218 pp. December 3, 2024, North Atlantic Books. Non-fiction.
It feels like it continues to be a time for gathering, pathfinding and contemplation, a phase that was perhaps triggered by the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) protests, accelerated by the pandemic, and that’s being exacerbated by the tumbling, bewildering world we seem to live in now. This entry into this space of way-making by Aida Mariam Davis is directed particularly towards Africans and Black people. It’s a book that’s thinking deeply about lineage and legacy: It describes itself as “a call and response to dream and design better worlds rooted in African lifeways” and as “a path to Black freedom, a love letter to Black futures, and a blueprint to intergenerational Black joy and dignity”; importantly and centrally, “all (and always) on Black terms.”
This call to Blackness through design and design thinking lays out a formal thesis’s work of philosophical groundwork. Kindred Creation exposes all of the ways settler colonialism has acted violently against African and Indigenous ways of being and lifeways—in attempts to define and erase these cultures—and how Indigenous people and Africans in particular (on the Continent and in the Diaspora) can design new worlds for themselves in three parts: Re-member: Contexts And Characteristics Of Colonialism (Land, Language, Lifestyle, Labor); Refuse: Unsettle the Settler; and Reclaim: Return To Right Relationship.
What’s special about Aida Mariam Davis in particular is her positionality as an Ethiopian American: in Kindred Creation, she brings both perspectives to bear. Kindred Creation is not so much a primer or manual as Davis’s own profound meditation on these themes and her sharing of her thoughtful perspective; it should be read as such. The book enlarges on a particular theme for me: utopian thinking, and African and Black futurisms.
Recommended for theorists of Black lives, culture, and design, Black creatives, and everyone who thinks deeply about Black futures.
Read with:
- The Afrofuturist Evolution x Ytasha L Womack
- Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook x Elizabeth Dori Tunstall, Ene Agi (Illustr.) (ARC)
- The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America x Aaron Robertson
Thank you to North Atlantic Books and NetGalley for DRC access.
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Harare Review of Books 
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