Noah Tesfaye
A Student of Black Study
“A Student of Black Study” is a collection centered around understanding the historical
developments of what is known as the Black Liberation Movement and the struggles of African-descended peoples fighting to affirm their self-determination. The collection, which spans in topic and subfields of Black Studies, is motivated by my investment in movement work as an organizer and as someone aspiring to attend graduate school in the near future. The goal of gathering this assortment of texts is to help inform my own understanding of Black people and hopefully continue to share this knowledge and texts with those I am in community with.
—Noah Tesfaye
View his full essay.
View his bibliography.
Muntaqim, Jalil. We Are Our Own Liberators: Selected Prison Writings. 2003. Reprint, Oakland: PM Press, 2010.
I found my thesis topic after reading this book with Jalil Muntaqim himself in a Zoom non-UChicago course. Reading with a former US political prisoner of 49 years is an experience I will never forget. I got to get a better sense of what New Afrikan identity was, how the Republic of New Afrika was seen as a political possibility in the 1960s/1970s, and how we must center political prisoners in our analysis of anti-Black white supremacist violence by the state.
Onaci, Edward. Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Edward Onaci’s book made my thesis possible. Without his initial archival work uncovering the histories of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), I could not have been able to embark on a two-year journey to analyze the political philosophies of the RNA and their contemporary legacies. This text is filled with annotations, questions, and self-criticisms. Now that I do know Dr. Onaci personally while working on my thesis, this book means even more to me today than it did when I began this work in 2021.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Reprint, New York: Grove Press, 2005.
