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About the Book

  • Page ID
    181524
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    As you navigate this text, you will be introduced to a chorus of voices that paved the way for exploring Black Studies. Our writing collective’s transdisciplinary approach, drawing from fields such as Africana Studies, Black Feminism/Womanism, Black Psychology, and Cultural Studies, offers a comprehensive understanding of the transformative power of Black Thought. Throughout the text, you will meet activists, artists, clinicians, and scholars who are combating the effects and trauma of anti-Blackness in American society through their collective liberatory praxis. By amplifying these diverse voices and histories, this textbook aims to heal the misrepresentation, misinformation, and erasure that has alienated and dehumanized the Afrikan American community from Saltwater Slavery to the present.

    While the text unfolds, you will be guided by key theorists who engage in abolitionist work to emancipate not only the body but also free the mind from the mental bondage of anti-Black rhetoric meant to diminish, extinguish, and annihilate a people’s belief in themselves. This text looks towards Africana Studies as a discipline that recenters the worldview, experiences and agency of Afrikan people; its capacity for social responsibility and justice calls for social formulations that acknowledge, recognize, and respect all of the various iterations of the human experience. By centering Black life, we aim to shift how academia and society interact and view Black Studies. In order to achieve this, this collection of chapters must be openly available as it fills a scholarly void, being that it is the first free Online Educational Resource that provides an introduction to the field of Black Studies. Furthermore, this text is an answer to the need to provide equal access to subject matters presently under attack nationwide. Authoring these chapters is therefore an act of social justice countering the failed attempt to ban teaching from a Black knowledge base while simultaneously providing a multitude of opportunities to engage in the critical discourse of this vast discipline.

    We aim to provide the theoretical framework necessary to create a genealogy of freedom built upon diverse and inclusive thought. In doing so, we will engage in the vestiges of cultural remembrance in order to cultivate a cathartic/liberating space in which to challenge and reveal/heal from the generational trauma associated with oppressive forms of violence such as slavery, racial apartheid via Jim Crow, and the impact of discriminative practices that continually disenfranchise millions of Black Americans from a whole unfettered reality. By existing and resisting oppressive realities, our text explores the poetics of fugitivity through the arts as a means to weed the repressive roots of authoritative subjectivity while sowing a new crop of revolutionary free thinkers.