Who Are These For?
Artists, intellectuals, (recovering) academics, content creators, innovators, and others who experience triggers and challenges when reading heavy, important texts alone or in learning environments where they don’t feel emotionally safe expressing what their body is saying. (They may also lack the tools to sit with and process what is happening in their body.) This can be especially necessary after years of learning in traditional, white supremacist classrooms in America.

The Purpose of Black Somatic Reading Circles
As educators, artists, and liberation seekers, we might find it challenging to teach and engage with activating content in ways that honor our embodied wisdom. This work is rooted in Imani’s realization of the need to heal their relationship with reading as a Black trans person—moving beyond intellectual rumination and dissociation to embodied awareness and acknowledgment that their Black body spoke as they read and engage with Black “things.” Further, as an adult who was stigmatized and diagnosed with a Speech Impediment for speaking their first language, their family of origin’s Black English, in first grade, while “learning” Standard English, Imani is sensitive to the reality that they were taught to read as if they were white. They were never taught to read in their Black body. They were taught to dissociate from it and the language most attached to their emotional core. They are certain this is true for many of us.

Core Principles & Beliefs

• Shared Belief & Focalizing’s 7 Conditions:
  Creating a rigorous, emotionally safe, and intimate learning environment grounded in curiosity and emotional openness.

• Acknowledging Contradictions:
  Recognizing that reading in colonial languages, like “Standard” English, as African Diasporic people, can be re-wounding, yet reading is also essential for liberation.

• Embracing Opposite Energies:
  We hold these tensions as part of our collective liberation work, grounded in Imani’s 7 Conditions for Healthy Black Inhabitation.

Learning Space & Practice

• Needs-First Approach:
  Prioritizing learner needs, feedback, and mutual teaching.

• Inter-lingual Engagement:
  Supporting diverse linguistic backgrounds and embodied wisdom.

• Facilitation & Collaboration:
  Opportunities for co-facilitation and community building.

• Participation Agreement:
  All participants will agree not to teach Imani Noel’s pedagogical framework without them present.

• Centering the Reader:

  We prioritize the reader’s embodied truth by holding collective space for their authentic experience with a text. This is wisdom that transcends language—pre-linguistic and rooted in felt sense—rather than mere opinion that someone else can change. We honor the body’s teachings and practice communicating from this embodied space, fostering a deeper connection to our innate knowledge.

• Authentic Expression:

  We welcome play, laughter, playing the dozens, pleasure in one’s intellect, knowledge, and capacity, competitiveness for the sake of mutual growth, and intellectual banter, while understanding that this is not in contradiction to accountability, emotional flexibility, power sharing (communicating from a place of knowledge to connect, not shame; while recognizing that this is a complex process we must practice (it’s called teaching)), ego flexibility, and the ability to share power and to recognize if/when we have misattuned to someone’s existing reality.

Imani Noel’s R.E.A.D. Method

Developed by Imani, while reading violence against Black bodies in the archive in graduate school, this process engages with Black texts as sacred objects, sitting with the paradoxically healing and activating somatic and aesthetic encounter as a form of re-wounding that we must engage, similar to how one might engage Roland Barthes’ concept of the punctum in a photograph:

• Recognize

• Engage

• Acknowledge

• Discern

Focus Areas:

• Embodied resonance

• Accepting & Naming Activation

• Titration

• Curiosity & Openness to new realities

• Acknowledging the violence in our political, embodied, cultural past and present without normalizing or accepting violence (interpersonal, systemic, institutional, and/or state-sanctioned)

• Creating a new way of experiencing Black embodied wisdom as knowledge production in motion and in relationship with Black objects and Black experiential development and identity formation

Join Us

Participants commit to reading primary and sometimes secondary texts by African diasporic people, engaging slowly and allowing texts to transform us. This is a process-based reading practice, focused on reading Black "things" or reading "things" that position Black people and Black bodies as "things" as an aesthetic encounter, a wounding encounter, that requires a set of somatic skills, with an intention that leans towards the sacred. We will discuss why this wounding is foundational, essential, and integral to how Blackness was constructed in the West, and why Black artists both consciously and unconsciously employ “The Wound” to wreak havoc, fuck shit up, rearrange, move, shift, change us, and more.

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Final Note

It’s okay not to seek this kind of intellectual community. Imani facilitates these spaces for those yearning for a space like this. These embodied reading practices align with their needs, yearnings, and desires. They are sure, because they have met others like them, that this is true for many others.

And keep in mind, Imani has never experienced this before. We are entering new, experimental, and embryonic territory. Where we go, we go together.