Book Launch
November 13, 2025, 7pm
Thursday, November 13
7pm
Free with RSVP. Please RSVP here.
Please join us for a book launch for Jonathan González’s Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars, co-hosted by Ugly Duckling Presse. New York City choreographer, artist and writer Jonathan González will host a night of readings, screenings, and performances by Justin Allen, Rudy Gerson, Mario Gooden, Nile Harris, Marguerite Hemmings, Joselia Hughes, Benjamin Krusling, Shanzhai Lyric and Andrew Smyth, prompted by Ways to Move. The event will also feature a reading by González.
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.
Praise for Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars:
“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 sixteenth-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
“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
“[González’s] 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
“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 Willis, dancer, writer, Curator of Theater and Dance at EMPAC