Zoé Samudzi is a Zimbabwean-American writer and activist known for her book As Black as Resistance. Samudzi has written for The New Inquiry, The Daily Beast and Vice magazine. Samudzi was a 2017 Public Imagination Fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Writing and career
In 2018 Samudzi and William Anderson published their book, As Black as Resistance, which called for a new type of politics for Black Americans. Her work with Anderson on Black anti-fascism notes that “Black radical formations are themselves fundamentally anti-fascist despite functioning outside of ‘conventional’ antifa spaces.”. She has a critique of white anti-facism stating that it fails to account for the fact that "American fascism is an evolution of state carceral forms that were founded on the settler genocide of indigenous communities and the enslavement of black people." Until white anti-fascists do more than repeat Black Lives Matter slogans and "fully assimilate nonwhite thinkers into the body of knowledge that we rely on to counter fascism" they will not be able to fully address the complexity of the US anti-fascist movement. Samudzi is an intersectional feminist, believing that “ ‘woman’ is not a catchall category that alone defines all our relationships to power”. Samudzi described the COVID-19 pandemic as a “pandemic of western movement”. She investigated the reasons that coronavirus disease disproportionately impacted the Black community, and reported on the legacy of apartheid as seen in the current COVID response from Namibia. On Juneteenth 2020 Samudzi's quotation, “We are not ready to fight because we love fighting. We are ready to fight because we are worth fighting for,”, was selected by Bustle as one of the best quotations to keep inspired in the fight for racial justice.
Art and creative works
In 2018, Samudizi curated an art show at the Ashara Ekundayo gallery in Oakland, California, which is dedicated to Black women artists. She was part of a five-member Oakland film collective called The Black Aesthetic dedicated to highlighting "the multidimensionality of Blackness in under appreciated films or works by emerging filmmakers, which put on screenings and lectures for three seasons. Samudzi would often act as the visiting scholar, leading discussions of films after the showings. "The East Bay Express described Samudzi as the “Best Voice for a Radical New Future."
