John Akomfrah Mimesis: African Soldier opens during Black History Month 2024 and will be on display in GoMA until January 2026. We are very grateful to John and Smoking Dogs Films for providing us with a reading list of publications – historical, fiction, poetry and exhibitions – that relate to his work and practice. We have also added some books here that are important to ongoing work on our displays and collections in Glasgow Museums.

Some of these books are available in exhibition spaces across GoMA or in Library at GoMA.

• John Akomfrah James Harvey
• John Akomfrah – Lisson Gallery
• Black and British: A Forgotten History (Paperback) David Olusoga (author)
• The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire David Olusoga (author)
• The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Paperback), Olaudah Equiano (author), David Olusoga (foreword)
• Black and British: An Illustrated History: Signed Bookplate Edition (Hardback) David Olusoga (author), Jake Alexander (illustrator), Melleny Taylor (illustrator)
• Black and British: A short, essential history (Paperback) David Olusoga (author)
• Black History for Every Day of the Year (Hardback), David Olusoga (author), Yinka Olusoga (author), Kemi Olusoga (author, illustrator)
• Edward Said Orientalism
• George Jackson Blood in my eye        
• The Way of Chinese Painting: Its Ideas and Technique with Selections from the Seventeenth-Century Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting by Mai-mai Sze (1988-01-18).
• George Padmore Pan Africanism or Communism         .
• Sergei  Eisenstein The psychology of composition         
• CLR James The Future in the present      
• Ezra Pound Selected Poems          
• Andrey Tarkovsky Sculpting in time       
• Walter Benjamin Illuminations              
• Juliet Mitchell Psychoanalysis and Feminism   
• Aime Cesaire Discourse on Colonialism   
• The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (Paperback) C L R James (author), James Walvin (author of introduction)
• W E B Dubois The Souls of Black Folk           
• Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space   
• Rhitwik Ghatak Cinéma and I                  
• Kwame Nkrumah Neo colonialism, the last stage of imperialism     .
• Rotomi Fani- Kayode Black Male / White Male        
• Virginia Woolf  Moments of Being    
• Frantz Fanon Black Skin – White Masks   
• Robert Frank The Americans 
• Nelson Mandela biography
• Patterson Joseph The secret diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho
• Emma Dabiri Don’t touch my hair   
• James Baldwin Notes of a native son 
• James Baldwin The fire next time      
• James Baldwin Another Country   
• Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness 
• Christina Sharpe In the Wake: On Blackness and Being 
• Edwidge Danticat Create Dangerously
• Stuart Hall Edited by Paul Gilroy; Ruth Wilson Gilmore STUART HALL: SELECTED WRITINGS: Selected Writings on Race and Difference – essay on Cultural Identity and Diaspora [1990]
• Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth
• Frantz Fanon Toward the African Revolution
• Sudhir Hazareesingh Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture
• Kris Manjapra Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation
• Johny Pitts Afropean: Notes from Black Europe
• Bernardine Evaristo Blonde Roots
• Peter Fryer Black People in the British Empire
• Alice Correia What is Black Art?
• The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure Ekow Eshun (editor)
• Sathnam Sanghera Stolen History