Reading Black Reconstruction Today

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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.

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.
 
 

Contents 
 

Introduction: Black Reconstruction as a Portal 

Yousuf Al-Bulushi and Damien Sojoyner 

Part I • Dismantling Propaganda, Past and Present 

1 • Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and the History of Twenty-First-Century Propaganda 

Gerald Horne and Tionne Alliyah Parris 

2 • The Incessant Propaganda of American Historiography 

Joshua Myers 

3 • The Propaganda of the Present in South Africa 

Richard Pithouse 

Part II • Indigeneity, Fascism, and Abolition Democracy 

4 • The War That Ended Reconstruction 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz 

5 • The Shape of Fear: Racial Fascism and the Counterrevolutions of Property 

Alberto Toscano 

6 • Abolition Democracy in and out of Philadelphia 

Jasmine Noelle Yarish

Part III • Global Imperialism and the Dark Proletariat

7 • Black Reconstruction in Palestine/Israel: On the Wages of Jewishness 

Zahi Zalloua

8 • Black Reconstruction in (Latin) America 

Geo Maher

9 • From Du Bois to Cabral: “Portuguese” Africa and the Color Line 

António Tomás

10 • “A Common History and a Common Disaster”: Du Boisian Diasporic Politics in the Black Mediterranean 

Camilla Hawthorne

Part IV • The General Strike

11 • Wake Up: Social Reproduction, Modular Prison Technology, and the Y2K General Strike 

Orisanmi Burton

12 • Proletarian Organization and the Black General Strike 

Joshua Clover

Part V • Conversations on Abolition, Repair, and Reconstruction Today
 

13 • The Beautiful Struggle: The Abolition of the Prison-Industrial Complex. An Interview with Rachel Herzing 

Rachel Herzing and Damien Sojoyner

14 • Social Antagonisms/Abolitionist Tensions. An Interview with Ant Smith of the W. E. B. Du Bois Movement School 

Ant Smith and Geo Maher

15 • The Limits of Propaganda: Unmasking Fabricated Truths and Moving Beyond Hardened Beliefs. An Interview with Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Yousuf Al-Bulushi, and Damien Sojoyner

Conclusion: Black Reconstruction as Rosetta Stone 

Geo Maher

Acknowledgments 

Selected Bibliography 

List of Contributors 

Index