Thinking from Black: A Lexicon

An expansive lexicon of words, terms, concepts, and ideas that takes the multiplicity of Black life as its 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.

Read in relation to each other, the terms create a rich, startling lexicon that is eclectic, elliptical, cross-genre, historical, speculative, and literary—a set of words, phrases, concepts, and ideas that are part of the many languages constituting and animating Black life. Thinking from Black is a book to be read with others, as it was created. It is a book to live and think and act with, in the world.