Resources

Audio/Podcasts/Albums

Abolition Science

Abolition Science is an abolitionist project that envisions a science and math delinked from racial capitalism, imperialism, and oppression - a science and math that serves all people.

Ayoni Unmoved (A Black Woman Truth) Barking Owl Sessions x Ayoni

A sonic offering about navigating misogynoir with radical self-love.

This podcast is hosted by Black women, nonbinary and gender variant folks who discusse topics related love, sex, and dating. The pdocast have different episode sectors that unpack problematic childhood songs, “animals do be gay”; a sector where hosts discuss queerness and gender in other animal species, and current political/social issues that impact reproductive health, Black women, nonbinary, gender variant and queer folks.

JJJJJerome Ellis - The Clearing | Spotify | Bandcamp

A unique, vibrant, and thoughtful album that explores the nexus point of differently abled bodies, temporality, artistry, and Blackness. Ellis touches upon major thinkers and themes brought up in class.

QueerWOC Podcast

Podcast’s host, Dr. Money describes their podcast as an audible syllabus that discusses and educates Queer women of color on topics related to mental health, community building, and sociopolitical issues that effect Queer Black, Indigenous and folks of color. This podcast is rooted in healing and cultivating a learning space for Queer women of color.

We Be Imagining Podcast

The We Be Imagining Podcast examines the intersection of race, tech, surveillance, gender and disability in the COVID-19 era.

Film, Documentaries, & Visual Projects

**Akomfrah, John, The Last Angel of History. (1996) (Black Audio Film Collective).**

This classic documentary film on Black rhetoric, music and technology centers Afrofuturism, music and memory as the key to unlocking and decoding diasporic connections and messages. Featuring interviews with George Clinton, Octavia Butler, Greg Tate, DJ Spooky and numerous influential Black figures in multimodal creations, the “Data Thief” serves as the film’s narrator linking genres, images, sounds, and diasporic communities to disrupt linear cultural and historical narratives, notions of space and time travel, as well as erasure of Black cultures roots and future iterations. (Janelle Poe)

Black Futures: An Ode to Freedom

Black Futures is a video created by the Movement for Black Lives for the 2021 Black Futures Month that looks back at Freedom Summer 2020 and the powerful uprisings for racial justice all across the globe. The video transports us into far into the future to connect with the Black youth for whom “we loved in advance.”

Black Quantum Futurism

Camae Ayewa and Rasheeda Phillips use Afrofuturism, art, science, and Black thought to situate guerilla planning toward a decolonial, Black abolitionist future against colonial and settler disenfranchisement. Black Quantum Futurism, or BQF, is an art collective, publishing entity, musical endeavor, and technological weapon meant to preserve life by recognizing Black time as default. This project exists in many places at once, currently at the Vera List Center at the New School, online as a Black archive, and in other institutions worldwide. Their programming centers on art as activism and space-time marking as defense work for Black life. Their work is accessible online, through text, recorded music, and currently in New York. (OD Enobabor)

Critical Carceral Visualities

These projects examine the role of visual culture in shaping the (in)visibility of the carceral system. Taught through abolitionist pedagogies, the two included projects demonstrate possible ways to interpret images to illustrate carceral violence -- to render systemic harms legible and denaturalize the carceral state in visual culture. (Josh Adler)

Love is the Message, The Message is Death

“Love is the Message, The Message is Death” offers a powerfully moving montage of original and appropriated footage that explores the mix of joy and pain, transcendence and tragedy that characterize the African American experience. The video points to the ongoing violence against Black people that is foundational to U.S. history and continues to play out in the present. It also shows how Black Americans have taken these experiences, and created cultural, political and aesthetic achievements that are intrinsic to the national identity.”

Nichols, Nichelle How Dr. MLK Jr. dissuaded her from quitting Star Trek | Link 1 | Link 2

(Best of her character for those who have never seen the original Star Trek)

This moving interview features Nichelle Nichols talking about how she almost quit Star Trek because she thought its stories about space and the future were frivolous and more or less beneath her acting ability. She played a main character as a Black woman on TV and was treated as an equal member of the command crew of a starship despite the realities of 1960. in The weekend that she turned in her letter or resignation, she was by total coincidence confronted by Martin Luther King Jr., who told her that it was the only tv show he let his children watch. Literally because it showed Black people in the future. Her shock at this moment is moving and you can feel what she feels when she realizes how important her role was to Black people and especially to this Black person in particular, but the meaning she takes away from this, and the possibility of what hopeful fiction about the future means to a civil rights leader is downright profound. - JMB

Walker, Kara. An Audience (the trailer), 2014. Digital video (colour, sound). 27:18 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Kara Walker - An Audience (trailer)

On the last day of the showing of “A Subtlety” in the summer of 2014, artist Kara Walker had the audience of the exhibition covertly filmed. The 27-minute-long film premiered later that year in NYC and ran for several months. I haven’t seen it, nor been able to find it online. However, here’s the 5-minute trailer. An Audience is a subtle yet powerful flipping of the hypersexualised gaze Black women are subjected to. Walker’s Sphinx troubles the problem of consent as it pertains to Black women, in a world hinged on our historical sexual exploitation, where consent has been denied. An Audience allows the Sphinx —and Black women— to reclaim agency and reinstate the possibility of consent by seeing clearly how others attempt to misuse and abuse her. This is a transformational piece because it interrupts the exploitative narrative that racial capitalism has sold us, that we are static bodies to be photographed, exploited, pointed/ laughed at, and used for others' pleasures and purposes.

Women of Color Archive (WOCArchive) Website | Instagram

The Women of Color Archive (WOCArchive) is an intergenerational visual & aural based project that seeks to preserve the stories of our Black, Indigenous, and other matriarchs of color. This project began in 2016 with a single interview of abuelita Aída about her life in rural Veracruz, and continued to grow through submissions from high school students and community members of all ages. A selection of student created art pieces from the first cohort of submissions are currently housed through Weeksville Heritage Center in Brownsville, Brooklyn and newer entries can be viewed on our instagram page through the hashtag #MyWOCArchive. WOCArchive is a growing project and is currently accepting submissions. please visit our instagram for more details.

Texts/Journals/Books

**Alkalimat, A. (2021). The history of Black Studies. Pluto Press.**

How do we study Black people, not bodies? How do we research and sustain Black life against structural racism? Do we start our study from the drain of Africa or from the wealth of Kemet and Mansa Musa? Or even the (pending) emancipation of Black folks post the trans-Atlantic slave trade? These activist-oriented questions should be the guiding principle of a robust Black Studies department, program, and social movement. Dr. Abdul Alkalimat, Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Library Science at the University of Illinois- Champaign Urbana, is one of the founding scholars of Black studies in the United States. The text operates as an activist archive of Black Studies from its interdisciplinary inception to institutionalization. Alkalimat rejects a direct linear or chronological understanding of the field and instead insists on analyzing Black studies within specificities of geographies of the institutions that incorporated these courses, the political shifts that affected Black life and Black social movement, and finally, the radical commitment to historical materialism and its dialectical shortcomings as the discipline grows. The methodology Alkalimat uses is also a tradition of Black studies. Although the book is a history reader, his refusal toward standard citation practices within that discipline- such as shortened quotes, is upended with his long quote as context method choice. His analysis explores the intellectual labor of extending and opening Black thought gives away to the praxis of Black studies; the protection of Black humanity. The work consists of fifteen chapters, all of which address episodes in the Black social movement in the United States and how the nuanced ways the field responded, assisted, and sometimes hindered the liberation movement. As Alkalimat dedicates this work to the Black student activists today and his comrades of the past, this survey is a fantastic introduction to the activist history of Black studies within all of its dimensions.

**Audre, L. (2018). Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House. Vauxhall, London: PENGUIN UK.**

Lorde explained, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” It is through the collective voice that examines the varying intersectionalities that true transformative change can occur.

Critical Resistance’s reformist-reforms vs abolitionist reforms guide

Although directed towards policing, this handy guide may prove useful across a range of topics. Throughout the semester, people in the course returned to a tension in their life/work: how to make long-term, meaningful change while also working to ensure that people’s immediate needs could be met. Many expressed that working to provide for people’s immediate needs has meant further investment in the very structures that produce inequities, while future-oriented transformative changes may do little to alleviate people’s immediate needs. This one-pager demonstrates how immediate- and long-term needs may be achieved through transformative change.

Davis, Angela 1972. ‘Reflections on the Black Women’s Role in the community of Slaves.’ The Massachusetts Review Vol 13(1/2).

Davis highlights the myth of the matriarch in slavery is “a cruel misnomer” that didn’t exist then in the we may recognise Black matriarchs today, because “it implies stable kinship structures within which the mother exercises decisive power,” which “the slave system did not—and could not—engender or recognise,” (84, 82). Davis turns our attention away from this framing of the Black woman’s power to that of vital resistance conjurer and rebellion creator. Whether it was by organisation in the fields, whispers in kitchens or bare individual gumption, the slave revolts and maroon community formations across the Americas may have suffered if not for the actions of enslaved women. Davis also discusses consent and the reclamation of Black female sexuality from the deadly economies of others.

**DuBois, W.E.B. The Comet, 1920**

DuBois is known for his invention of the discipline of sociology, and his searing analyses of history and the inequality around the colorline. But some argue that in this less-known science fiction/speculative fiction short story that he actually helped to invent one of the first paradigms for Afrofuturism. People have argued that it is also a clear work of CRT, voice of color style narration. This deeply reflective work is about a comet that hits New York and kills almost everyone. A Black man rescues a rich and openly racist white woman from the rubble and despite their differences, the two manage to grow close in their journey out of the city. Realizing how much they have in common when their realities have both been completely shattered. What do you think happens when they finally cross the river and realize that the rest of the world is still very much alive?

**Gordon-Reed, A. (Ed.). (2020). Racism in America: A reader. Harvard University Press.**

This reader contains excerpts from 20 titles previously published by Harvard University Press spanning from 1992 to 2020. Authors featured include Toni Morrison, Khalil Gibran Muahammad, Elizabeth Hinton, Stuart Hall, Nicole R. Fleetwood, among others. Most, though not all, of the excerpts focus specifically on anti-Black racism. Although the focus of the collection is the United States, this reader provides valuable historical context about the violent forces of anti-Blackness, and the ways that Black resistance has always existed.

Guridy, Frank, History of Black Diasporic migration in the Americas: Forging Diaspora

Cuba's geographic proximity to the United States and its centrality to U.S. imperial designs following the War of 1898 led to the creation of a unique relationship between Afro-descended populations in the two countries. In Forging Diaspora, Frank Andre Guridy shows that the cross-national relationships nurtured by Afro-Cubans and black Americans helped to shape the political strategies of both groups as they attempted to overcome a shared history of oppression and enslavement.

Gyasi, Yaa, Homegoing

Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.

One of Oprah’s Best Books of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway award winner, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

**Kaba, M., Nopper, T. K., & Murakawa, N. (2021). We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Abolitionist Papers). Chicago , IL: Haymarket Books.**

Kaba details transformation through her work as an abolitionist organizer, while also highlighting that without a vision for transformational justice, harm will contour to be (re)created. It is through transformational justice that one is able to envision a world of endless possibilities.

Lanham, J. Drew Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves

Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a poem written and narrated by J. Dre Lanham. Published by Emergence Magazine in July 2021, this poem offers a balm, medicine and tonic for Black people looking for hope, levity, joy to sojourn in the wake. This poem offers meditative invitation to seek joy as a form of justice for ourselves, community and planet.

Putnam, Laura Radical Moves

"In the generations after emancipation, hundreds of thousands of African-descended working-class men and women left their homes in the British Caribbean to seek opportunity abroad: in the goldfields of Venezuela and the cane fields of Cuba, the canal construction in Panama, and the bustling city streets of Brooklyn. But in the 1920s and 1930s, racist nativism and a brutal cascade of antiblack immigration laws swept the hemisphere. Facing borders and barriers as never before, Afro-Caribbean migrants rethought allegiances of race, class, and empire. In Radical Moves, Lara Putnam takes readers from tin-roof tropical dancehalls to the elegant black-owned ballrooms of Jazz Age Harlem to trace the roots of the black-internationalist and anticolonial movements that would remake the twentieth century.

From Trinidad to 136th Street, these were years of great dreams and righteous demands. Praying or "jazzing," writing letters to the editor or letters home, Caribbean men and women tried on new ideas about the collective. The popular culture of black internationalism they created--from Marcus Garvey's UNIA to "regge" dances, Rastafarianism, and Joe Louis's worldwide fandom--still echoes in the present.”

**Ramírez D’Oleo, Dixa Caribbean/Gardener. (2021) , ASAP Journal.**

Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 U.S. Presidential election, at a time when many found themselves drawn to gardening and a return to the soil as a balm, distraction, and necessity, D’Oleo asks several Caribbean scholars to “put language and image their relationships to gardening, broadly speaking[,] . . . inspired by [her] interest in both el conuco (the garden plot) and el monte (the hills) in a Caribbean set against the plantation and tourist resorts that constantly encroach upon them.” (Introduction) This collection is de-colonial geography that also interrogates the way this locale and culture is often mis-represented and appropriated and exploited in scholarly and creative texts. JoiriMinaya, Nathalie Batraville, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Natalia Ortega Gamez, and Deborah Jack contribute to this multimodal, diasporic re/membering.

Ross, Janell. “Black History Month Has Ended. Here's What Experts Think the Black Future Will Look Like,” Time Magazine, Feb 2022.

Reflections on futurists during the end of Black History Month: a journalist interviews practitioners who use data and observation as well as imaginations fears and hopes to analyze what is to come, in this case specifically for Black folk. The experts range from statisticians and scientist types to science fiction writers and philosophers. The article covers climate change, the future of labor, and the possibility for Black people to one day reconnect with their dispossesd indigeneity. The message is that the most common predictions show us a bleak future for Black people, but it definitely doesn’t have to be that way. Really interesting perspective that encourages setting priorities and revealing obstacles through futurism, and takes science as seriously as science fiction.

Other Links

African American Policy Forum

Kimberlé Crenshaw, is a legal professor at Columbia and UCLA law schools, a foundational member of the legal scholars establishing Critical Race Theory (CRT) as methodology and practice, and person who coined the term “intersectionality” ( ). Crenshaw is also Co-founder and Executive Director of AAPF, “an innovative think tank that connects academics, activists and policy-makers to promote efforts to dismantle structural inequality[, . . .] and an organization dedicated to advancing and expanding racial justice, gender equality, and the indivisibility of human rights, both in the U.S. and internationally.” (Our Mission) AAPF has numerous initiatives, including #SayHerName to bring attention to the often overshadowed Black women victims of police brutality, #TruthBeTold, a direct response to the anti-CRT movement and Donald Trump’s Equity Gag Order (2020), as well as numerous educational programs and funds devoted to youth as well as workshops and digital media designed to engage wide publics.

**Aloziem, Ozy, “A dinner party game to spark your radical imagination” TEDxMileHigh**

This dinner party game is a way to exercise radical imagination and could make an excellent class activity. The social worker who created Ozy Aloziem, who specializes in community engagement, radical healing and radical imagination building,was hoping to inspire a game which could help me visualize a better world and imagine a more just future. Much of imagining a more just future for Black people and the disinherited of the world is to have the audacity to hope for something better while caring for yourself, and acknowledging the harm of the present world. It also gives participants an opportunity to use radical imagination to create their own Black Futures. This dinner game is meant to help participants “taste liberation,” and I think fits well with our curriculum.

Black Tech Policy Week 2022

Black Tech Futures Research Institute hosted a free virtual policy-week with various Black tech folks who held discussions surrounding: surveillance, censorship, digital social justice movements, tech in the health sector, etc. One of panels that stood out and crossed reference with this course’s reading was the “Black Women Public Interest Technologists talk about algorithms, censorship, surveillance, and security/safety issues affecting Black communities”-- this panel touched on various topics that were discussed during the Transformation and Technology week. The panel discussed how to include and hold stakeholders accountable in technology’s censorship and surveillance. Overall– the Black Tech Futures Research Institute is a great source for data, networking, and resources for technology public policy and innovation

Fractals: A Black Feminist Organizing and Movement Building Timeline

Fractals is an interactive resource developed by Black Feminist Future (BFF) to highlight the distinct trajectory of Black Feminisms in the US. Fractals is a growing and community resource that can be used to deepen our understanding of Black feminisms, key people, action points, cultural moments, and social movements spanning the 1800s to the present day.

Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work

The Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work is a collective of social workers from different parts of the U.S. who envision the entire field of social work becoming aligned with abolitionist principles. This network exists primarily as a virtual network and hosts webinars, compiles digital resources, and conducts research about the current landscape of abolitionist social work. This is a useful website for anyone interested in the abolition of the Prison-Industrial-Complex, as well as other targets of abolitionist movements. This website may also spark ideas about ways to build connections in a primarily virtual/digital space for envisioning futures.

The Texas Freedom Colonies Project

Founded by Urban Planner Andrea Roberts at Texas A&M University, the Texas Freedom Colonies Project exists as a project that aims to "prevent the erasure, destruction, and decay of cultural properties within Black settlements in partnership with descendant communities." The website documents and demonstrates how to do cultural preservation that highlights Black life and its relationship to the land in the United States. The portal also contains immense materials, including guides and a policy archive useful for Black land defense work to tools within urban planning and survey like Atlas.TI can be used to give dimensionality to Black placemaking as it is presented. This project is useful for scholar-activists, researchers, cultural workers, and community members who just want to reclaim lost and stolen histories. Dr. Roberts plans for this project to expand to protect Black settlements throughout the worldwide Black diaspora.

Rede Nacional de Feministas Antiproibicionistas (RENFA)

The National Network of Anti-Prohibitionist Feminists (RENFA) is a feminist, anti-racisit, supra-partisan and anti-capitalist political organization, created to network in the struggle for human rights and political empowerment of women and trans people. Our objective is to transform the models of control by the systems of racism, patriaaaarchy, and capitalism oppression, especially in the field of drug policies. We are organized in local collectives, currently in 11 states of the country (Brasil): AL, BA, CE, DF, MG, PA, PE, RJ, RN, RR, and SP.

upEND

upEND is a collaboration between The Center for the Study of Social Policy and the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Their focus is on abolishing family policing (commonly known as child welfare systems). Their website has numerous resources like grey literature reports, videos from webinars, and articles that explore the need for abolition. upEND explicitly centers Black and Indigenous women, children, and families in their calls for abolition. This website exemplifies ways that people working within institutions can amplify bolder visions that center Black communities.