Knowledge
These texts can help you hold onto your agency and working‑class voice inside higher education. Becoming well read isn’t about proving legitimacy to hierarchical systems — it’s about refusing the narrow forms of knowledge they try to impose. These resources offer alternatives, openings, and companions in resisting epistemic violence.
Black studies & abolitionist refusal
Frantz Fanon
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) — Fanon’s foundational analysis of racial identity, anti‑Black racism, and the lived experience of colonisation.
A Dying Colonialism (1959) — Essays on everyday life and resistance during the Algerian Revolution.
The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — His most influential text, analysing decolonisation, violence, and national consciousness.
Toward the African Revolution (1964) — A posthumous collection of political essays, speeches, and journalism
Saidiya Hartman – refusal of the archive; waywardness.
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self‑Making in Nineteenth‑Century America (1997; revised 2022)
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007)
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)
Fred Moten & Stefano Harney – fugitivity, undercommons, refusal of institutional capture.
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) -- I was unable to find this book at both the university of Gloucestershire and The Hive in Worcester. I bought my copy from amazon but if you can find it in a more ethical way, please do.
All Incomplete (2021)
Fred Moten's In the Break is also a great, beautiful read.
I also recommend Moten's interviews and lectures on Youtube.
Tina Campt – quiet refusal, haptic listening.
Tina Campt has extensive work on the nature of Vernacular photography. And listening to images rather than the typical projection that observational practice teach.
Campt argues that vernacular photographs — especially those made by Black communities — cannot be understood through the usual art‑historical or documentary frameworks. Those frameworks assume:
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distance
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neutrality
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the supremacy of the visual
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the authority of the observer
Sources:
Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004)
Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012)
Listening to Images (2017)
A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (2021)
Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (2020, co‑edited with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, Brian Wallis)
Christina Sharpe – refusal as “wake work”.
Indigenous refusal
Audra Simpson – political refusal, ethnographic refusal.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Indigenous refusal as resurgence.
Glen Coulthard – refusal of recognition politics.
Raven Chacon
Working‑Class / Labour‑Based Refusal
Beverley Skeggs — Formations of Class & Gender
bell hooks — Where We Stand: Class Matters
Raymond Williams — Resources of Hope
Feminist & queer refusal
Sara Ahmed – willfulness, complaint as refusal.
Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post‑Coloniality (2000) — early work on encounters, difference, and migration.
Feminist Life
KillJoy
Complaint
Jack Halberstam – unproductivity, unbecoming as refusal.
José Esteban Muñoz – queer utopian refusal.
Philosophical refusal
Giorgio Agamben – inoperativity (central to Honig’s reading).
Herman Melville – Bartleby as refusal (“I would prefer not to”)
More refusal Theorists:
Carole McGranahan – foundational in theorising refusal as generative, relational, and ethnographic.
Bonnie Honig – develops feminist refusal as world‑building, drawing on The Bacchae.
Marcel Mauss – early theorist of refusal in The Gift (refusal as cutting or remaking social relations).
James C. Scott – everyday refusal, infrapolitics.
K. Sivaramakrishnan – refusal in environmental and political anthropology.
David Graeber – creative refusal as world‑making and rejection of dominant political projects.
Lila Abu‑Lughod – critiques resistance frameworks; foundational for refusal’s genealogy.