Kindred Creation

Parables and Paradigms for Freedom—Black Worldmaking to Reclaim Our Heritage and Humanity

By: Aida Mariam Davis, Angela Y. Davis - foreword

Narrated by: Aida Mariam Davis

A vital path home. Employing African epistemologies and an embodied African beingness, this book embraces the revelation and miracle of Blackness.

Creating a world worthy of our children requires recalling the dignity and distinction of the African way of life.

This book is not written for settler consumption. Kindred Creation is a call and response to dream and design better worlds rooted in African lifeways: a path to Black freedom, a love letter to Black futures, and a blueprint to intergenerational Black joy and dignity—all (and always) on Black terms.

Author, organizer, and designer Aida Mariam Davis explores the historical and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism, making explicit the ways that extraction, oppression, and enslavement serve the goals of empire—not least by severing ancestral connections and disrupting profound and ancient relationships to self, nature, and community.

Structured in three parts—Remember, Refuse, and Reclaim—Kindred Creation is a philosophical guidebook and a vital invitation to power and reconnection. Davis employs parable, poetry, theory, memory, narrative, and prophecy to help listeners:

• Remember: By unforgetting the unending and cascading violence of settler colonialism and other forms of domination and exploring the ways that African land, language, lifestyle, and labor are stolen, distorted, and repackaged for colonial consumption to extract capital and sever ties to ancestral knowledge, lifeways, and dignity
• Refuse: By rejecting and interrupting death-making institutions and relationships and choosing kinship and self-determination in the face of settler colonial violence
• Reclaim: By revealing that freedom is within us—and within reach. Davis shares how the listener can birth new worlds and relationships and offers strategies for reclaiming land, language, lifestyle, and labor.

The colonial violence and dispossession of African land, language, and labor is inflicted intentionally—and by design. Reclaiming African lifeways and remembering what was forcibly forgotten must be by creation: a remembering of our interconnectedness and kinship.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2024 Aida Mariam Davis (P)2024 North Atlantic Books

Critic reviews

"The American experiment in democracy may be nearly 250 years old, but our attempt to realize a multiracial and pluralistic society of free and equal citizens has yet to be born.... Kindred Creation reminds us that we must look backward to reclaim and repair in order to chart any path forward."
—Rob Reich, professor of political science at Stanford University

"An invitation to rip colonial borders out of our hearts and souls by the roots, and then rebuild, restore, and reimagine what lives lived together could look like.... an invitation to be made whole."
—Patty Krawec, cohost of the Medicine for the Resistance podcast, cofounder of the Nii'kinaaganaa Foundation, and author of Becoming Kin

"A must-read for all schools and for parents of Black children who can use Aida's smart, decolonized lens as a tool to reimagine/create a revolutionary new world of freedom."
—Jessica McKay, New York Times best-selling author of Always with You, Always with Me