Thinking from Black: A Lexicon

by The Practicing Refusal Collective

New language for what you already knew was true.

For you if

you have felt the limits of the language you were given and need new words.

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This is not a book you read front to back — it is a book that remakes how you read, how you think, and what language you reach for when the old words fail. The Practicing Refusal Collective — sixteen Black feminist scholars, artists, poets, and theorists convened by Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman — built a lexicon that takes the multiplicity of Black life as its starting point rather than its subject. Each entry is a concept, a provocation, a new threshold of meaning: refusal, visuality, fugitivity, the otherwise. By the end you will have new words for things you already knew to be true, and a framework for language itself as a site of resistance.

Where This Book Lives

Themes: language and power
Topics: black radical tradition

The Practicing Refusal Collective — sixteen Black feminist scholars, artists, and activists convened by Tina Campt at Princeton and Saidiya Hartman at Columbia — built this lexicon over years of workshops across the diaspora. It is not a reference book; it is a way of thinking. We put it in the catalog because language itself is a site of power, and this is one of the most serious attempts in recent memory to build new language from the center of Black life rather than around its margins.

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