“Octavia Butler teaches us,” explains Black playwright Ericka Dickerson-Despenza, “…that we have two options in Apocalypse: adapt or die.”
Global Black History
Editors: Marlene L. Daut, & Tao Leigh Goffe
Past Editors: Keisha N. Blain & Annette Joseph-Gabriel
Thelma King and the Call for Revolution
In 1963, a Panamanian assemblywoman took to Cuban radio to condemn the United States and its control of the Americas.
Quilting: An Archive of Hand, Eye, and Soul
Once, Black women employed textile arts both as a mutual aid network, and as a safe space to envision a Southern Black liberated life.
Sembène’s “Black Girl” Is a Ghost Story
Few know the film—the first feature-length film by a West African director—was based on a real-life incident, a real tragedy lost in colonial archives.
Necessary Housework: Dismantling the Master’s House
White supremacy tells us we do not belong, but we do have a place in history.
“Tell Real Stories”: Shawn Utsey on Racism and Psychotherapy
“Liberation begins in the mind… Black folks have never been given the opportunity to define our own reality.”
Nikki Giovanni on Rest, Love, and Care
“There is nothing supreme about being white.”
Love and Other Liberties
Libertie presents a revolutionary vision of what life could be like for Black women in the 19th century.
Nobody Verzuz a Nation
Though a new phenomenon, Verzuz isn’t new. Black artistic, scholarly, athletic, and political spaces have always been made into battlegrounds.
Electric Laboratory
“What are the compartments that have been placed around how we understand slavery and genocide and its impact on our lives and the world?”
Haiti’s New Political Worlds
Throughout its history, residents of Haiti, especially those of African descent, imagined and created their own possibilities for new social worlds.
Black Freedom Is the Seed for All Freedom
Even with colonialism and slavery ended, black life remains unfree. What will it take to go from emancipation to liberation?
What if Black Women Were Free?
The transnational struggles of Black women throughout history are different experiments in the practice of freedom.
Remembering Is Resistance
Confronting painful pasts gives society an opportunity to change. This is why those invested in the amnesiac status quo fight against memory.
Who’s Afraid of Antiracism?
By France’s twisted logic, acknowledging race equals attacking the Republic.
Pay Attention When They Tell You to Forget
Remember that anti-Black violence has been the central dynamic of US history—and how Black women have struggled with this violence for centuries.
When Nature Is Valued over Human Life
White South Africans used wildlife conservation to build a narrative as a race. Unfortunately, this pursuit came at the expense of Africans.
The Poetics of Abolition
For poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as for the Black Romantics, history is the repetition of anti-Black violence that has yet to be abolished.
How to Step Out of Comfort Zones
Caribbean authors—and the “disorderly” women of whom they write—can reveal how important it is to seek out one’s true self.
When Martinique Cannibalized Colonialism
What to do with Confederate statues in the US South? Martinique didn’t just destroy its colonial-era statues—it rebuilt them into something else.