TOPIC: “ Between Radicalism and Repression: U.S. Black Communists Against Racial Capitalism”

This talk examines how the scholar-activism of Black anticapitalists like Claudia Jones, James Ford, William Patterson, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Hunton, and W.E.B. Du Bois offered a fundamental challenge to the entanglements of United States racism, capitalism, and imperialism throughout the twentieth century. They offered positions on the “Negro Question,” superexploitation, self-determination, and the economic basis of racial antagonism that not only challenged U.S. racial capitalism, but also envisioned a world predicated upon peace, socialism, mutual cooperation, and human flourishing. The talk also explicates the form of repression and state-sanctioned violence to which these freedom fighters were subjected because of their political orientation. This dialectic between Black radicalism and violent repression shaped the ways in which these actors forged movements, organizations, and communities that undergirded their struggles for a world beyond Euro-American exploitation and oppression.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is the 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar in the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College. A scholar of critical Black studies, political theory, political economy, and intellectual history, Dr. Burden-Stelly is the co-author, with Dr. Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Antiblackness, Anticommunism, and the Rise of Capitalism in the United States and is also the co-editor, with Dr. Jodi Dean, of the forthcoming volume Triple Jeopardy and World Revolution: Three Decades of Political Writing by Black Women Communists and the co-editor, with Aaron Kamugisha of an anthology of writings by Percy C. Hintzen titled Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State. She is the guest editor of the “Claudia Jones: Foremother of World Revolution” special issue of The Journal of Intersectionality, and her published work appears in journals including Small Axe, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, and the CLR James Journal. Burden-Stelly’s public scholarship can be found in venues including Monthly Review, Boston Review, Black Agenda Report, and Black Perspectives.  MORE.

Organizers

Visual & Critical Studies and Wattis "Land to Light On" collaboration - Land to Light On, is a collaborative public programming series between the Wattis Institute and CCA's academic departments focusing on racial capitalism, abolition, and decolonization.