PRIM BOOKSHOP
READS YOU CAN RELATE TOWelcome.
The PRIM Bookshop offers a variety of reads which are available to purchase.
Don’t see a title you would like? Just email us at info@prim.black
We can’t wait to see your library grow and grow!
The PRIM Bookshop offers a variety of reads which are available to purchase.
Don’t see a title you would like? Just email us at info@prim.black
We can’t wait to see your library grow and grow!
︎︎︎
OKHA READS 2024
House of Bondage
Ernest Cole
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 Reissued for contemporary audiences, this edition adds a chapter of unpublished work found in a recently resurfaced cache of negatives and recontextualizes this pivotal book for our time.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.
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.
Daughters of Nri
Reni K Amayo
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.
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.
There’s A Disco Ball Between Us
Jafari S. Allen
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.
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
Magdalene Odundo
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.
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.
Panama in BlackAfro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century
Kaysha Corinealdi
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.
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.
Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain
Jason Okundaye
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.
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.
Here Comes The Sun
Nicole Dennis-Benn
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.
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.
Octavia’s Brood
Adrienne Maree Brown + Walidah Imarisha
Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing visionary fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time.
This book brings twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia's Brood span genres—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism—but all are united by an attempt to experiment with new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves
and worlds that could be.
The collection is rounded off with essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a foreword by Sheree Renée Thomas.
Publisher: AK Press
Format: 296 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: March 13, 2015
ISBN-13: 9781849352109
This is the selected read for PRIM’s February OKHA Book Club. Click here to sign up.
This book brings twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia's Brood span genres—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism—but all are united by an attempt to experiment with new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves
and worlds that could be.
The collection is rounded off with essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a foreword by Sheree Renée Thomas.
Publisher: AK Press
Format: 296 pages, Paperback
Language: English
Released: March 13, 2015
ISBN-13: 9781849352109
This is the selected read for PRIM’s February OKHA Book Club. Click here to sign up.
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MORE READS
The Black Joy Project
Kleaver Cruz
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
"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
I cannot be good until you say it
Sanah Ahsan
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
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
The New Saints
Lama Rod Owens
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
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
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