Building a Reparative Framework for Cultural Equity: Redesigning Creative Business Through Solidarity Economy

HowlRound Theatre Commons: In his 1969 review of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Ayi Kwei Armah—the first Black literary critic to analyze Fanon’s work on global Blackness—highlights a vision of culture as a vital environment for survival and growth rather than a mere product. A decade later, in the 1980s, Armah took a radical step toward cultural sovereignty by founding Per Ankh Publishing, an African publication collective in Popenguine, Senegal. Modeled after the ancient Egyptian "House of Life," the cooperative was established to bypass the extractive nature of Western publishing, which Armah viewed as a form of intellectual enslavement.