I have always really loved reading. Nonfiction and fiction; poetry or prose. It doesn’t matter. For me, there is something special about the worlds we get to create in our minds through the words that almost serve as a map on the page. It’s powerful. With fiction books, especially Young Adult (YA) and Dystopian Society books, you literally get to conjure new worlds and picture yourself away from your reality. In first or second grade, when I picked up my very first Harry Potter book—and in turn developed my deep love for reading, it was then that I discovered how important it was for me to reimagine the world; to see the possibility of a reality beyond the one I was currently experiencing. Sometimes what I saw was nothing at all, and that was powerful too. Because it taught me to be comfortable with the idea that, beyond this world, there is nothing else. And that that is okay.
However, while many understand fiction as a genre in which it is easy to be imaginative while reading, not many people believe the same about nonfiction, it seems. For me, though, nonfiction is just as imaginative. When I read bell hooks, or Angela Y. Davis, or Kwame Nkrumah, or Kiese Laymon, I put myself in their words. For me, it comes down to these questions: What does it feel like to be the subject(s) of this book? What would it look like to shift that material reality? What would it look like to exist in a world where this no longer exists? And how do we get there?
That requires a level of imagination only obtainable by those who are committed to actualizing a new future—even if that future is nothing.
So while we are forced to self-isolate, for our own protection and others’, tap into your imagination and read some of these books I’ve compiled. I’ve read most of them, and I’m excited to read the rest while quarantined.
I won’t be writing a blurb to describe the books. I want you to read these titles, and let them take your imagination somewhere special. And then read the books to join in on the fight to carry us all somewhere special.
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Here are 15 books that I am (re)reading while COVID-19, also known as Coronavirus, wreaks havoc around the globe. This is the perfect time to imagine something new.
- Michel Foucault – Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
- Frantz Fanon – Black Skin, White Masks
- Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth
- Jennifer Nash – black feminism reimagined: after intersectionality
- Jennifer Nash – The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography
- George Jackson – Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
- Monique Morris – Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
- Erik McDuffie – Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism
- Kwame Ture – Stokely speaks; Black power back to Pan-Africanism
- Daniel Black – Perfect Peace
- Mireille Miller-Young – A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography
- bell hooks – All About Love
- Kwame Nkrumah – Consciencism
- Angela Y. Davis – Are Prisons Obsolete?
- Angela Y. Davis – If They Come In The Morning: Voices of Resistance
Da'Shaun Harrison
Da’Shaun Harrison is a trans theorist and Southern-born and bred abolitionist in Atlanta, GA. They are the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and several other media/literary honors. As an editor, movement media and narrative strategist, and storyteller, Harrison uses their extensive history as a community organizer—which began in 2014 during their first year at Morehouse College—to frame their political thought and cultural criticism. Through the lens of what Harrison calls “Black Fat Studies,” they lecture on blackness, fatness, gender, and their intersections. Harrison currently serves as Editor-at-Large at Scalawag Magazine, is a co-host of the podcast “Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back,” and ⅓ of the video podcast “In The Middle.” Between the years 2019 and 2021, Harrison served as Associate Editor—and later as Managing Editor—of Wear Your Voice Magazine.