Zoé Samudzi | |
|---|---|
 Samudzi in 2020 | |
| Born | 1992 or 1993 (age 32–33) |
| Education | Northwest Missouri State University University of Pittsburgh (BA) London School of Economics (MS) University of California, San Francisco (PhD) |
| Website | www |
Zoé Samudzi (born 1992/1993)[1] is an American writer and activist known for her co-authored bookAs Black as Resistance. Samudzi has written forThe New Inquiry,The Daily Beast andVice magazine. Samudzi was a 2017 Public Imagination Fellow at theYerba Buena Center for the Arts. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of African-American and Africana Studies at The Ohio State University.
Samudzi's parents are fromZimbabwe and grew up inBritish colonial Africa.[2][3] Her grandfather wasAbel Muzorewa, the first and only Prime Minister ofZimbabwe Rhodesia.[4] She attended theNorthwest Missouri State University (then Missouri Academy of Sciences) where she took part in theModel United Nations.[5] She was an undergraduate student at theUniversity of Pittsburgh, where she studiedpolitical science and African studies. While at the University of Pittsburgh, Samudzi attended a rally in response to the unjust shooting ofTrayvon Martin, where she called for police and government accountability.[6]
In 2013 Samudzi moved toLondon, where she completed a master's programme at theLondon School of Economics. As a doctoral researcher at theUniversity of California, San Francisco, she studiedGerman colonialism, theHerero and Namaqua genocide and the role of science in Indigenous and Black identity.[7] She has studied the barriers that transgender people face accessing healthcare, contextualizingtrans health within "larger systems of oppression".[8]
In 2018 Samudzi and William C. Anderson published their co-authored book,As Black as Resistance, which called for a new type of politics for Black Americans.[9] Her work with Anderson on Blackanti-fascism notes that "Black radical formations are themselves fundamentally anti-fascist despite functioning outside of 'conventional'antifa spaces."[10] Her critique of white anti-fascism states that it fails to account for the fact that "American fascism is an evolution of state carceral forms that were founded on thesettler genocide of indigenous communities and the enslavement of black people." Until white anti-fascists do more than repeatBlack 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.[11]
Samudzi is anintersectional feminist, believing that "woman is not a catchall category that alone defines all our relationships to power".[12] Samudzi described theCOVID-19 pandemic as a "pandemic of western movement".[13] She investigated the reasons thatcoronavirus disease disproportionately impacted the Black community, and reported on the legacy of apartheid as seen in the COVID response fromNamibia.[14][15] Samudzi has argued foranarchism in an interview and expressed support for theEZLN.[16]
OnJuneteenth 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 byBustle as one of the best quotations to keep inspired in the fight for racial justice.[17]
Since 2022, Samudzi has been an associate editor ofParapraxis, a magazine ofpsychoanalysis and politics.
From 2023 to 2025, she was the Charles E. Scheidt Visiting Assistant Professor ofGenocide Studies and Genocide Prevention at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies atClark University.[18]
In 2018, Samudzi curated an art show at the Ashara Ekundayo gallery inOakland, California,[19] which is dedicated to Black women artists.[19] 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.[20] Samudzi would often act as the visiting scholar, leading discussions of films after the showings.[21] "TheEast Bay Express described Samudzi as the "Best Voice for a Radical New Future."[22]
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