100 Books Like Community as Rebellion

This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”

Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.

Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.

She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.

What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?

When I first read this book, I had just started teaching gender in university classrooms and was studying gender training for my PhD research. This book crystallized for me what I found so fascinating and important about teaching and learning as a feminist.

In this book, the late great bell hooks weaves together personal experience with academic engagement in a way that is accessible and engaging. In dialogue with the iconic Brazilian education theorist Paolo Freire, she lays out her vision for education as a practice of freedom, as opposed to education that reinforces systems of domination. I assign parts of this book in my courses every year and recommend it to everyone interested in thinking about how education can be a liberatory practice.  

Although her father died when she was only nine, the great scholar of African American life and literature, Farah Jasmine Griffin has never forgotten his admonition to her: “Read until you understand.” In this beautiful book, Professor Griffin guides us to an understanding of the U.S. Constitution, Malcolm X, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, the artist Romare Bearden, and writers as different as the enslaved 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. As educators, we have read and re-read and read again. Every read reveals a new level of understanding and we are grateful for the journey on which Professor Griffin leads us.

This gorgeous book by microbiologist Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery is as beautiful to read as it is to hold—in your hands, in your heart. We can’t stop thinking about Montgomery’s key lesson: if you have a plant that is struggling, you figure out what environmental changes it needs to thrive—more or less water or sunlight, better soil. When people fail to flourish, we’re quick to blame the individual. As an African American woman, Montgomery makes us think about society and how we approach problems (do we compete or do we build a collaborative effort for a holistic solution?). Humans have much to discover from our photosynthesizing world: how plants learn—from their own kin, their friends, and their foes—and Montgomery helps us to understand the nature (literally) of teaching and learning.

Beyond Retention is a non-fiction title that has the same narrative as my novel Resilience. Through various stories of lived experience, this title brings to light all the issues of race and gender inequality in higher institutions. What makes this book special is that it doesn't focus only on faculty but deals with administrators as well. Every woman who is interested in a career in academia should have and read Beyond Retention, as it offers ways through which one can thrive and not just survive in higher education.

US elite universities are both an engine of inequality and an environment where inequality is particularly evident. 

In this book Harvard professor Abraham Jack explores how low-income students fare when accepted to a prestigious and expensive college.

The book distinguishes between the “privileged poor” who attended private high schools before arriving to campus and the “double disadvantaged” which come from underfunded, state schools. 

Through many interviews and everyday examples, Abraham Jack shows how inequality is both about income and social capital and demonstrates the complexity of creating a more just society in a country like the United States. 

Although the book is less relevant to understand other countries, this is social science at its best.

I love how this book examines white male cultural appropriation of Chinese Literature and does it to such an extreme extent that it becomes wonderfully absurd. Chou skillfully depicts the discomfort of being Ingrid Yang, a first-generation Taiwanese American woman and Ph.D candidate who is attempting to navigate the elite halls of academia where white men still have all the power.

But what I also appreciated was how Chou examines the main character’s own complicity in the fetishization of Asian women through her relationship with her subtly sketchy boyfriend. 

This book does a fantastic job of illustrating something that I explore in my own work: pro-slavery (and anti-Black) white Americans were not the only obstacles facing abolitionists in the fight for racial equality.

The abolitionist movement itself was often divided along racial lines. Black abolitionists pushed for radical, egalitarian change in all aspects of American life. When push came to shove, however, many of their white counterparts had a limit as to how far they would go.

Bell shows how this dynamic played out at progressive colleges like Oberlin before, during, and after the Civil War. The implications of this book, however, stretch far beyond those campuses–and far beyond that time.

The book captures the picture-perfect life of a brown-skinned immigrant who finds it all rose-tinted living it up in New York.

The scales fall after 9/11 when faced with shifting allegiances and overt suspicions. The author slowly builds up a gnawing tension as we wait for the protagonist to teeter over the edge, as the isolation and resentment eats away inside him spiraling into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The book touched me as a person of South Asian descent, having faced unconscious bias. The book delineates the perspective of “the other”, where the unfamiliar is made to feel like a convenient scapegoat in times of crisis.

However, there is more that unites us than divides us - and we can try to change the world one person at a time.

This is only a biography in the loosest sense, one of Afro-Cubans from the year slavery was abolished until an ugly racial massacre that claimed thousands of innocent victims. In 1892, José Martí famously declared that “There is no racial hatred because there are no races.” The following year he wrongly predicted that “In Cuba, there will never be a racial war.” Cuba’s independence myth was founded on the idea that there would be no white or black Cubans, only Cubans. Yet in 1912, two Afro-Cuban politicians, Pedro Ivonet and Evaristo Estenoz, both veterans of Cuba’s independence struggle, some of their followers, and thousands of Afro-Cubans in the wrong place at the wrong time, were massacred in a frenzy of racial hatred.