There is a present-day tendency to retreat into the realms of dystopia, of catastrophe and disaster, of failed states and fascism, of environmental collapse and economic apocalypse. This tendency is neither wrong nor mistaken. Yet it is often suffocating, only adding to the pressurized dread of the era, offering no antidote to the plague of […]
Tag Archives: reading
Anarchy / Autonomy / Utopia
A Decade of Radical Black Reading
Soon after The Public Archive launched in 2010, we began featuring reading lists that, for the most part, appeared under the banner “Radical Black Reading.” To mark nearly a decade’s worth of publication, we’ve culled a number of entries from the lists, focussing on work that in our view deserves more attention while offering some direction […]
Radical Black Reading: Late summer, 2018
A few late summer’s reading suggestions, with a little nod to the impact of the revolutions of 1917 and 1968 on the Caribbean. In Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (Pluto) Charles Forsdick and Christian Hogsbjerg have produced what is arguably the most important biography of Louverture since CLR James’ magisterial Black […]
Reading Against Fascism
Soon after The Public Archive launched in 2010, we began featuring reading lists. Syllabi, some might call them, though regardless of the name, they were critically annotated compilations of texts grouped together under a number of general themes. “Reading Haiti,” for instance, gathered recently-published books that challenged mainstream media representations of the Black Republic and […]
10 Books for 2015
1. Amy Jacques Garvey, Garvey and Garveyism (Black Classic Press). Thanks and praise are due to Black Classic Press for reissuing Garvey and Garveyism, Amy Jacques Garvey’s remarkable biography of her husband, the Jamaican pan-Africanist Marcus Mosiah Garvey. Originally self-published in Kingston, Jamaica in 1963, Garvey and Garveyism is among the most lucid and inspired […]
Radical Black Reading: Summer 2013
The New York Times’ dismissive, error-strewn obituary of Una G. Mulzac, the late proprietor of Harlem’s now-closed Liberation Books, cast her as a cantankerous crank-pot holding anachronistic political beliefs. Yet for many people, folk like Mulzac were historians, vernacular archivists, and living repositories of pan-African memory. Places like Liberation Books – alongside San Francisco’s endangered […]