Zoé Samudzi

Zoé Samudzi is a Zimbabwean-American writer and activist known for her book As Black as Resistance. Samudzi has written for The New Inquiry, The Daily Beast and Vice magazine. Samudzi was a 2017 Public Imagination Fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Zoé Samudzi
Samudzi speaks to Code Pink in 2020
Alma materNorthwest Missouri State University
University of Pittsburgh
London School of Economics
University of California, San Francisco

Writing and career

In 2018 Samudzi and William Anderson published their book, As Black as Resistance, which called for a new type of politics for Black Americans.[1] Her work with Anderson on Black anti-fascism notes that “Black radical formations are themselves fundamentally anti-fascist despite functioning outside of ‘conventional’ antifa spaces.”.[2] She has a critique of white anti-fascism stating that it fails to account for the fact that "American fascism is an evolution of state carceral forms that were founded on the settler genocide of indigenous communities and the enslavement of black people." Until white anti-fascists do more than repeat Black Lives Matter slogans and "fully assimilate nonwhite thinkers into the body of knowledge that we rely on to counter fascism" they will not be able to fully address the complexity of the US anti-fascist movement.[3]

Samudzi is an intersectional feminist, believing that “ ‘woman’ is not a catchall category that alone defines all our relationships to power”.[4] Samudzi described the COVID-19 pandemic as a “pandemic of western movement”.[5] She investigated the reasons that coronavirus disease disproportionately impacted the Black community, and reported on the legacy of apartheid as seen in the current COVID response from Namibia.[6][7]

On Juneteenth 2020 Samudzi's quotation, “We are not ready to fight because we love fighting. We are ready to fight because we are worth fighting for,”, was selected by Bustle as one of the best quotations to keep inspired in the fight for racial justice.[8]

Art and creative works

In 2018, Samudizi curated an art show at the Ashara Ekundayo gallery in Oakland, California,[9] which is dedicated to Black women artists.[9] She was part of a five-member Oakland film collective called The Black Aesthetic dedicated to highlighting "the multidimensionality of Blackness in under appreciated films or works by emerging filmmakers, which put on screenings and lectures for three seasons.[10] Samudzi would often act as the visiting scholar, leading discussions of films after the showings.[11] "The East Bay Express described Samudzi as the “Best Voice for a Radical New Future."[12]

Early life and education

Samudzi's parents are from Zimbabwe and grew up in British colonial Africa.[13][14] She attended the Northwest Missouri State University (then Missouri Academy of Sciences) where she took part in the Model United Nations.[15] She was an undergraduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied political science and African studies. While at the University of Pittsburgh, Samudzi attended a rally in response to the unjust shooting of Trayvon Martin, where she called for police and government accountability.[16]

In 2013 Samudzi moved to London, where she completed a master's programme at the London School of Economics. She is a doctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, where she studies German colonialism, the Herero and Namaqua genocide and the role of science in indigenous and Black identity.[17] She has studied the barriers that transgender people face accessing healthcare, contextualizing trans health within "larger systems of oppression".[18]

Selected publications
  • Samudzi, Zoé; Anderson, William C. (5 June 2018). As black as resistance : finding the conditions for liberation. Chico, CA. ISBN 978-1-84935-315-1. OCLC 1037813731.
  • Samudzi, Zoe; Anderson, William C. (2017-06-01). "The Anarchism of Blackness". Roar Magazine (5): 70–81.
  • Samudzi, Zoe; Mannell, Jenevieve (2016-01-02). "Cisgender male and transgender female sex workers in South Africa: gender variant identities and narratives of exclusion". Culture, Health & Sexuality. 18 (1): 1–14. doi:10.1080/13691058.2015.1062558. ISSN 1369-1058. PMID 26242843. S2CID 25303598.
  • Samudzi, Zoe (4 July 2019). "Afro-Diasporic Feminism and Freedom in Fluidity". In Eric-Udorie, June (ed.). Can we all be feminists?: seventeen writers on intersectionality, identity and finding the right way forward for feminism. ISBN 978-0-349-00988-9. OCLC 1051693928.

References
  1. Samudzi, Zoé; Anderson, William C. (5 June 2018). As black as resistance : finding the conditions for liberation. Chico, CA. ISBN 978-1-84935-315-1. OCLC 1037813731.
  2. "Everything You Need to Know About Antifa and How to Talk About It". www.vice.com. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  3. "Searching for Black Thought in White Antifascism". Jewish Currents. 2019-08-01. Retrieved 2020-07-11.
  4. "StackPath". www.womankind.org.uk. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  5. "What coronavirus teaches us about colonialism and the privilege of certain passports". gal-dem. 2020-03-31. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  6. "ROAR Collective Interviews Zoé Samudzi: COVID-19, Hierarchical Power, and the Distribution of Death". It's Going Down. 2020-04-21. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  7. Longworth, Arthur; Kamdar, Mira; Benfey, Christopher; Rich, Nathaniel; Dorfman, Ariel; Samudzi, Zoé; Hatuqa, Dalia; Eakin, Hugh; Klinkenborg, Verlyn (2020-04-11). "Pandemic Journal, April 6–12". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2020-07-11.
  8. "21 Juneteenth Quotes That'll Inspire You To Keep Fighting For Racial Justice". Bustle. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  9. "Blackness as a State of Matter". Contemporary And (in German). Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  10. Bitker, Janelle (2018-01-17). "Oakland's Black Artists Make Space for Themselves". East Bay Express. Retrieved 2020-07-11.
  11. "Oakland Film Series Asks: Is There a Black Aesthetic?". KQED. Retrieved 2020-07-11.
  12. "Best Voice for a Radical New Future 2018". East Bay Express. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  13. Samudzi, Zoé. "Perspective -- Johnny Clegg's music was full of contradictions. But I loved it". Washington Post. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  14. Samudzi, Zoé. "Naturalized Citizens Like My Mother Now Live In Fear of Status Reversal". Teen Vogue. Retrieved 2020-07-11.
  15. University, Northwest Missouri State. "Missouri Academy students place high at recent competitions". www.nwmissouri.edu. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  16. "At CMU, hundreds rally to remember Trayvon Martin". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  17. "The Chromatics of Play". Open Space. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  18. Krauss, Louis. "Off the Cuff: Zoé Samudzi, Medical Sociology Ph.D. Candidate". The Oberlin Review. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
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