On Cuddling Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace (Vagabonds)

"Will take its place among books by Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, and Hazel Carby that investigate the violence of intimacy and the intimacy of violence" Jack Halberstam, author of Wild Things
Ranging from the terrifying embrace of the slave ship's hold to the racist encoding of "cuddly" toys, On Cuddling is a unique combination of essay and poetry that contends with the way racial violence is enacted through intimacy.
Informed by Black feminist and queer poetics, Phanuel Antwi focuses his lens on the suffering of Black people at the hands of state violence and racial capitalism. As radical movements grow to advance Black liberation, so too must our ways of understanding how racial capitalism embraces us all. Antwi turns to cuddling, an act we imagine as devoid of violence, and explores it as a tense transfer point of power.
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