“The revolution is not an ideal or a utopia; it is the fundamental movement of our time. For two centuries, private life and society, art and religion, technology and science, everything has been revolutionised.”
Category: founding
David Waldstreicher reviews “The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism” by Gerald Horne
“Horne doesn’t deny the Revolution and the Civil War mattered. He rather brings out their counter-revolutionary dimensions and remembers neglected episodes that may have been just as or more important in, for example, Texas. Though he doesn’t explicitly say so, his Gulf South–oriented U.S. history is a rejoinder to several varieties of north-south or east-west…
“Worldmaking after Empire”: Adom Getachew interviewed on Jacobin Radio
“The story of how decolonization struggles across the Black Atlantic tried to not only cast off European rule but also to remake the entire world system. An October 2019 conversation.”
The tragedy of post-colonial self-determination
In her challenging book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019), political scientist Adom Getachew discusses self-determination in the Anglophone Black Atlantic, with special emphasis on post-colonial independence as well as Caribbean and African federations. It would be interesting to compare the political thought of intellectuals and statesmen such as George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley,…
The tragedy of Haiti in history, drama, and performance
Last week, as I read in The New York Times the four-day series “The Ransom – The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers” and I continued work on Aimé Césaire’s superb drama The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963, 1970) for my book-length project The Tragedy of Revolution, I took the train to Chicago and…
“The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers” (ΝΥ Times)
“In 1791, enslaved Haitians did the seemingly impossible. They ousted their French masters and founded a nation. But France made generations of Haitians pay for their freedom — in cash.”
Brian Meeks: “How a Revolution on the Tiny Island of Grenada Shook the World”
“Revolutions are, inevitably, fraught periods of great danger and uncertainty. At their moment of triumph, the old order is temporarily prostrate, but there remains great hostility to the new regime both internally and internationally. The chances of initial consolidation and success are slim, and the very act of asserting authority in order to survive becomes…
Adom Getachew interviewed on “The Anti-Colonial Revolution”
“Radical post-colonial leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere didn’t just want independence — they wanted to break the political and economic order that kept the Global South in subjugation.”
Luam Kidane: “Provocations to rupture and the power to act”
“Movements made up of cultural producers and trade unionists, farmers and feminists are calling us to action through the work that they do. Mutual aid initiatives, land occupations and people’s assemblies are setting an example of how movement building practices can help us to break out of the marginalizing and oppressive confines imposed by the…
Julie Gibbings: “Unfinished Revolutions and the Politics of Postponement in Guatemala”
“For many Guatemalans, the democratic project of 1944-54 remains unfinished. Historical memories of 1944 continue to offer hope to many Guatemalans who long for a democratic revolution that would overturn the political bankruptcy of the Guatemalan state and inaugurate a more just and inclusive society. What a new democratic revolution might mean, however, is widely…