![]() ![]() Du Bois’s depiction of the Civil War as a workers’ strike, Roediger traces the rise and fall of a social revolution-a jubilee-that in the course of a terrible war and its turbulent aftermath opened up the prospect of a more just nation, one in which all people could stand on a level and equitable ground. Thavolia Glymph, Duke Universityīuilding on W.E.B. Evocative and inspiring, Seizing Freedom represents a landmark study by one of the foremost scholars of the history of race and labor. Sweeping in scope and filled with brilliant and original insights, this book reminds us of how little still is our appreciation both for what slaves accomplished between 18 and how beholden the national labor movement and the woman suffrage campaigns were to the ‘general strike’ they won. The insurgent history of abolition gets resuscitated and used vividly to address a host of stalled contemporary debates and ossified styles of thought. In Roediger’s hands, these are neither dry nor overly abstract categories. It aims artfully at the underlying mechanisms of revolutionary transformation: imagination, solidarity, time, labor, the human body, gender, class, and race. This sparkling book does more than merely restore and underscore the agency of bold worker-slaves in attempts to make the United States democratic and free. A worthy supplement to Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. It brilliantly brings together disability studies, race in the Civil War, and the disappearance of the gold standard. A meticulously researched book, unfailingly attentive to issues of race, gender, and labor. Seizing Freedom persuasively documents the self-emancipation of the enslaved Black folk of the American South. Roediger shows how this massive self-emancipation from below set in motion ‘radiating impulses toward freedom,’ promoting literacy for freedmen, a pursuit of family ties and a new sense of social motion … Slenderly packed scholarship conveying provocative ideas. Roediger’s spellbinding account of black self-emancipation and the array of movements accelerated by this ‘general strike of the slaves,’ as Du Bois put it, reminds us that it is never too late to take up the democratic promise of Radical Reconstruction.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |