Frank B. Wilderson III
Frank B. Wilderson III
Frank B. Wilderson III spent five years in South Africa as an elected official in the African National Congress during the country’s transition from apartheid and was a member of the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto We Sizwe.
His books include Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (South End Press, 2008; reprint edition, Duke University Press, 2015) and Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010). Ishmael Reed called Incognegro, awarded the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award, “an important contribution to the African and African American canons and a rare American work that bridges two cultures [Black American and Black South African].” Commune Editions published Wilderson’s poetry collection, Sideways Between Stories, in 2016 as a pamphlet.
Black Study Series
The Poetry Center’s Black Study Series takes its title and impetus from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s collaborative work, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013): “But the student has a habit, a bad habit. She studies. She studies but she does not learn. If she learned they could measure her progress, establish her attributes, give her credit. But the student keeps studying, keeps planning to study, keeps running to study, keeps studying a plan, keeps elaborating a debt. The student does not intend to pay.”