Reading Black Reconstruction Today - by Yousuf Al-Bulushi & Geo Maher & Damien M Sojoyner (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

We are living through a period of perpetual crises and explosive struggles for liberation on a global scale. This transdisciplinary collection explores what W. E. B. Du Bois's groundbreaking 1935 work, Black Reconstruction in America, tells us about repression and resistance across the world, asking: What do abolition and reconstruction mean today? What would it take for these concepts to become a global reality? How can we make sense of our political moment, from the resurgence of Black consciousness across the Americas, to the rise of neofascism in Europe and beyond, to the fight against land dispossession in Africa? Reading "Black Reconstruction" Today draws together a group of leading scholars and activists to explore the lasting relevance of Du Bois's political masterwork.

From the Back Cover

"Reading 'Black Reconstruction' Today is a rich and rigorous exploration of W. E. B. Du Bois's great work. This volume will be an indispensable resource for teachers, students, and scholars, for anyone who is reading Du Bois and thinking with him about the legacy of the Reconstruction era and the world-building possibilities of abolitionism."--Kevin Bruyneel, author of Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States

"W. E. B. Du Bois's masterful drama of insurgent Black politics and counterrevolutionary violence is as relevant today as it was in 1935. Reading 'Black Reconstruction' Today is an important engagement with Du Bois's work. It is well written, with concise and trenchant arguments that will be meaningful for a broad public interested in thinking with Black Reconstruction, as well as those trying to understand the present conjuncture."--Alex Lubin, Professor of African American Studies and History, Penn State University

"Visionary scholars Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Geo Maher, and Damien Sojoyner have curated a collection of essays that powerfully marshal W. E. B. Du Bois's towering historical analysis while offering sophisticated, original contributions. Reading 'Black Reconstruction' Today is a brilliant volume that extends key insights from Du Bois's classic text to engage with contemporary struggles against racial enclosure and urgent endeavors to create another world."--Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity

About the Author

Yousuf Al-Bulushi is Associate Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City.

Geo Maher is founding Coordinator of the W. E. B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction in Philadelphia, and author of Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance.

Damien M. Sojoyner is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums.