Praise

A remarkably insightful and compelling book about the being and becoming of Blackness. Once I began reading it, I couldn’t stop. Written in the spirit and tradition of bell hooks and Frantz Fanon, it is one of the most important books written on the sociology, phenomenology, and psychology of racism and colonialism since Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.

– David Austin, author of Fear of a Black Nation and Dread Poetry and Freedom

Kilomba creates a space of resistance, and ultimately a space of hope: a new geography of the future.

– Alfredo Jaar, artist, architect, photographer, and filmmaker

Plantation Memories has become, for many of us, one of the critical resources for navigating … what Kilomba describes as the “continuous re-staging of the colonial order.”

– Gabi Ngcobo, educator and curator of the 2018 Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

Grada Kilomba forcefully reminds us that the plantation is not in our past, it is the foundation and the practice of our current order of life, its social relations and our imaginaries. In this work, the plantation is revealed as the foundation of and therefore the shaper of modern life—actual and metaphorically. The plantation now lives in all of us with different effect and affect and it functions as a psychic tether of our very beings.

– Rinaldo Walcott, author of The Long Emancipation: Moving Towards Black Freedom

A rigorous and highly intimate exploration of the ways that the unfinished legacies of slavery, colonialism, and Europe’s African genocide remain sutured into the everyday lives of Black women. Kilomba’s work demonstrates the psychological and political urgency of ongoing anti-colonial struggle in a time of enduring calamity.

– Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

An innovative and important intervention.

– Paul Gilroy, founding director of the Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College London