Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars
November 2025
Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars
$20.00
In stock
"This is minoritarian revolution in motion: a vital resistance that passes through the apparatuses of domination, composing black worlds in the space of a breath."
— Tavia Nyong’o
About the Book
Moving between archival fragments, rehearsal notes, and speculative memory, Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars traces the embodied frequencies and assembled states of Black life. González theorizes Blackness as a grammar, occupying the interstices of white colonial culture; Black movement and expression are both defined by and break down the hegemonic. Through a consideration of land, politics, magic, and movement, this hybrid work performs the perpetually unfinished task of resistance.
Author
Jonathan González
is an artist and scholar whose work engages research at the intersections of racialization, black geographies, creative practice and African diasporic literacies. These practices take on the form of prose, the choreographic, video art, sound, lecture and curation to engender interdisciplinary engagement towards otherwise modalities of collaboration, representation and study. González’s writings have been published by ASAP/J Journal, EAR | WAVE | EVENT, Regiones:CENTRAL, Movement Research Journal, Contemporaryand, Contact Quarterly, Cultured Magazine, deem journal, and Angela’s Pulse. González has received fellowships from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Art Matters Foundation, Wave Farm and the Jerome Foundation. González has been an artist in residence with numerous organizations including Center for Afrofuturist Studies, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Loghaven Artist Residency.
Praise
González locates Black insurgent grammars in the very toxicity of racial capitalism, revealing how aesthetic practices operate through rather than against the particulate matter of environmental violence. His account moves fluidly between 16th-century Obeah trials and Lee Perry’s Black Ark studio, demonstrating how marronage has always been a question of frequency—tuning to oblique wavelengths that evade capture while remaining materially consequent. This is minoritarian revolution in motion: a vital resistance that passes through the apparatuses of domination, composing black worlds in the space of a breath.
— Tavia Nyong’o, author of Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World
His integrative project, operating through gestures of vignette and recollection—an anthology in the sense of "collection of flowers," a collation of the bloomed—emphasizes the somatics of presence and the social life of non-being, toward a vision where movement and gathering are their own theorists, bodies of practice that know what is to be done before we do, a knowledge registered as density in the air and vibration in the flesh.
— manuel arturo abreu, author of Incalculable Loss
Guiding readers from the Caribbean to 1930s New York to contemporary Southern France and Greek isles, Ways to Move offers readers dazzling spatiotemporal styles of Black diasporic wayfinding. In domains way, way, way beyond the grasp of genre partitions, Jonathan González animates the written word…
Ways to Move is a text that will lavishly reward repeated engagement, leaving haunting aftershocks of a rigorous imagination comprising smudged traces of paths both ancestral and as-of-yet existent.
— Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, author of Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology
Ways to Move is a book that knows it is possible to make a morsel of text deliciously dense with ideas. Here, both the recollected everyday moves of Black life and the dusty dates of dance history grow lush with texture, fragrance, and openings to new meaning.
— Tara Aisha Willis
Excerpt
i want to be with you in the ways with you
i want to be with you in the ways with you that wrestle under the castle of our skin
i want to be with you in the ways with you that hack at the hold of our freedom
i want to be with you in the ways with you that vibrate this skeleton
Details
ISBN: 978-1-946604-38-5
Publication Date: November 1, 2025
