Kindred Creation

Description

Kindred Creation offers a path home to an embodied African beingness: one that embraces sacred Black personhood against assimilation and colonization and shows readers that designing a future beyond survival isn’t only possible—it’s a necessary reclamation.

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 also be by design: an embodied re-knowing rooted in kinship, care, and liberation.

Author, organizer, and designer Aida Mariam Davis excavates the historical and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism, making explicit the ways in which 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 readers:

• 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 reader can birth new worlds and relationships and offers strategies for reclaiming land, language, lifestyle, and labor.

Feminist, liberatory, and spanning East Oakland to Ethiopia and beyond, 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.Aida Mariam Davis holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and African American studies from the University of California, Berkeley in addition to a Master’s from the University of Southern California in Public Policy and Public Administration. Davis is currently the Chief People Officer of the People Team at Sierra Club. Davis founded and led Decolonize Design, a boutique consulting firm with clients spanning the nonprofit sector, philanthropy, and Fortune 500 companies. She created the Belonging, Dignity, Justice, and Joy (BDJJ) framework as an alternative to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) industrial complex. Her writing can be found online and in print at various publications, including Stanford Social Innovation Review, World Economic Forum, Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, and UC Berkeley Diaspora Magazine. She teaches a class on social innovation at the University of Pennsylvania. Davis currently resides in California with her husband and two children.US

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