Thinking From Black: A Lexicon, Edited by Practicing Refusal Collective, Redefines Black Diasporic Thought

Key facts

• Thinking From Black: A Lexicon was released in 2026 by FSG Originals.
• The book is edited by Tina Campt, Kaiama L. Glover, Canisia Lubrin, Tavia Nyong’o, Christina Sharpe, and Alexander Ghedi Weheliye.
• The editors are members of the Practicing Refusal Collective, a Black feminist academic group convening since 2015.
• The volume is described as a “diasporic glossary” that offers definitions of phrases from which Blackness proliferates.
• Contributors include artists, poets, and historians who mull over words of their choosing.
• In 1979, Kamau Brathwaite delivered a speech at Harvard University, later published as History of the Voice (1984), introducing the concept of “nation language.”
• Brathwaite defined nation language as a creolized Caribbean tongue synthesizing African influences, “like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave.”
• The cover features Gabrielle Goliath’s 2024 performance Elegy — for two ancestors, staged at La Biennale di Venezia in the Sale d’Armi, Venice, photographed by J. Macdonald.