...anything you imagine, you possess -Kendrick Lamar
In his book, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robing D.G Kelley illuminates the ways in which Black people have envisioned freedom even in the midst of unfreedom.
In her poem, Won’t You Celebrate With Me, Lucille Clifton says:
…come celebrate with me
that everyday something has tried to kill me
and has failed…
Indeed, since the bloody birth of the US as we currently know it there have been ongoing attempts to dominate, devalue and extinguish Black life. And yet, Black peoples remain. Black peoples have subverted and continued to subvert. Black peoples have fought and continue to fight. Black peoples have challenged and continue to challenge. Black people have created and continue to create. Black people have loved and continue to love.
Black Radical Hope
For Enslaved Peoples To Love and to Run For Freedom… this was the Embodied Expression of Radical Hope
MPI/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The song Go Down, Moses is said to be a song that Harriet Tubman would sing to indicate that she was present and an escape plan was near
Black Faith
Link to This Far by Faith (Hour One):
The Black Radical Imagination
Anything you imagine, you possess -Kendrick Lamar
bell hooks wrote Theory as Liberatory Practice (1971) where she noted:
“I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing”
“Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end.”
“Within revolutionary feminist movements, within revolutionary black liberation struggles, we must continually claim theory as necessary practice within a holistic framework of liberatory activism. […] We must actively work to call attention to the importance of creating a theory that can advance renewed feminist movements, particularly highlighting that theory which seeks to further feminist opposition to sexism, and sexist oppression. Doing this, we necessarily celebrate and value theory that can be and is shared in oral as well as written narrative.”
Centering Pleasure as Political and Personal Practice
Freedom is not a secret. It's a practice. -Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Black Joy
Black Erotics
Audre Lorde articulated the erotic as (opposite of pornography)… a source of power… an inner-resource… life force. It has been embodied by scholars as a necessary and intentional centering of pleasure. It has been enacted by performers as an owning, harnessing and unapologetic expressing of sexual energy and desire. Black erotics have a deep, wide, complex and contradictory span.
Writing Black in…
