Thinking From Black: A Lexicon

"A monumental reflection in time, through blackness into light."
Steve McQueen, artist and Academy Award-winning filmmaker

“Thinking from Black performs the unworlding needed for alternate futures. It emancipates and facilitates meaning-making away from a colonialist 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, acclaimed poet, author and playwright

An essential work for Alchemy by Knopf, this book collects a living, breathing lexicon: words, terms, concepts, and ideas that take the multiplicity of Black life as the point of departure.

Thinking from Black: A Lexicon is an unusual reference book. Its contributors—the Practicing Refusal Collective—are visual artists, poets, dancers, historians, writers, architects, painters, theorists, activists, anthropologists, filmmakers, educators, and musicians. Each has engaged with the idea of a lexicon of Black living and taken up the invitation to think from Black in relation to their own medium.
    Some terms are enunciated in a poetic register—such as Redaction, Seeing, and Song. Some are aspirational—such as Solidarity, Garden, and Care. Some entries, such as BlackSound, Fantasy, Mathematics, and Dispossession, work in a more theoretical idiom. Words such as Gesture and Syncopation are composed of both text and drawings, and summon the body in motion. The word Time, which is defined twice, carries with it musicality, duration and refusal. Together, these definitions offer a sense of some of the many ways that Black people tend to each other and the world.
    Read in relation to each other, the terms create a rich, startling lexicon that is eclectic, elliptical, cross-genre, historical, speculative, and literary—a set of words, phrases, concepts, and ideas that are part of the many languages constituting and animating Black life. Thinking from Black is a book to be read with others, as it was created. It is a book to live and think and act with, in the world.

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.

Members include:

• Rizvana Bradley
• Dionne Brand
• Tina Campt
• Denise Ferreira da Silva
• Kaiama L. Glover
• Saidiya Hartman
• Arthur Jafa
• Canisia Lubrin
• Tavia Nyong'o
• Darieck Scott
• Christina Sharpe
• Maboula Soumahoro
• Deborah A. Thomas
• Françoise Vergès
• Alexander G. Weheliye
• Mabel O. Wilson