I've been reading. Volumes of text in small doses. Small doses and slow pace fits better with my life parenting a small child. Small doses and slow pace fits better with my love of getting lost in the footnotes and other corners where good gossip lives if you know how to listen for it.
I like to sit with and think with these writers and thinkings. I like to sit with them and read/weave them together like a hamaca-in-the-making; a woven technology comprised of tension and strategic spacings meant to hold and not-hold.
Some of these I am reading/or have read as part of my time in graduate school. Some of these I've picked up or found out of personal curiosity about my role in the larger climate justice work a prima de afuera i w/ strong, deep, and palimpsestic Caribbean roots.
In line with a belief that knowledge is a responsibility (and perhaps to address my abuelita's questions about what I do for work :p ) I'd like to share this hamaca of readings with you.
Below is a list of readings I'm engaging, sequences in no particular order (perhaps except by their location in my line of sight). Texts listed in purple bold are those nbeign shipped to our pandemic place (an apartment in the Great Lakes).
Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature by Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez.
Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition by Glen Sean Coulthard
Theft is Property: Dispossession and Critical Theory by Robert Nichols
Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic by Shatema Threadcraft
Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Jessica Marie Johnson
Mohawk Interrupts: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States by Audra Simpson
Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Cesáire (who taught Fanon at some point in time)
Various essays and articles by Fred Moten, including this panel featuring Moten and Saidiya Hartman
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman
The Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line Book by Jose Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown
Black Reconstruction and The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco by Savannah Shange
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Many poems and articles by June Jordan and Audre Lorde and Alexis Pauline Gumbs and singers and songwriters of the Caribbean and AfroDiaspor (but not Lin, never LMM---- i just can't stomach that this man claims the kind of nation that kept my family on "the outside")
The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King
We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mirame Kaba
Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought by Briona Simone Jones
On Property by Rinaldo Walcott
Archival census data that lists my Boricua family as "de color" (which /might/ mean that they are Black and Indigenous (Arawak?Taino? Something else?), and if so that census category is an erasure of both their Blackness and their Indigeniety extending from the US-to-the-territories project of "melting pot nationalism" aka blanquiamiento. I say /might/ because there is so much I do not know about my own family, and I'm learning to/ have been encouraged to lean into the spaces/gaps/unmemories of Caribbean archives). I read archival documents that list my family as hired farm hands and another which lists them as sharecroppers or renters. I read archival policies that highlight the history of racist and settler colonial mechanisms and logics justified violent and still-felt enclosures on sacred lands.
I read an innumerable amount of tweets/social media posts about climate justice that center decolonizing/anti-colonial strategies, and that centers and/or engages Indigenous resurgence beyond the settler state, and that centers and/or engages Black political thought and that addresses and accounts for mechanisms of racialization in the US and places otherwise.
I read environmental sociology, political ecology texts, and ecology texts, and soil science texts, and stats books like Indigenous Statistics. Maybe a little Marx too.
The Combahee River Collective Manifesto
I am "reading" texts from family and friends who are sick and dying and forgetting and getting engaged and getting divorced and getting laid off and getting interviews but no calls back and getting tired and getting steps in and getting diagnosis and getting misdiagnosed and staying at home (because it is our responsibility).
I read house plants, and the expressions on my child's face. I read the clouds and the tightness in my chest.
I read (and re-read) this blog post, to edit for clarity with the hopes that this list is understood to be an archive. A peek into the backgrounds of my mind, a reminder to rest/sit with the texts with enough time to make meaning, in the way that Black and Indigenous citational practices ask of readers and listeners.
I read my last sentence as a closing, a letting go, knowing this list will be missing something. Knowing I cannot be fully known in one blogpost, and opening up myself to response (from my future self and more).
[Hello from July 25, 2024! I've updated this post for clarity and style.]
Image description: A full face selfie of the writer from slightly below. They are wearing blue and sea-foam green earrings in the shape of a flower with petals, and a lime-green scarf around loose, dark hair. Angélica wears winged black eyeliner with a pop of lime green eyeliner overlaid that matches the scarf. The selfie is superimposed onto an illustration of "space" which shows slightly through from behind the selfie image.
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