A reading list to process the state of the world

Readings on and against borders, empire, and settler-colonialism.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Waves and Crests, 2019

“We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we stop pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence. Naiveté is often an excuse for those who exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake.”

— Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Silencing the Past”

I spent Monday distracting myself, avoiding watching the inauguration at all costs. Trump has already made our ominous future crystal clear. In less than twenty-four hours, he has hinted at undoing a ceasefire for Palestinians, pardoned Jan 6 Capitol rioters, withdrawn from the World Health Organization, issued an executive order against trans identities, and condoned a two-time Nazi salute by a member of the broadcasted oligarchy. He also declared a border emergency and greenlit raids targeting undocumented immigrants. The upcoming days, weeks, months, and years will be bleak.

Last May, a wave of student protests blossomed. A surge of surveillance and McCarthyism followed, now plaguing those who condemn genocide. My students have asked for reading lists to understand their political reality better. So… I’ve compiled and condensed some of these lists to share with those contemplating how we got here, where we can go, and how global intimacies of violence from the past are hauntingly webbed into our present.

My recommended readings:

1. ‘An Atlas of the Difficult World’ by Adrienne Rich (1991)

2. ‘Some of us did not die’ by June Jordan (2002)

3. ‘The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution’ by C. L. R. James (1938)

4. ‘Intimacies of Four Continents’ by Lisa Lowe (2015)

5. ‘The Great Moving Right’ Show by Stuart Hall (1979)

6. ‘The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left’ by Stuart Hall (1988)

7. ‘Confronting Climate Coloniality’ by Farhana Sultana (2024)

8. ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ by Aimé Césaire (1950)

9. ‘Blood in My Eye' by George Jackson (1972)

10. ‘Love In A Fucked Up World: How To Build Relationships, Hook-Up, and Raise Hell Together’ by Dean Spade (2025)

11. ‘Home and away: Narratives of migration and estrangement’ by Sara Ahmed (1999)

12. ‘Home’ by Warsan Shire (2009)

13. ‘No Language Is Neutral’ by Dionne Brand (1990)

14. ‘Feminism Without Borders’ by Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003)

15. ‘Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition’ by Cedric Robinson (1983)

16. ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ by Walter Rodney (1972)

17. ‘A Dying Colonialism’ by Frantz Fanon (1959)

18. ‘Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism’ by Kwame Nkrumah (1965)

19. ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ by Franz Fanon (1961)

20. ‘Necropolitics, narcopolitics, and femicide: Gendered violence on the Mexico-US border’ by Melissa Wright (2011)

21. ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’ by Audre Lorde (1984/2007)

22. ‘As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance’ by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017)

23. ‘Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism’ by Iyko Day (2016)

24. ‘Communities of Resistance’ by Ambalavaner Sivanandan (1990)

25. ‘The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017’ by Rashid Khalidi (2020)

26. ‘Reflections on exile and other essays’ by Edward Said

xo,
HH