Thinking From Black is an animated collection that illuminates, interrogates, and grabs hold of what Blackness means from as many angles as humanity, history, and artistry allow. Initiated by the Practicing Refusal Collective, whose members span the US, Europe, the Caribbean, Canada, and Africa, this fierce book is as much about creativity as it is about the political realities and ethical practices of being Black at a time when anti-Black violence is resurging in terrifying ways.
A reference book, a glossary, and an inventive vocabulary that ushers in new ways to talk about what Blackness means, feels like, and looks like, this book charts its own linguistic and cultural territory.
This book charts its own linguistic and cultural territory.
It features the work of seventy-seven artists, scholars, and activists from around the world, each of whom contributed a phrase/word/concept that evokes the multiplicity, tensions, and ruptures related to Blackness from their unique location and genre. Arranged alphabetically, the table of contents reads like a tasting menu that cuts across time, space, bodies, watery passages, sounds, emotions, and memory.
“Anarchy”; “Comfort”; “Horizon”; “Migration”; “Rage”; “Seen”; “Testify”; “Vessel”; “World.”
There are architectural sketches, photos, footnotes, drawings, mathematical equations, dictionary entries real and imagined, lines from the Bible, and singular letters dancing across the page.
The brevity of the contributions, most of which are one or two pages long, and their stunningly diverse content makes the collection churn with imaginative, almost explosive energy. Thinking From Black is not an easy read — how could it be? But alongside the wrenching entries about Black flesh burning and the horrors of fascism are rhythmic reflections on eulogies and gardening, as Ashanté M. Reese writes, “the practice of sowing life into the Black body and our collective being.”
Ronald Cummings opts to upend familiar associations between water and slavery and Black suffering. His chapter, one of the longest at nine pages, remembers Black life by mapping fire in cosmology, race riots, and on signature albums like Fire by the Pointer Sisters and Catch a Fire by Bob Marley and the Wailers.
Each contribution is novel and superb, and there are some lines in the book that feel indelibly etched somewhere in my chest. In SONG/SING, Canisia Lubrin tells us: “Inside this song another song grows another song inside it and we sing our lives inside another song.” In her eloquent dialogue about the strange mutuality between brutality and tenderness, Christina Sharpe has a penetrating sentence that reads: “the young woman who drove the wrong way and the babygirl who survived this.”
Beverly Bain unpacks struggle as relational and collective. But it’s also a refusal. Of not only racial subjugation, but also of denying one another of our creativity in times of profound duress. Struggle is the death of oppressed people, and it can also be glimpsed in the Red Dress Campaign that honours missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. In SEEN, Courtnay McFarlane teaches us about Rastafarian patois, how it dances in the basement under the light of a single red bulb and de-centers or “boofs” marginalization.
Language is like a secret pocket in the tongues of its speakers and their children. It carries people and it creates them, too. Languages and lexicons that recreate Blackness from its own center can also be curated, as this revolutionary text succeeds in doing, beautifully and with care.
The Practicing Refusal Collective is an international Black feminist forum of artists and scholars dedicated to initiating dialogues on Blackness, anti-Black violence, and Black futurity in the twenty-first century. The Collective comprises sixty members from multiple disciplines of the humanities.
Publisher: Alchemy by Knopf Canada (September 2026)
Paperback: 6″ x 9″ | 368 pages
ISBN: 9781039056596
Dr. Treena Orchard is an award-winning professor and author based in London, Ontario. Her work on sexuality, gender, and health sheds new and illuminating light on human behaviour in the 21st century. She has written for Maclean’s, Psychology Today, and The Conversation,and in 2025 was awarded the YWCA Woman of Excellence Award (Social Justice). Treena's memoir Sticky Sexy, Sad: Swipe Culture & The Darker Side of Dating Apps (AEVO/University of Toronto Press) was nominated for Book of the Year & People’s Choice by Mindvalley. Her next book project Vulnerbro: Men, Masculinity & Vulnerability explores how men cultivate their sense of identity and belonging.
