tayi

Here's a big list of all my recommendations for anyone curious about black literature, history, cinema, and thought. Thank you to @sh1-n0bu for inspiring this! Make sure to always do your own research further than what I've listed. There's a plethora of criticisms, thoughts, and perspectives that contribute and challenge the texts I list here, and it's always important to not let one text be the end all be all of your thoughts and opinions. This list will mostly focus on cinema, literature and art because that's what I study :)

Black Literature

Ark of Bones and Other Stories by Henry Dumas

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley 

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire

The Belly by Tchicaya U Tam’si 

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Uses of the Erotic by Audre Lorde 

Communion by bell hooks 

The Autobiography of Malcom X

The Autobiography of Assata Shakur

A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

Mouth of Rain Anthology by Various Writers

Small Island by Andrea Levy 

In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo

Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka

Soul by Soul by Walter Johnson

Zami by Audre Lorde

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

1943: Surrealism and Us by Suzanne Césaire

Erasure by Percival Everett

Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson III

Black Cinema

Atlantique dir. Mati Diop

Atlanta dir. Donald Glover

Sorry to Bother You dir. Boots Riley

La Noire de …. dir. Ousmane Sembène

Get Out dir. Jordan Peele

I’m A Virgo dir. Boots Riley

Sinners dir. Ryan Coogler

And So Angels Die dir. Moussa Sène Absa

The Blackening dir. Tim Story

Ginja and Hess dir. Bill Gunn

American Fiction dir. Cord Jefferson

Candyman dir. Nia DaCosta

Black Culture and Media Youtube Video Essayists

F.D. Signifier

Princess Weekes

Prince Shakur

Khadija Mbowe

Anansi’s Library

Black Art Movements

Afrosurrealism 

Négritude

Harlem Renaissance

Black Artists

Jean Michel Basquiat

Kara Walker

Kool Keith

Ekow Nimako

Sun Ra

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer.