Reading & Hearing The Nation on No Map
by William C. Anderson
is now available at akpress.org
Music is a huge part of everything that I do. I spend most of my time listening to music and looking for new music. It informs all of my politics and has been a radicalizing force in my life from my earliest days growing up in the church. Music isn’t a hobby or convenient distraction, it’s at the core of my being. I have been making playlists for years to try to help people through hard times with songs that inspire, comfort, and push me to action. I started doing this when I was working with the Praxis Center at Kalamazoo College as an editor for the race, class, and immigration section of their blog. I also made two during the pandemic when I was organizing, teaching, and writing. So, naturally, I made one to go with my book. You’ll see a few references to music throughout the text if you pick it up, but not nearly as many as I could have put. I think I’m going to have to write a book that’s strictly dedicated to music. It means too much to me not to. So, I’ve attached an accompanying playlist of songs related to this text. These are songs that inspired The Nation on No Map. Some complement the text and others conflict with it. Others are simply different songs I enjoyed while things were coming together on my journey to the last page. And some are symbolic. Hear me out!
If you’re willing to listen to my musical selections, please also consider a short reading list of texts that could be read alongside this book too. Many of them influenced this book and my thinking about the topics at hand.
Books
Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return (2001)
Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution (1979)
C.L.R. James and Grace C. Lee, State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950)
C.L.R. James and Grace Lee Boggs, with Cornelius Castoriadis, Facing Reality (1958)
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019)
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (1997)
Cedric Robinson, The Terms of Order, (1980)
Cedric Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (2001)
William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, As Black as Resistance (2018)
Kuwasi Balagoon, A Soldier’s Story (2001)
Burton Watson, The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-Chi (1999)
Jeffrey L. Broughton, The Bodhidharma Anthology: The Earliest Records of Zen (1999)
Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (2009)
Modibo Kadalie, Pan African Social Ecology: Speeches, Conversations, & Essays (2019)
Eusi Kwayana, The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics (1972)
I.E. Igariwey and Sam Mbah, African Anarchism: The History of a Movement (1997)
Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe (1990)
Christina Sharpe, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)
Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture (1937)
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
Harold W. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family (1844)
Essays & Short Reads
Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (1987)
Dionne Brand, Chronicles: Early Works (2011)
Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson, The Anarchism of Blackness (2017)
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)
Paul Gilroy, Black Fascism (2000)
Ashanti Alston, Black Anarchism (2003)
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (1988)
Sylvia Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument (2003)
Aimé Césaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez (1956)
Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge (1844)
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Letter To Marx (1846)
Bedour Alagraa, What Will Be the Cure?: A Conversation with Sylvia Wynter (2020)
Walter Rodney, Aspects of the International Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America (1975)
Gabrielle DaCosta,The Havoc of Less (2017)
Hubert H. Harrison, The Negro and the Nation (1917)
William C. Anderson, Everyone’s Place: Organizing, Gendered Labor, and Leadership (2021)