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This is an epic novel of the African diaspora in the Americas, from the slave trade to Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. The crowning achievement of Afro-Colombian author, Zapata Olivella, "Chango, el gran putas" depicts the African American experience from an entirely different perspective-that of the gods who stand over the world and watch. Ranging from Brazil to New England but centered in the Caribbean, where countless slaves once arrived from West Africa, "Chango" recounts scenes from four centuries of involuntary displacement and servitude of the muntu, the people.

Through the voices of Benkos Biojo in Colombia, Henri Christophe in Haiti, Simon Bolivar in Venezuela, Jose Maria Morelos in Mexico, the Aleijadinho in Brazil, or Malcolm X in Harlem, Zapata Olivella conveys, in luminous verse and prose, the breadth of heroism, betrayal, and suffering common to the history of people of African descent in the Western hemisphere. Unique to these narratives is the hovering presence of the Orichas, the African gods and messengers whose actions construct a worldview that defies Western logic. And within this pantheon stands Chango, the god of fire, war, and thunder who both curses the muntu for betraying their own kind and challenges them to liberate not only themselves but all of humanity. "Chango, the Biggest Badass” is a passionate tour de force that seeks to recuperate the values and wisdom of a people subjugated in the European colonizers' headlong rush toward empire, treasure, and modernity.

Readers and critics of postcolonial literatures will relish the opportunity to experience Zapata Olivella's masterpiece in English; students of world cultures will appreciate this extraordinary tapestry, woven from equal strands of myth and history.

Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Format: 500 pages
Language: English
Released: November 30, 2009

Digital Copy Only


This is the selected read for PRIM’s November OKHA Book Club. Click here to sign up.

Soul on Ice is a memoir and collection of essays by Eldridge Cleaver. Originally written in Folsom State Prison in 1965, and published three years later in 1968, it is Cleaver's best known writing and remains a seminal work in African-American literature. The treatises were first printed in the nationally-circulated monthly Ramparts and became widely read for their illustration and commentary on Black America. Throughout his narrative, Cleaver describes not only his transformation from a marijuana dealer and serial rapist into a convinced Malcolm X adherent and Marxist revolutionary, but also his analogous relationship to the politics of America.

Publisher: Delta
Format: 256 pages
Language: English
Released: January 25, 1999
ISBN-13: 978-0385333795


This is the selected read for PRIM’s November OKHA Book Club. Click here to sign up.

First published in 1967, Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage has been lauded as one of the most significant photobooks of the twentieth century, revealing the horrors of apartheid to the world for the first time and influencing generations of photographers around the globe. Reissued for contemporary audiences, this edition adds a chapter of unpublished work found in a recently resurfaced cache of negatives and recontextualizes this pivotal book for our time. Cole, a Black South African man, photographed the underbelly of apartheid in the 1950s and ’60s, often at great personal risk.

He methodically captured the myriad forms of violence embedded in everyday life for the Black majority under the apartheid system—picturing its miners, its police, its hospitals, its schools. In 1966, Cole fled South Africa and smuggled out his negatives; House of Bondage was published the following year with his writings and first-person account. This edition retains the powerful story of the original while adding new perspectives on Cole’s life and the legacy of House of Bondage.

It also features an added chapter—compiled and titled “Black Ingenuity” by Cole—of never-before-seen photographs of Black creative expression and cultural activity taking place under apartheid. Made available again nearly fifty-five years later, House of Bondage remains a visually powerful and politically incisive document of the apartheid era.

Publisher: Aperture
Format: 216 pages
Language: English
Released: December 15, 2022
ISBN-13: 9781597115339

This is the selected read for PRIM’s September OKHA Book Club. Click here to sign up.

A perfect science-fiction novel awaits your reading!A gruesome war results in the old gods' departure from earth. The only remnants of their existence lie in two girls. Twins, separated at birth. Goddesses who grow up believing that they are human.

Daughters Of Nri explores their epic journey of self-discovery as they embark on a path back to one another. Strong-willed Naala grows up seeking adventure in her quiet and small village. While the more reserved Sinai resides in the cold and political palace of Nri. Though miles apart, both girls share an indestructible bond: they share the same blood, the same face, and possess the same unspoken magic, thought to have vanished with the lost gods.

The twin girls were separated at birth, a price paid to ensure their survival from Eze Ochichiri, the man who rules the Kingdom of Nri. Both girls are tested in ways that awaken a mystical, formidable power deep within themselves. Eventually, their paths both lead back to the mighty Eze.

This is the selected read for PRIM’s August OKHA Book Club. Click here to sign up.

In There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.”

In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam.

Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.

Publisher: Duke University Press
Format: 424 pages
Language: English
Released: November 15, 2021
ISBN-13: 9781478014591

This is the selected read for PRIM’s July OKHA Book Club. Click here to sign up.

The Journey of Things by Magdalene Odundo was published alongside the exhibition of the same name presented at The Hepworth Wakefield in Spring 2019.

The book features 44 of Odundo’s vessels alongside a large selection of museological and contemporary objects that reveal the wide range of global references that have informed her practice. It also comprises a series of interleaved sections presenting an organic flow of content which pairs and juxtaposes the historic and the contemporary, featuring works by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Lucie Rie, Jean Arp, as well as ancient vessels from Greece and Egypt, historic ceramics from Africa, Asia and Central America, and ritual objects from across the African continent.

Publisher: InOtherWords
Format: 184 pages
Language: English
Released: May 15, 2019
ISBN-13: 9781916002418

This is the selected read for PRIM’s May OKHA Book Club. Click here to sign up.

In Panama in Black, Kaysha Corinealdi traces the multigenerational activism of Afro-Caribbean Panamanians as they forged diasporic communities in Panama and the United States throughout the twentieth century.

Drawing on a rich array of sources including speeches, yearbooks, photographs, government reports, radio broadcasts, newspaper editorials, and oral histories, Corinealdi presents the Panamanian isthmus as a crucial site in the making of an Afro-diasporic world that linked cities and towns like Colón, Kingston, Panamá City, Brooklyn, Bridgetown, and La Boca. In Panama, Afro-Caribbean Panamanians created a diasporic worldview of the Caribbean that privileged the potential of Black innovation.

Corinealdi maps this innovation by examining the longest-running Black newspaper in Central America, the rise of civic associations created to counter policies that stripped Afro-Caribbean Panamanians of citizenship, the creation of scholarship-granting organizations that supported the education of Black students, and the emergence of national conferences and organizations that linked anti-imperialism and Black liberation. By showing how Afro-Caribbean Panamanians used these methods to navigate anti-Blackness, xenophobia, and white supremacy, Corinealdi offers a new mode of understanding activism, community, and diaspora formation.

Publisher: Duke University Press
Format: 280 pages
Language: English
Released: September 16, 2022
ISBN-13: 9781478015895

This is the selected read for PRIM’s June OKHA Book Club. Click here to sign up.

In this landmark work, Jason Okundaye meets an elder generation of Black gay men and finds a spirited community full of courage, charisma and good humour, hungry to tell its past – of nightlife, resistance, political fights, loss, gossip, sex, romance and vulgarity. Through their conversations he seeks to reconcile the Black and gay narratives of Britain, narratives frequently cleaved as distinct and unrelated.

Tracing these men’s journeys and arrivals to South London through the seventies, eighties and nineties from the present day, Okundaye relays their stories with rare compassion, listening as they share intimate memories and reflect upon their lives. They endured and fought against the peak of the AIDS epidemic, built social groups and threw underground parties; they went to war with institutions (and with each other) and created meaning within a society which was often indifferent to their existence.

Revolutionary Acts renders a singular portrait of Britain from the perspective of those buffeted by the winds of marginalisation and discrimination. It is a portrait marked by resilience and self-determination, inspired by the love and beauty Black men have found in each other.

Publisher: Faber&Faber
Format: 304 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: March 7, 2024
ISBN-13: 9780571372218


This is the selected read for PRIM’s April OKHA Book Club. Click here to sign up.

Capturing the distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, Nicole Dennis-Benn pens a tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide expanse of turquoise seas.

At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is ruthlessly determined to shield Thandi from the same fate. When plans for a new hotel threaten their village, Margot sees not only an opportunity for her own financial independence but also perhaps a chance to admit a shocking secret: her forbidden love for another woman. As they face the impending destruction of their community, each woman fighting to balance the burdens she shoulders with the freedom she craves must confront long-hidden scars.

From a much-heralded new writer, Here Comes the Sun offers a dramatic glimpse into a vibrant, passionate world most outsiders see simply as paradise.

Publisher: Liveright
Format: 352 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: July 5, 2016
ISBN-13: 9781631491764


This is the selected read for PRIM’s March OKHA Book Club. Click here to sign up.

In the Black Fantastic assembles art and imagery from across the African diaspora that embraces ideas of the mythic and the speculative. Neither Afrofuturism nor Magic Realism, but inhabiting its own universe, In the Black Fantastic brings to life a cultural movement that conjures otherworldly visions out of the everyday Black experience – and beyond – looking at how speculative fictions in Black art and culture are boldly reimagining perspectives on race, gender, identity and the body in the 21st century.

Transcending time, space and genre to span art, design, fashion architecture, film, literature and popular culture from African myth to future fantasies and beyond, this vital, timely and compelling publication is an expressive exploration of Black popular culture at its most wildly imaginative, artistically ambitious and politically urgent

Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Format: 304 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: June 9, 2022
ISBN-13: 9780500024621

A history of Black imagery that recasts our understanding of visual culture and technology

In BLACK MEME, Legacy Russell, awardwinning author of the groundbreaking GLITCH FEMINISM, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media.

Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed JET magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights. Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how citizen-recorded footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. Why the Anita Hill hearings shed light on the media’s creation of the Black icon. The ownership of Black imagery and death is considered in the story of Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard. Meanwhile the live broadcast on Facebook of the murder of Philando Castile by the police after he was stopped for a broken taillight forces us to bear witness to the persistent legacy of the Black meme.

Through imagery, memory, and technology, BLACK MEME shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.

Publisher: Verso
Format: 192 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: May 31, 2024
ISBN-13: 9781839762802

For too long, women have worked hard to fit into a pre-existing system that wasn’t built for them. Sharmadean Reid is on a mission to change that with this book, offering women New Methods to live by, to thrive, succeed and get what they want out of life.

Outwardly, Sharmadean might appear to have had it all, a string of successful business ventures, an adorable son, a host of awards to her name, but, inwardly, she was crumbling and was in desperate need of a change. After trying every wellness practice, reading countless personal development books and eventually just doing ‘the work’, it wasn’t until the morning of her 39th birthday that Sharmadean woke in peace and contentment. Now she is here to share with women everywhere the methods that got her to that place.

New Methods for Women is 49 powerful essays that offer new perspectives on life, work, self, friendships, parenthood, and relationships. Sharmadean interweaves the lessons she’s learnt, with a diverse range of thinkers, ideas and stories that have informed her approach. There are countless books that tell women how to navigate the system as it is, but what women really need is to change the system to empower and support them: this book gives you the tools to do just that.

Publisher: Penguin Life
Format: 384 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: June 27, 2024
ISBN-13: 9780241461754

The collected life-work of an interdisciplinary writer, performer, and central figure in the Black Gay cultural arts and AIDS movements.

In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage and a politics of liberation, to weave together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death. Influential to contemporary writers such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon, Spells of a Voodoo Doll is Saint's crucial legacy–five hundred incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and Trans activist movements in the United States, both historic and present.

[available on request only]

Publisher: Penguin Life
Format: 440 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: March 23, 2023
ISBN-13: 978-1643621562

HIM + HIS is an exploration of what identity means for the male. Him, signifying his physical being, and His, symbolising the mind, and the journey to acquiring individual power and possession over ones mental state.

Self-published by Prosperitee Press, the book is 522 pages and features 120 contributors - it consists of many versions of voice, of both visual and written contributions; a collection of poems, letters, illustrations, photography, interviews, short stories and even the skeleton of a screenplay. All contributions have been welcome; whether you are man yourself, and have suffered from mental health issues and mental illness, or whether you are the family or friend, like myself, who have watched their loved ones eaten alive by their minds.

Publisher: Prosperitee Press
Format: 522 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: December 31, 2018
ISBN-13: 9781999363208

Teaching to Trangress: 
Education as the Practice of Freedom

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks - writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual - writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.

bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?

Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.

"To educate is the practice of freedom," writes bell hooks, "is a way of teaching anyone can learn." Teaching to Transgress is the record of one gifted teacher's struggle to make classrooms work. 

Publisher: Routledge
Format: 224 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: December 1, 1994
ISBN-13: 9780415908085

An unprecedented visual history of African women told in striking and subversive historical photographs-featuring an Introduction by Edwidge Danticat and a Foreword by Jacqueline Woodson.

Most of us grew up with images of African women that were purely anthropological-bright displays of exotica where the deeper personhood seemed tucked away. Or they were chronicles of war and poverty-"poverty porn." But now, curator Catherine E. McKinley draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos to present a visual history spanning a hundred-year arc (1870-1970) of what is among the earliest photography on the continent. These images tell a different story of African women: how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in their style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of the colonial oppression that threatened their selfhood and livelihoods.

Featuring works by celebrated African masters, African studios of local legend, and anonymous artists, The African Lookbook captures the dignity, playfulness, austerity, grandeur, and fantasy-making of African women across centuries. McKinley also features photos by Europeans-most starkly, striking nudes-revealing the relationships between white men and the Black female sitters where, at best, a grave power imbalance lies. It's a bittersweet truth that when there is exploitation there can also be profound resistance expressed in unexpected ways-even if it's only in gazing back. These photos tell the story of how the sewing machine and the camera became powerful tools for women's self-expression, revealing a truly glorious display of everyday beauty.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Format: 240 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: April 22, 2021
ISBN-13: 9781620403532

A deliciously gritty and strikingly bold debut novel about discovering love where it has always been.

Elsie is a sexy, funny, and fiercely independent woman in South London. But, at just 28, she is also tired. Though she spends her days writing tender poetry in her journal, her nights are spent working long hours for minimum wage at a neighbourhood gay bar.

The difficulty of being estranged from her family, struggle of being continually rejected from jobs, and fear of never making money doing what she loves, is too great. But Elsie is determined to keep the faith, for a little longer at least. Things will surely turn around. They have to.

As she tries to breathe through the panic attacks, sleeping with her hot and spirited co-worker Bea isn't exactly straightforward and offers Elsie just another place to hide.

As Elsie tries to reconnect with her best friend Juliet, her fragile world spirals out of control. Can Elsie steady herself and not fall through the cracks?

Publisher: Dialougue Books
Format: 335 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: April 25, 2024
ISBN-13: 9781408717066

Featuring 117 full-color photos and eight breathtaking essays on a force that fuels Black life all around the globe, this is Humans of New York meets The Black Book

"A patchwork quilt of visually stunning images, captured moments of triumph, antidotes to trauma narratives and rich, ebullient emotional and verbal spice for the soul." – Michael W. Twitty, culinary and cultural historian, and author of The Cooking Gene and Koshersoul

"In literature, there are some books that transcend mere pages and ink, becoming essential pieces of cultural expression. One such book poised to make its mark is The Black Joy Project…. This ambitious work breaks new ground." – Essence

Black Joy is everywhere. From the bustling streets of Lagos to hip-hop blasting through apartment windows in the Bronx. From the wide-open coastal desert of Namibia to the lush slopes of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. From the thriving tradition of Candomblé in Bahia to the innovative and trendsetting styles of Soweto, and beyond, Black Joy is present in every place that Black people exist. Now—at last—is a one-of-a-kind celebration of this truth and a life-giving testament to one of the most essential forces that fuels Black life: The Black Joy Project.

Publisher: HarperCollins
Format: 224 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: February 29, 2024
ISBN-13: 9780358588757

Intricately weaving Quranic verse, psychology, and the hip-hop soundtrack of their childhood, Sanah's poems reach for divinity in the body; an archive that refuses erasure.

These poems traverse unruly emotional and physical landscapes, Whiteness, islamophobia, homophobia, intergenerational suffering, and the politics of therapeutic processes. In these pages, belief and unbelief, goodness and badness, the material and spiritual are intertwined, reclaiming queer love and desire as holy.

How are we incarcerated by others' gazes? Who gets to be good in a society built upon hierarchy? How might we embrace each other's madnesses? Sanah Ahsan asks questions that travel to the heart of our humanness, bending the lines between psychologist and client to show us the sacred nature of our wounds. These poems kneel to the messiness of being alive, building altars to complication and presence.

Refusing binaries of gender or religious doctrine, I cannot be good until you say it finds what is to be revered in the grey spaces of morality, advancing imagination and self-compassion as sites of communion.

This debut collection is a call to prayer, fearlessly complicating what is good, and what is god.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Poetry
Format: 112 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: March 14, 2024
ISBN-13: 9781526665867

A Buddhist Lama and intersectional thought leader shares a guide for those who would dream a more just, ethical world into being.Saints, spiritual warriors, bodhisattvas, tzaddikim-no matter how they are named in a given tradition, they all share a profound wish to free others from suffering.

Saints are not unattainable beings of stained glass or carved stone. "Saints are ordinary and human, doing things any person can learn to do," teaches Lama Rod Owens. "Our era calls for saints who are from this time and place, speak the language of this moment, and integrate both social and spiritual liberation. I believe we all can and must become New Saints."With The New Saints, Lama Rod shares a guidebook for becoming an effective agent of justice, peace, and change. Combining personal stories, traditional teachings, and instructions for contemplative and somatic practices, he shares inspiring resources for self-exploration and wise action.

Here is a clarion call for becoming a spiritual warrior-a human refreshed, serving a vision of a world shaped by love.

Publisher: Sounds True
Format: 288 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: November 28, 2023
ISBN-13:978-1649630001

Among Others: Blackness at MoMA begins with an essay that provides a rigorous and in-depth analysis of MoMA’s history regarding racial issues. It also calls for further developments, leaving space for other scholars to draw on particular moments of that history. It takes an integrated approach to the study of racial blackness and its representation: the book stresses inclusion and, as such, the plate section, rather than isolating black artists, features works by non-black artists dealing with race and race- related subjects. As a collection book, the volume provides scholars and curators with information about the Museum’s holdings, at times disclosing works that have been little documented or exhibited. The numerous and high-quality illustrations will appeal to anyone interested in art made by black artists, or in modern art in general.

Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Format: 488 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: July 25, 2019
ISBN-13: 9781633450349

Feeling Seen:
The Photographs of Campbell Addy

Candid and personal, dazzling with color and immediacy, this first and only monograph of a rising star of the photography scene features work from major labels and magazines, outtakes from shoots, and newly commissioned texts by Edward Enninful and Ekow Eshun on the importance of authentic diversity behind and in front of the camera.

From major portraits of the likes of Kendall Jenner, FKA Twigs, and Tyler, the Creator to cover shoots for leading magazines such as Time, Rolling Stone, and Garage, Campbell Addy has quickly become one of the most in-demand photographers of his generation. The book opens with a foreword by British Vogue’s editor-in-chief, Edward Enninful, discussing the powerful intersection of photography, race, beauty, and representation. This is followed by a broad selection of Addy’s striking photographs, which range from prominent fashion and magazine commissions to candid portraiture. Featuring recognizable cover shots alongside unpublished outtakes and unseen photography, viewers are afforded insight into Addy’s creative process on set. Quotes from leading Black figures including Naomi Campbell and Nadine Ijewere are woven between Addy’s striking imagery, in which these trailblazing Black creatives reflect on the first time they felt seen in their industry. The book closes with a deeper exploration of Addy’s more personal imagery and influences, paying tribute to the heritage of Black photographers through the work of Ajamu and James Barnor. In conversation with curator and writer Ekow Eshun, Addy balances his own experiences as a queer, Black photographer who left his Jehovah’s Witness family home at sixteen with broader questions of identity, intimacy, and art which face many creatives today. Charged with energy, compassion and authenticity, this inaugural monograph signals a major talent whose influence and stature will only grow with time.

Publisher: Prestel
Format: 208 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: April 14, 2022
ISBN-13: 9783791388465

Kerry James Marshall is one of America’s greatest living painters. History of Painting presents a groundbreaking body of new work that engages with the history of the medium itself.

In Kerry James Marshall: History of Painting, the artist has widened his scope to include both figurative and nonfigurative works that deal explicitly with art history, race, and gender, as well as paintings that force us to reexamine how artworks are received in the world and in the art market. In all the paintings in this book, Marshall’s critique of history and of dominant white narratives is present, even as the subjects of the paintings move between reproductions of auction catalogues, abstract works, and scenes of everyday life.

Essays by Hal Foster and Teju Cole help readers navigate Marshall’s masterful vision, decoding complexly layered works such as Untitled (Underpainting), 2018, and Marshall’s own artistic philosophy. This catalogue is published on the occasion of Marshall’s eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, London in 2018.

Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Format: 96 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: August 1, 2019
ISBN-13: 9781644230152

Contact High 

Both an artist’s book and comprehensive inquisition of D’Angelo Lovell Williams’s work to date, Contact High offers an expansive engagement with the visualisation of desire and depiction of the Black body. Williams’s narrative images reflect the many forms in which Black queer people exist and have existed historically within each other’s lives, picturing them as sitters, lovers, caregivers, or shadows. Williams’s work is guided by their life experience and an interrogation of their own perspective, as well as wider questions around the representation of race, class, sexuality, gender, and intimacy.

The title Contact High references the importance of touch and gesture in Williams‘s work, and alludes to heightened senses and intuitive movement. From self-portraits to collaborations with community, Williams’s photographs visualise the Black body in performative scenes that are theatrical, dance-like, and occasionally mundane, pointing towards collective histories and Black ancestral practices. At the heart of these intimate, dialogic images are notions of kinship and spirituality interweaved with quietly political and radical gestures. Williams’s unfaltering gaze insists on visibility and deference, and creates scenes in which Black and queer voices are the authority. The dynamics that play out between families, cultures, friends, lovers, ancestors and descendants are visualised as a spectrum of care, tenderness, and vulnerability, speaking to the nuances of our complex lives often overlooked by historical depictions.

Publisher: MACK
Format: 108 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: May 2, 2022
ISBN-13: 978-1913620622

The first encompassing publication on the work of Adam Pendleton, one of the most formally inventive and conceptually rigorous American artists working today

Adam Pendleton's original and powerful body of work has been described as the embodiment of a new era. His multifaceted projects, which include painting, collage, film, and publishing, re-contextualize historical and theoretical positions on abstraction, blackness, and the avant-garde. Working predominantly in black-and-white, Pendleton often creates 'total works' that envelop viewers and push the limits of contemporary discourse.

A rising star in the international art scene, Pendleton is currently represented by PACE in New York, London, and Hong Kong; Shane Campbell in Chicago; David Kordansky in Los Angeles; Max Hetzler in Berlin; Pedro Cera in Lisbon; and Eva Presenhuber in Zurich.

Publisher: Phaidon Press
Format: 160 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: November 10, 2020
ISBN-13: 9780714876580

Born in London and raised in Nigeria, Shonibare employs a diverse range of media - from sculpture, painting and installation to photography and film - to probe matters of race, class, cultural identity and history.

He is perhaps best known for his signature use of a colourful "African" batik fabric that actually originated in Indonesia and was introduced to Africa in the 19th century by British and Dutch colonisers. Incorporated into Victorian costumes, covering sculptures of extraterrestrials, or stretched like canvas for paintings, these vibrant textiles cleverly challenge issues of origin and authenticity.

This book - the most comprehensive resource available on Shonibare - presents the best work of the London-based artist's career, including his high-profile project for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London and other innovative public sculptures. Whether lampooning Victorian propriety or commenting on what it means to be an "alien," Shonibare makes art that challenges straightforward interpretations.

Publisher: Prestel
Format: 240 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: December 31, 2013
ISBN-13: 9783791348728

Out of this collection of twenty-two interviews spanning two decades rises the distinctive voice of “the princess of black poetry.” Nikki Giovanni entered the literary world at the height of the Black Arts Movement and quickly achieved not simple fame but stardom, a phenomenon almost unprecedented for a poet.

Her first two volumes of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talks and Black Judgement, gave expression to the thoughts and feelings of a generation of young African Americans and established Giovanni, in the minds of many, as a “revolutionary,” even militant, poet. The image was not altogether accurate, yet it became the gauge by which her later work was judged.

In these conversations the reader can follow the evolution of Giovanni’s distinctive voice and the sensibility of the poet’s mind. She chooses her words carefully, while giving an impression of spontaneity and even of glibness.

Publisher: University Press Mississipi
Format: 246 pages, Hardback + Paperback
Language: English
Released: December 1, 1992
ISBN-13: 9780878055876

More titles available, please email info@prim.black for more.

 

A continent-spanning survey of the most dynamic scenes in contemporary African photography, and an introduction to the creative figures who are making it happen

Africa State of Mind gathers together the work of an emergent generation of photographers from across Africa, including both the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. It is both a summation of new photographic practice from the last decade and an exploration of how contemporary photographers from the continent are exploring ideas of ‘Africanness’ to reveal Africa to be a psychological space as much as a physical territory – a state of mind as much as a geographical place.

Dispensing with the western colonial view of Africa in purely geographic or topographic terms, Ekow Eshun presents Africa State of Mind in four thematic parts: Hybrid Cities; Inner Landscapes; Zones of Freedom; and Myth and Memory. Each theme, introduced by a text by Eshun, presents selections of work by a new wave of African photographers who are looking both outward and inward: capturing life among the sprawling cities and multitudinous conurbations of the continent, turning the legacy of the continent’s history into the source of resonant new myths and dreamscapes and exploring questions of gender, sexuality and identity. Each of the photographers seeks to capture the experience of what it means, and how it feels, to live in Africa today.

Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Format: 272 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: March 26, 2020
ISBN-13: 9780500545164

White Shoes is a collection of self-portraits taken in locations around New York that were central to the city’s once pivotal – and now largely obscured and unacknowledged – involvement in the slave trade. Nona Faustine depicts herself at the sites of slave auctions, burial grounds, slave-owning farms, and the coastal locations where slave ships docked, posing nude apart from a pair of white high-heeled shoes. Documenting herself in places where history becomes tangible, Faustine acts as a conduit or receptor, in solidarity with people whose names and memories have been lost but are embedded in the land.

Through quiet but defiant self-representation, Faustine responds to a history of depiction of Black people that is shaped by subjugation, phrenology, and pseudo-science. Her complex large-format images refer and respond to a range of sources including daguerrotypes of slaves and photographs commissioned by naturalists, while her nudity — expressive of fearless self-possession as well as vulnerability – subverts the legacy of Black and female nudes in Western art. Running throughout the images, the talismanic white shoes that give the series its name suggest the many adaptations to dominant White culture that were and are still demanded of people of colour.

At once historical and speculative, White Shoes confronts the relationship between the visible and invisible, between what is displayed and what is kept from view.

Includes newly commissioned texts by Pamela Sneed, Jessica Lanay, and Seph Rodney, together with an interview of the artist by Jessica Lanay.

Publisher: MACK
Format: 168 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: September 22, 2021
ISBN-13: 9781913620448

A Civil Rights Journey presents the astonishing archive of Dr Doris Derby: photographer, activist, and professor of anthropology. Active throughout the Civil Rights Movements of the mid twentieth century in the southern United States, particularly Mississippi, Derby acted as a photographer, organiser and teacher, making photographs of the intimate and human side of the everyday struggle for survival and human rights.

She photographed both the organisation of political events, meetings, and funerals, alongside the literacy, co-operative and community theatre programmes, many of which she founded, and encountered much danger and tragedy along the way. Here we see the speeches and protests that gave the movement its defining moments, as well as vital figures including Muhammad Ali, Alice Walker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Jesse Jackson. We also see classrooms and church halls, doctors and secretaries: everyday scenes of joy, frustration, curiosity, and connection, in which the determination and collective actions and resolve and actions of the movement are equally expressed.

This extensive volume presents Derby's images in sequences that between them document rural and urban poverty, offer lucid ethnographies of particular streets and families, track the day-to-day lives of African American children growing up in the Mississippi Delta, and bear witness to such pivotal events as the Jackson State University shooting, the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., and the 1968 Democratic Convention. Derby's photographs offer us an invaluably rich portrait of a historical moment whose effects have defined today's world and issues a vital reassertion of the work that remains to be done. Artist photographer Hannah Collins has worked with Doris Derby to recount the events photographed in extensive texts which accompany the images.

Publisher: MACK
Format: 168 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: September 22, 2021
ISBN-13: 9781913620448

Finally a book on African design that celebrates the contemporary! It is packed with works that show how the continents rich array of craft traditions are being preserved and revived with an exciting contemporary twist.

An introductory section identifies the sophistication, vitality, diversity and soulfulness of the past that is now being harnessed to develop a contemporary African identity. Sections on furniture, textiles, ceramics, basketry and lighting bring together the work of respected designers, makers and organizations based on the African continent or part of the diaspora.

Celebrating the wider changes occurring across Africa, the fifty or so designers and crafters included have been chosen for their innovative approach to creating sophisticated products. Many of the pieces demonstrate how sustainability and recycling are often of the utmost importance. The book is completed by a glossary and bibliography.

Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Format: 208 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: May 18, 2015
ISBN-13: 9780500291627

South Africa has an established, vibrant and highly politicized contemporary art scene that is often in dialogue with the deep and recent past.

South African Art explores this relationship between past and present, showing contemporary and historic art objects from the earliest human artistic tendencies three million years ago to 20th-century apartheid Resistance Art and the art of post-apartheid transformation. South African Art begins with the first artistic stirrings of our earliest ancestors and the first African kingdoms through to the creation of 3D figurative art and specialised artisans. It then considers the influence of Dutch, British, Malay, Chinese and Indian settlers from the 16th century onwards and the ensuing conflicts, followed by a focus on the British colonial period and the European obsession with the exotic and the objectification of African bodies.

A chapter on segregation after the Union of South Africa in 1910 and Resistance Art during the apartheid era of c.1970 to 1989 is followed by a final section looking at South Africa’s transformation from an apartheid state to the ‘Rainbow Nation’, and the country’s current artistic optimism.

Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Format: 256 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: October 27, 2016
ISBN-13: 9780500519066

During the Museum of Modern Art’s 90-year history, African American architects and designers have had little to no purchase in its permanent collection and exhibition histories, reflective of larger trends in museum and architectural discourses at large.

The exclusion of Black architects and designers from the academic imagination have largely been waylaid in favor of dominant formalist and stylistic concerns. This book, conceived as a field guide to accompany the exhibition at MoMA, examines how contemporary architecture may address the varied contexts of systemic anti-Black racism that have fostered violent histories of discrimination and injustice in the United States.

The invited contributors reimagine the legacies of race-based dispossession in ten American cities and how individuals and communities across the United States have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms, and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance, and refusal. The catalogue will feature a portfolio of new photographs by artist David Hartt.

Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Format: 176 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: February 11, 2021
ISBN-13: 9781633451148

Okwui Enwezor

When they were first exhibited in the late 1960s, Frank Bowling's immense "map paintings" were widely celebrated for their vibrant color and subtle modulation of the painted surface.

These works, like many in Bowling's oeuvre, draw on the principle of mapping to create a kind of mental geography, woven throughout with personal and historic imagery. This collection of paintings from throughout Bowling's career features exquisite reproductions that illuminate his experiments with material and the paintings' wide range of pictorial possibilities.

Accompanied by an extensive curatorial survey, art historical contributions, prose poem, biographical visual essay, as well as the collected writings and correspondence of the artist, this book offers an in depth exploration of Bowling's career and aspects of his journey from his home in Guyana to London and New York. It also highlights references to the natural world and his use of classical and literary symbolism. This book creates a true mappa mundi-an evolving map of Bowling's inner and physical worlds.

Publisher: Prestel
Format: 256 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: July 20, 2017
ISBN-13: 9783791356587

This publication accompanies a major new exhibition of Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates (b.1973), focussing on his clay-based work, collaborative projects and large scale sculptures and installations since 2005.

Gates's interdisciplinary practice draws on his training in both urban planning and pottery, resulting in work which aims to instigate the creation of cultural communities and the recirculation of art-world capital, all the time considering the notion of Black space and ideology. Fully illustrated with examples of pottery, sculptures, installations, films and archive materials, the book also documents a new film by Gates and features essays from leading craft historians and writers.

This in-depth exploration of Gates's work is timely and relevant now in a world where a new generation are raising questions through making, identity and activism.

Publisher: Whitechapel Gallery
Format: 200 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: May 19, 2022
ISBN-13: 9780854882960

Making Africa takes a fresh look at African design. For the first time, we have a book that focuses on creative accomplishments on the continent, without being obsessed with the usual tropes of recycling, humanitarian design or traditional crafts.

Instead, Making Africa shows a new generation of designers who use their work as a tool for economic, political and social change and therefore also to create a new future for the continent. Their creative output defies all definitions of genres – crossing over classical fields such as furniture design, product design and typography to encompass digital media, art, photography, architecture and film.

A large section of the catalogue is dedicated to documenting work by over 120 protagonists of Africa’s new creative epoch – including Cyrus Kabiru, Cheick Diallo, Mário Macilau, Francis Kéré, David Adjaye, Kunlé Adeyemi, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Robin Rhode, Alaforu Sikoki, Selly Raby Kan and many more. The historical and theoretical background is explored in essays and discussions with Okwui Enwezor, Koyo Kouoh, Edgar Pieterse and Amelie Klein, among others. These are complemented by statements from around 70 other experts from Africa, who met at interviews and think tanks in cities such as Cape Town, Johannesburg, Lagos, Dakar, Nairobi and Cairo.

This is a book about the future of Africa and about a new, more open way of understanding design – which means it is also a book about what design can achieve in the 21st century.

Publisher: Vitra Design Museum
Format: 345 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: March 27, 2015
ISBN-13: 9783931936525

Frazier first traveled to Flint in 2016, as part of a magazine commission to create a photo essay about the water crisis. During that trip she met Shea Cobb, a Flint poet, activist and mother who became Frazier’s collaborator in what would evolve into a five-year body of work. Divided into three acts, Flint is Family follows Cobb as she fights for her family’s and community’s health and wellbeing.

Act I introduces Cobb, her family and The Sister Tour, a collective of women artists. Cobb lives with her mother and her daughter, Zion. She works as a school bus driver and hairstylist, while launching her career as a poet, writer and singer. To protect her daughter’s health, Cobb makes the critical decision to leave her mother and friends behind and make the reverse migration to Mississippi, where her father resides on family-owned land. Act II follows Cobb and Zion to Newton, Mississippi, where they move in with Cobb’s father, Douglas R. Smiley. There they learn how to take care of their Tennessee Walking Horses, as well as the land and fresh water springs they will one day inherit. Due to segregation and discrimination in the Newton County school system, Cobb and Zion eventually return to Flint. Act III documents the arrival of a 26,000-pound atmospheric water generator to Flint in 2019 that Frazier, Cobb and her best friend Amber Hasan―a hip-hop artist, herbalist and community organizer― helped set up and operate in their neighborhood.

Spurred by the lack of mass-media interest in the impact of this ongoing crisis and inspired by the collaborative work of Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in 1940s Harlem, Frazier’s approach ensures that the lives and voices of Flint’s residents are seen and heard and that their collective creative endeavors provide a solution to this man-made water crisis. Flint is Family in Three Acts is a twenty-first- century survey of the American landscape that reveals the persistent segregation and racism which haunts it. It is also a story of a community’s strength, pride, and resilience in the face of a crisis that is still ongoing.

Co-published with The Gordon Parks Foundation

Publisher: WordUnited
Format: 312 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: May 26, 2022
ISBN-13: 9783958297531

“At first the focus of my project was my gender transition, but along the way I found out that it’s about an ongoing search for myself: being a human with feelings, who is continuously developing.” — Marvel Harris

MARVEL describes the journey of Marvel Harris’ personal battles with mental illness, self-love, acceptance, and gender identity, all told through a searing collection of self-portraits spanning the course of five years. These photographs present a new-found visual language; a tool with which Marvel was able to express those emotions that, on account of his autism, he previously struggled to make sense of. The process of making these portraits allowed him to connect to the world around him at the time he needed it most.

Winner of the MACK First Book Award 2021, MARVEL is an important new voice which contributes to an increased awareness of the issues surrounding gender identity and mental health. In doing so, this deeply personal book demands a more tolerant attitude from society towards transgender people and those who don’t identify as entirely male or female.

Publisher: MACK
Format: 140 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: May 4, 2021
ISBN-13: 9781913620493

Dr. Joy Buolamwini

To most of us, it seems like recent developments in artificial intelligence emerged out of nowhere to pose unprecedented threats to humankind. But to Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been at the forefront of AI research, this moment has been a long time in the making.

After tinkering with robotics as a high school student in Memphis and then developing mobile apps in Zambia as a Fulbright fellow, Buolamwini followed her lifelong passion for computer science, engineering, and art to MIT in 2015. As a graduate student at the “Future Factory,” she did groundbreaking research that exposed widespread racial and gender bias in AI services from tech giants across the world.

Unmasking AI goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech. It is the remarkable story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products—and how she galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice League. Applying an intersectional lens to both the tech industry and the research sector, she shows how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity “excoded” and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools. Computers, she reminds us, are reflections of both the aspirations and the limitations of the people who create them.

Encouraging experts and non-experts alike to join this fight, Buolamwini writes, “The rising frontier for civil rights will require algorithmic justice. AI should be for the people and by the people, not just the privileged few.”

Publisher: Random House
Format: 336 pages, Hardback
Language: English
Released: Oct 31, 2023
ISBN-13: 9780593241837

Safiya Noble

A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms.

Run a Google search for “black girls”―what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.

In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance―operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond―understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.

An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.

Publisher: NYU Press
Format: 248 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: February 20, 2018
ISBN-13: 9781479837243

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.

Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.

This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.

Publisher: Polity
Format: 172 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: June 21, 2019
ISBN-13: 9781509526406