The
Rememory
Library

Our ambition for The Rememory LIbrary is to offer not only the materials for learning, exploring, and understanding, but also the tools to do so in an ethical and life-affirming way. This project began in collaboration with and in response to Ithaca High School students' demands for a portal to Africana Studies that might take them somewhere familiar and new. These demands were not only for a diversity of experience and voice in their classroom readings and discussions, but also a desire to more intimately identify with local communities and the places they call home. What are the narratives that might allow these students to more fully claim these spaces as their own? To know themselves not as guests, or haphazard wanderers, but custodians themselves of land and history that has been passed down to them via a long genealogy of Black, Brown, and Indigenous resistance? The Rememory Library, then, is an assembly of forbearers and freedom seekers, creative-theoreticians, and witnesses to our Belonging and the ways systems of interlocking oppression have tried and failed to cut our roots. Our intentions for the project, therefore, include making room for gathering across space and time - a Black sociality that is marked by expansive simultaneity - and to invite and introduce new learners and thinkers into the discourse of Black Studies by giving them the language and tools to do so in ways that always promote life and interrupt the cycle of violence - interrupt colonial ways of knowing, learning, and becoming. 

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The Rememory Library brings together and makes accessible a large congregation of important Black diaspora writers and thinkers, and we encourage those who are unsure of how to work with these materials in their classrooms, to reach out (rememorylibrary@gmail.com) and ask for feedback as we continue to prepare workshops and teaching guides for ethical Black study for those outside of Black Studies. 

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