Kindred Creation

Parables and Paradigms for Freedom--Black worldmaking to reclaim our heritage and humanity

by Aida Mariam Davis

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Pub Date 3 Dec 2024 | Archive Date 1 Nov 2024

North Atlantic Books

Multicultural Interest | Nonfiction (Adult) | Politics & Current Affairs

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Description

A vital path home. Employing African epistemologies and an embodied African beingness, this book embraces the revelation and miracle of Blackness.

Creating a world worthy of our children requires recalling the dignity and distinction of the African way of life.

This book is not written for settler consumption. Kindred Creation is a call and response to dream and design better worlds rooted in African lifeways: a path to Black freedom, a love letter to Black futures, and a blueprint to intergenerational Black joy and dignity—all (and always) on Black terms.

Author, organizer, and designer Aida Mariam Davis explores the historical and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism, making explicit the ways that extraction, oppression, and enslavement serve the goals of empire—not least by severing ancestral connections and disrupting profound and ancient relationships to self, nature, and community.

Structured in three parts—Remember, Refuse, and Reclaim—Kindred Creation is a philosophical guidebook and a vital invitation to power and reconnection. Davis employs parable, poetry, theory, memory, narrative, and prophecy to help readers:

Remember: By unforgetting the unending and cascading violence of settler colonialism and other forms of domination and exploring the ways that African land, language, lifestyle, and labor are stolen, distorted, and repackaged for colonial consumption to extract capital and sever ties to ancestral knowledge, lifeways, and dignity
Refuse: By rejecting and interrupting death-making institutions and relationships and choosing kinship and self-determination in the face of settler colonial violence
Reclaim: By revealing that freedom is within us—and within reach. Davis shares how the reader can birth new worlds and relationships and offers strategies for reclaiming land, language, lifestyle, and labor.

The colonial violence and dispossession of African land, language, and labor is inflicted intentionally—and by design. Reclaiming African lifeways and remembering what was forcibly forgotten must be by creation: a re-membering of our interconnectedness and kinship.

A vital path home. Employing African epistemologies and an embodied African beingness, this book embraces the revelation and miracle of Blackness.

Creating a world worthy of our children requires...

A Note From the Publisher

For more information or for a physical copy, please email publicity@northatlanticbooks.com.

Advance Praise

“This book is a masterpiece! Drawing from the best parts of our traditions, Kindred Creation is an offering of high art, radical political philosophy, and spiritual nourishment. Aida Mariam Davis has gifted us with a text that not only spotlights and challenges lingering colonial logics, but also provides theories, tools, and tactics that are necessary for audacious freedom, dreaming, and courageous worldmaking. Read this book and prepare to be unsettled, challenged, inspired, and healed.”

—MARC LAMONT HILL, author and BET News correspondent

“Kindred Creation is an invitation to rip colonial borders out of our hearts and souls by the roots, and then rebuild, restore, and reimagine what lives lived together could look like. A future built on the ancient, collective roots of trees and relatives that have never stopped reaching towards us. It is an invitation to be made whole.”

—PATTY KRAWEC, cohost of the Medicine for the Resistance podcast, cofounder of the Nii’kinaaganaa Foundation, and author of Becoming Kin

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