Cracks in the Curriculum #5: What is it to be Oneself? Reading List

Artist and writer Jade de Montserrat shares a list of recommendations to accompany her Cracks in the Curriculum resource, What is it to be Oneself?

The books, films, songs and people on this list have contributed to my life-long devotion to curiosity. Inspired by artists and writers whose introspection nurtures life-long loving – a shared fight across generations for universal liberation from oppression and injustice.

Liberation begins with knowledge of human and interspecies rights. Where better to start than with The Little Red School Book? What better to speculate our futures with than Octavia’s Brood? And who are greater allies to dream with than Sojourner Truth and Janelle Monáe? This list is a collage of sounds and thoughts for imagining and becoming oneself, together.

 

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/

Barbara Cueto & Bas Hendrikx (editors), AUTHENTICITY? Observations and Artistic Strategies in the Post-Digital Age (Valiz, 2017)

I derived the title of my Cracks in the Curriculum resource, What is it to be Oneself?, from the editors’ introduction to this book. I’m critical of the digital world, especially social media, which are neither neutral nor universally accessible spaces. The essays in AUTHENTICITY? were crucial for expanding my understanding of hegemonic technologies. They continue to influence my thoughts on the internet as a discriminatory space, often affected by race and gender, and raise important questions about ethics, autonomy, agency, and authenticity.

James Van Der Pool, Dark Matter: A History of the AfroFuture (BBC Four, 2021) – watch a clip here

This elegant television programme stars Ekow Eshun, one of Britain’s foremost intellectuals. He gives an in-depth overview of Afrofuturism, a term I approached with some hesitation, questioning its potential to be an essentialist category or a trend within capitalist popular culture, rooted in colonialism. However, I’ve come to see how artists, thinkers and musicians utilise Afrofuturist imagination as an intersectional tool—a way to unlock alternate worlds and resist continued slavery, both mental and physical.

Identities, cultures, names and loves were, and are, lost to human greed. Afrofuturism, as I’ve come to understand it, holds the potential for reclamation and transformation. I return to and recommend this programme again and again. It offers avenues into the ‘deep-tissue experience’ of cosmology, spirituality, joy, hope, and the formation of something else…

Drexciya, Andreaen Sand Dunes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btOstAZFJTI&list=PLVlq6UCHPRWs55Dc0w6UlGjv_cmK0Adgb&index=14

E. Jane

https://e-jane.info

adrienne maree brown & Walidah Imarisha (editors), Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (AK Press, 2015)

Liberatory praxis is an ongoing process, and the stories from this extraordinary anthology are fuel to my committed fire. I originally bought this book, now some years ago, because it’s edited by adrienne maree brown whose activism and wisdom I keenly follow. The book’s title refers to writer Octavia Butler, whose work I first read alongside Audre Lorde’s. Together, they offer what I call pragmatic envisioning —a grounded approach to building liberatory futures.

I grew up in a Conservative, all-white household, family and town. My school and university education, where I was taught by exclusively white educators, did not mention colonialism. It was in my early thirties that I began devoting my research to the Black Atlantic, understanding my positioning in these histories. I am still stretching the once-blunted muscle of my imagination, which, combined with personal traumas, can feel stifled. Octavia’s Brood allows me to bathe in a cosmic shower. Here, I find release from the confines of reality and glimpses of visionary thinking.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke, 2018)

Situating Black life as a critical vessel for archival knowledge, M Archive was instrumental in developing the workshop, Listening and Drawing, which I’ve facilitated and adapted for different groups since 2020. I begin the workshop by reading my text ‘Breath. Work’, which is influenced by Gumbs’ writing. and we finish with a collective reading, spoken in unison. For this, I often select a section of Gumbs’ M Archive, which holds four chapters evoking the elements. One of these, ‘Archive of Fire’, connects with the charcoal I offer to participants for drawing, and with Blackness, carbon, mortality, and breath.

Søren Hansen and Jesper Jenson, The Little Red Schoolbook (originally published in 1969, republished in English in 2014, Pinter and Martin)

Jemma Egan from Serpentine Education introduced me to this life-changing book, which can equip all young people with knowledge of their human rights. If everyone confidently possessed these — freely and without fear— then trauma could be reduced and our collective imagination unleashed to flourish. It’s no surprise that this book was banned by UK authorities when it first came out. Educating young people to embody their democratic rights threatens school systems which maintain capitalist domination. I rejoice at how this book might inspire resistance by endowing students with autonomy, agency and a sense of responsibility. Buy several and give them to every young person you know!

Lonnie Holley, All Rendered Truth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDh_GyrMU4A&list=PLVlq6UCHPRWs55Dc0w6UlGjv_cmK0Adgb&index=53

Janelle Monáe, Suite II

Overture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8t7GhdeHGw&list=PLVlq6UCHPRWs55Dc0w6UlGjv_cmK0Adgb&index=31

Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2020)

This book has guided my thinking about the politics of the Internet in relation to art and artists. My formative years, and intervals well into my thirties, were spent in rural isolation, with electricity generated only for some hours each day. This impacted how I eventually used the Internet to observe and consume, rather than for dialogue and exchange. My neurodiversity can also manifest through illegibility in communication, which technology has not yet alleviated.

Glitch Feminism introduces me to a type of digital sociality that’s seemingly effortless to many. However, this survey of contemporary artists uses the manifesto form to introduce work that transcends the digital space. It offered me scope to consider refusals and models for self-definition: to think through who I am, who we are, and where we – my and your Black bodies – might belong.

Sojourner Truth, Ain’t I A Woman? speech first delivered in 1851, first published 1863 (Penguin, 2020)

The formerly enslaved abolitionist campaigner Sojourner Truth has been central to my research on the Black Atlantic. In 2012, I was playing with how I represented myself in my work, inspired by Josephine Baker and abolitionists including Truth. I began making self-portraits which allowed me control over my image and owed a debt of gratitude to Truth’s photograph, ‘I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance’. I interpret this affirmation as justifying how her portrait provided for her abolitionist work to continue.

My own intention remains to highlight the oppression and injustices which reverberate today. The question of Truth’s incredible polemic – Ain’t I A Woman? – still surfaces the question of who is truly recognised as human. This connects with the struggle of the trans community, who are vilified in abhorrent ways. For the poster accompanying my Cracks resource, I married Truth’s words with the Intersex-Inclusive Pride Flag in a gesture of solidarity, and in the spirit of Truth’s legacy.

Sons Of Kemet, My Queen Is Harriet

Tubman https://youtu.be/twjaSC5Ym9s?si=6snROcBSPTSsl_WB

Serpentwithfeet, whisper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPTp-X257g&list=PLVlq6UCHPRWs55Dc0w6UlGjv_cmK0Adgb&index=10

Helen Starr

http://www.themechatroniclibrary.com

Ytasha L Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago Review Press, 2013)