Black Formations: Poetics of Refusal within the African Diaspora

Black diaspora communities are under mounting pressure while living and laboring under racist logics. Yet these communities have found, and will continue to find, ways to thrive.

Black Formations investigates how the body protects itself from the emotional and psychic repercussions of racial violence. It explores refusal as a vocabulary and embodied grammar of the Black diaspora: expressions, articulations, and agential acts that emerge through the body, from the public to the private, from the explicit to the unseen. These autopoetics signal a capacity to exceed society’s racial logics and imagine oneself outside their constraints.

These emergent poetics of refusal are fleeting, ephemeral, and often unarticulated. Black Formations brings these poetics to light and presents them as creative and embodied strategies and forms of counter-narrative production of Black being, required not only for navigating racism and racial logics, but also for reaffirming Black sociality and creative life.