Readings in Decolonial and Race Theory

For those familiar with this work, feel free to add and sort entries, insert headings, etc., and to link to copies available online. Everything from blog articles to zines to academic books is welcome, but try to keep it to core texts or have a separate section for special interest stuff.


Discourse on Colonialism - Aimé Césaire (1950/5)
Black Skin, White Masks - Frantz Fanon (1952)
Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon (1961)

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney
Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism - Kwame Nkrumah (1965) (Especially the last chapter, The Mechanisms of Neo-Colonialism)

I Write What I Like - Steve Biko (1969-)
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent - Eduardo Galeano(1971)
Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient - Edward Said (1978)
Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1986)
The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism - Ashis Nandy (1983)

Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument (PDF) - Sylvia Wynter
Can the Subaltern Speak? (PDF) - Gayatri Spivak

The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses - Oyeronke Oyewumi (1997)
Conceptualizing Gender: The Eurocentric Foundations of Feminist Concepts and the Challenge of African Epistemologies (PDF) - Oyeronke Oyewumi (2002)

Poetics of Relation - Édoard Glissant (1990)

Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods - Volumes 1 and 2 (not available online)

500 Years of Indigenous Resistance - Gord Hill
African Anarchism: The History of A Movement (PDF) - Sam Mbah and I.E. Igariwey
Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition - Glen Sean Coulthard
A Mestizo’s Identity: Concerning a 1929 Anarchist Manifesto - Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge - V.Y. Mudimbe
Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism - Mahmood Mamdani (1996)
Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity - Mahmood Mamdani (2012)

Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book (PDF, essay) - Hortense Spillers
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America - Saidiya Hartman

Black Anarchism: A Reader (PDF)
Black Power Reader - Libcom
The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner - Saidiya Hartman
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study - Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

On The Postcolony (introduction) - Achille Mbembe
Necropolitics (PDF, Essay) - Achille Mbembe
Critique of Black Reason - Achille Mbembe
Brutalisme - Achille Mbembe

Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope - Calvin Warren
Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation - Calvin Warren
Afro-pessimism: An Introduction
Blackness and Nothingness - Fred Moten

A Billion Black Anthropocenes Or None - Kathryn Yusoff
Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human - Alexander Weheliye
Reontologising race: The machinic geography of phenotype - Arun Saldanha
Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety (PDF) - Jackie Wang
Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle - Katherine McKittrick
Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World - Gary Wilder

Pedagogy Of The Oppressed - Paulo Freire

Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom - Nicole Shippen (2014)

Other writers: James Baldwin, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Ward Churchill, Winona LaDuke, bell hooks, George Jackson

The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1; Racial Oppression and Social Control - Theodore W. Allen
The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2: The Origins of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America - Theodore W. Allen

The Black Jacobins: Toussant L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution - C. L. R. James
Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (introduction) - David Scott

Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India's Liberation Struggle - Maia Ramnath (2011)

Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide - Boaventura de Sousa Santos


Accomplices, Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex An Indigenous Perspective
Revolutionary Solidarity: A Critical Reader for Accomplices
No Selves To Abolish: Afropessimism, Anti-Politics and the End of the World - K. Aarons