This update is long overdue, but here it goes. Recently, I wrote the Foreword of Warwick University Sociologist Akwugo Emejulu’s Fugitive Feminism, which was recently published by Silver Press, an independent feminist publisher based in London, England. Fugitive Feminism is a detailed and timely manifesto on Black feminism about how the concept of humanity is contested and challenged. The text expresses Emejulu’s personal and intellectual journey as a Black feminist scholar committed to expanding the discourse of freedom. Her prose is a necessary interjection of Black studies as a praxis has many complicated layers. As I wrote in the Foreword, the book is:
“A reminder that Black feminism can be a promise, even if the world that we have inherited is so perilous. Fugitive Feminism is a bricolage: an intellectual imprint and philosophical harmony between what it means to flee and conjure a world where we are set free.”
I was in conversation on 27 October for the book launch at the London Review of Books. One of the things that were rewarding about contributing to the text was that I took part in editing it for Silver Press. As someone who has been working part-time for their editorial team over the past several months, I have contributed to their blog posts, including a reading list and the history of the reproductive justice movement.
In case you haven’t had a chance to, you can read some of my most recent essays on Black Radical thought and the history of medicine that has been guiding me through my book writing:
The Nation Magazine | Learning and Healing in the Archive of Black Thought
Africa is a Country | Reading List on Endemic Diseases
If you want to brush up on your German and understand the science of noise, gentrification in Berlin, and why Germans love the quiet, check out these two articles:
Berliner Zeitung | Warum lieben die Deutschen die Stille?
Der Freitag | Lärm-Diskriminierung: Warum sind die Deutschen so auf Stille erpicht?
A Read
I’m reading Rachel Aviv’s Strangers to Ourselves, a text that explores how the mentally ill discuss their disorders and the ways that psychotherapy shapes their lives. Her prose is undergirded by history and compassion, and provides a crucial window into how people make sense of their mental state.
As some of you know, I read poems every day, especially ones that allow me to work through the present, the deep work of trauma, and the beauty of sensuality. Eduardo C. Corral, poet, and author of Guillotine, illuminates the tender history of sexuality. In his recent poem, “Lines Written During My Second Pandemic,” he combs through the dredges of loneliness. Corral notes:
Like rough trade, loneliness won’t kiss you.
Loneliness is crouched in a tree, afraid of dirt.
Another poet that has recently caught my attention is Dujie Tahat, who excels in providing thick and sensual descriptions. In “On Desire,” they write, “I’m searching for god when I oil my body in the mirror.” This is the energy we should all have.
There are so many intriguing essays about the past. And as a historian, I am especially moved by the people and the spirits that are left out. I highly recommend Jennifer Wilson’s “The Haunted Past,” which unearths how ghosts feature in the oral stories of the formerly enslaved. Wilson’s prose is arresting. She states:
“Yet what comes through the most in these stories is how often the tellers recall being told them as children by their elders. These ghost stories were many things: containers for a syncretic spirituality, oral histories of the dead, cathartic narratives in which people like them had magical encounters that took them away from the drudgery of daily life.”
In the Archives
Recently, while conducting research for a book, I came across Sojourner, a feminist journal that ran from 1975 until 2022, scrolling through their earlier editions so that I could get a sense of their editions from the 1980s. At the same time, reading one of their issues from 1985, the publication lists a set of anti-abortion crimes that were occurring during this period. They were particularly aggressive in drafting anti-abortion legislation throughout the United States. Page 14 was particularly harrowing when we consider the lengths of the anti-choice movement; it bombed abortion clinics and even went so far as to describe condoms as “little concentration camps.” Here is the archival clip:
And
These clippings remind us that pro-choice activists cannot afford to be apathetic about abortion. Instead, we must remain conscious of this history to organize with a well-informed strategy.
With Radical Love,