We run this reading group in the hope that together we can reach different answers to the question “who are we?” We proceed with the assumption that nothing is our own, and therefore, with the possibility that we may embrace everything.

As a perspective and a praxis, Red Natural History urges those of us who take the side of the common to see ourselves as part of the storm that arrives from the past, not to produce chaos, but to rupture the status quo, draw capitalism’s structural violence and injustices into the open, and orient our struggles for a livable and egalitarian future for all. 

NAA is working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous theorists, historians, ethnobotanists, geographers, landscape architects, artists, and activists to define and organize around a counter-tradition of natural history, a Red Natural History, which sees the world not as a wealth of natural resources available for possession or profit, but as a world in common that cannot be enclosed. This first text situates this inquiry within NAA’s history of practice, telling the story of how we came to believe it is necessary to name and organize around an alternate tradition of natural history. The second delves into the question at hand, sketching out our collective’s provisional definition of Red Natural History.

More than a dozen independent African nations use the CFA franc, a currency with colonial origins and ongoing colonial functions. A new study of the CFA franc explains the monetary mechanisms of persistent French domination in Africa and carries forward a radical tradition of economic critique and political struggle.

This essay brings into conversation two recent books in this field that expound a different set of decolonial projects. In these books, Nadine El-Enany and Gary Wilder refuse to position the nation-state, with its bounded national territorial logic, as the frame of the analysis, thereby rejecting ‘methodological nationalism’.