his writing that I come back to this book over and over again. 

Thomas’ book taught me that, when we adopt a colonial analysis, we have to rethink every category of analysis: “masculinity” and “femininity,” “heterosexual” and homosexual,” and so on. I also came to accept that there is a deeply sadistic eroticism in all racial and colonial oppression.  

I learned that Western colonialism simultaneously positions African-descended people outside the category “human” while also projecting Western categories of gender and sexuality onto these colonized peoples in order to unjustifiably blame them for the worst behavior imaginable.  

Thomas convinced me that modern theories of gender and sexuality not only fail to provide sufficient critiques of oppression but that they re-inscribe oppressive conceptions of identity by smuggling colonial ideology in the back door, inspiring me to rethink everything I thought I knew about identity.

There are few publications that document how publishing makes it impossible for African authors to have the same possibilities as their white counterparts.

This is a great book about a young writer's obsession with a scandalised author and the reasons behind the latter's disappearance. The writing has an incantational cadence that is truly stunning, and Sarr never relents in his critique of the unsavoury treatment of African authors by Western publishers.

“Gitmo” is where the relationship between these nations gets concrete, through the protectorate (1902-1934), republican (1934-1959), and revolutionary eras (1959-present). This fine study gets down into the nitty-gritty of who labors for whom (Cubans for the U.S. military), who controls the physical space in and around a foreign military base (and the foreign military based in it), and the steadily growing class conflict in this flashpoint of empire leading up to the Revolution, followed by an odd stasis since then.

While the Black freedom struggle is often approached through the activism of Black males, the history of the struggle in Europe—like in the United States and elsewhere in the world—owes much to Black women, Black female scholar-activists, and Black feminist and Queer networks. Yet they remain woefully underrepresented in scholarship and collective memory.

I, therefore, chose this edited volume, because it uniquely presents the stories, intersectional experiences, and visions of contemporary Black female activists, artists, and scholars from across the continent. This not only uncovers the significant intellectual, political, social, and cultural contributions of Black women, but also expands definitions of (political) activism to include, among others, motherhood and the home.

Kamugisha, is an able representative of a new generation of scholars who offers a contemporary examination which presents some of the theoretical issues and ideas that inform Caribbean studies and history. The reader will get a good sense of some of the major historical contributors who have shaped Caribbean history, philosophy, and culture as they attempted to move “beyond” the colonial experience.

Williams mined volumes of government documents and the memories of survivors of the era in which the country’s most concentrated experiment in urban renewal came face to face with grassroots demands for deeper change. His book reveals the limits of liberalism, as well as dynamics within different groups pushing for social justice about how to negotiate with (or take on) power.

The late Pearson took a lot of heat as an African-American author for telling the truth about all sides of the Panther era. But somebody credible needed to do it, and he did it well  —  in a way that can help us approach modern-day political and police accountability protest with eyes wide open.