We're sorry. An error has occurred
Please cancel or retry.
Reading Black Reconstruction Today
Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Couldn't load pickup availability
-
11 August 2026

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.
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