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.

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The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — His most influential text, analysing decolonisation, violence, and national consciousness.

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Toward the African Revolution (1964) — A posthumous collection of political essays, speeches, and journalism​​

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Saidiya Hartman – refusal of the archive; waywardness.

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self‑Making in Nineteenth‑Century America (1997; revised 2022)

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Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007)

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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)

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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. 

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All Incomplete (2021)

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Fred Moten's In the Break (2003) is also a great, beautiful read. 

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I also recommend Moten's interviews and lectures on Youtube. 

Dean's Lecture Series: Fred Moten on Plato, Dickinson, and the Philosophical Blues

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​​​​Tina Campt – quiet refusal, haptic listening

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Tina Campt has extensive work on the nature of Vernacular photography. And listening to images rather than the typical projection that observational practice teach. 

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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:

• distance

• neutrality

• the supremacy of the visual

• the authority of the observer

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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)

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Christina Sharpe – refusal as “wake work” 

In the Wake : On Blackness and Being (2016)​​​

 

Indigenous refusal

Audra Simpson – political refusal, ethnographic refusal.

 

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Indigenous refusal as resurgence.

 

Glen Coulthard – refusal of recognition politics.

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Raven Chacon - sound as resistance 

Working‑Class / Labour‑Based Refusal

Gloria Anzaldúa

Working‑class Chicana background.

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Beverley Skeggs — Formations of Class & Gender

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bell hooks — Where We Stand: Class Matters

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Raymond Williams — Resources of Hope

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Kerry Hudson - Foreword to Toxic Childhood Stress (2020)

Newborn (2024) — memoir on motherhood, home, belonging

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Natasha Carthew - Rough Edges: Where Land Meets Water (forthcoming 2026)

Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and Resilience (2023)

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McKenzie Wark

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Chanel Miller

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Feminist & queer refusal

 

Sara Ahmed – Encounters, willfulness, complaint as refusal.

 

Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post‑Coloniality (2000) — early work on encounters, difference, and migration.

 

Feminist Life KillJoy blog  feministkilljoys | killing joy as a world making project

 

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”)

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More refusal Theorists: 

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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.

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