Thinking From Black: A Lexicon

**"A monumental reflection in time, through blackness into light." Steve McQueen, acclaimed filmmaker and artist “Thinking from Black performs the unworlding needed for alternate futures. It emancipates and facilitates meaning-making away from a colonialist orientation toward a globalizing storytelling that sets new frequencies, and logics without outcome. In a moment of great cultural, political, and social uncertainty, Thinking from Black curates, animates, demonstrates how we can language our way to new beginnings. This collection is a necessary inspiration, not to be refused.” Claudia Rankine, renowned author and playwright An essential work for Alchemy by Knopf, this book collects a living, breathing lexicon: words, terms, concepts, and ideas that take the multiplicity of Black life as the point of departure.** Thinking from Black: A Lexicon is an unusual reference book. Its contributors—the Practicing Refusal Collective—are visual artists, poets, dancers, historians, writers, architects, painters, theorists, activists, anthropologists, filmmakers, educators, and musicians. Each has engaged with the idea of a lexicon of Black living and taken up the invitation to think from Black in relation to their own medium. Some terms are enunciated in a poetic register—such as Redaction, Seeing, and Song. Some are aspirational—such as Solidarity, Garden, and Care. Some entries, such as BlackSound, Fantasy, Mathematics, and Dispossession, work in a more theoretical idiom. Words such as Gesture and Syncopation are composed of both text and drawings, and summon the body in motion. The word Time, which is defined twice, carries with it musicality, duration and refusal. Together, these definitions offer a sense of some of the many ways that Black people tend to each other and the world.