[11/01/25] González, Jonathan: Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars

Ugly Duckling Presse, paperback

Publication Date: November 1, 2025

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Ways to Move proposes Black resistance outside of the overdetermined binary of protest and participation to encounter a tertiary terrain of Black ambivalence, Black in-expression and Black withholding. By speculating alongside June Jordan’s architectural renderings for Skyrise for Harlem, rehearsal notes from Black Ritual (Obeah) by the American Ballet Theatre’s short-lived Negro Wing, and diary entries of Olaudah Equiano as encountered in his 1789 autobiography, this text contextualizes a historical longue-durée of Black life practices, attending to how the living memory of slavery is ever-conceived across these temporalities within the semiotics of the flesh, modes of place-making, and desire.

Jonathan González is an artist and scholar whose work engages research at the intersections of racialization, black geographies, creative practice and African diasporic literacies. These practices take on the form of prose, the choreographic, video art, sound, lecture and curation to engender interdisciplinary engagement towards otherwise modalities of collaboration, representation and study. González's writings have been published by ASAP/J Journal, EAR | WAVE | EVENT, Regiones:CENTRAL, Movement Research Journal, Contemporaryand, Contact Quarterly, Cultured Magazine, deem journal, and Angela's Pulse. González has received fellowships from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Art Matters Foundation, Wave Farm and the Jerome Foundation. González has been an artist in residence with numerous organizations including Center for Afrofuturist Studies, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Loghaven Artist Residency.