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The Long Emancipation

Moving toward Black Freedom

The Long Emancipation cover image Read the Introduction

Book

Pages: 144

Illustrations: 6 illustrations

Published: April 2021

Author: Rinaldo Walcott

In The Long Emancipation Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom. Taking examples from across the globe, he argues that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, a potential freedom has been thwarted. Walcott names this condition the long emancipation—the ongoing interdiction of potential Black freedom and the continuation of the juridical and legislative status of Black nonbeing. Stating that Black people have yet to experience freedom, Walcott shows that being Black in the world is to exist in the time of emancipation in which Black people must constantly fashion alternate conceptions of freedom and reality through expressive culture. Given that Black unfreedom lies at the center of the making of the modern world, the attainment of freedom for Black people, Walcott contends, will transform the human experience worldwide. With The Long Emancipation, Walcott offers a new humanism that begins by acknowledging that present conceptions of what it means to be human do not currently include Black people.

Praise

“Essential reading. From its first paragraphs Rinaldo Walcott's The Long Emancipation shifts the axis of thought about Black freedom. The astonishing and devastating idea at the center of this book lays out the condition of Black being in the Americas as existing, still, in a state of juridical unfreedom. Once that idea's recalibrating weight and urgency strike you, you must think again where analysis and theory begin. You must begin again.” - Dionne Brand, poet, novelist, essayist

“In The Long Emancipation Rinaldo Walcott has opened up whole new avenues for thinking about the causes and conditions, the global logics of ‘unfreedom’ that continue to haunt and imperil Black lives. This rich collection of provocations challenges us to consider the terms and possibilities of living beyond the death zones and extractive economies of capitalism; it invites us to see and feel the audacious eruptions of a blackness exceeding these limits—moving and struggling toward freedom.” - Deborah E. McDowell, University of Virginia

"Engaging with the works of Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon, Walcott issues a call to rethink the post-Enlightenment conception of the human. It is through this reworking that the book elucidates how we might be able to find real freedom. . . . in Black freedom lies the freedom of us all. Perhaps—if we heed Walcott’s call and respond to his challenge to think again and again—then, maybe, freedom is coming, tomorrow." - Lwando Scott, Public Books

"A must-have of any Black reader’s library. . . . [H]ighly recommended if you are in search of answers on how to explore oppression and articulate the depths of the Black experience." - Jordannah Elizabeth, Amsterdam News

"Rinaldo Walcott’s The Long Emancipation gave me new tools to think with in Black studies." - Elias Rodriques, Bookforum

"Walcott argues that Black people today live in what he calls the "long emancipation," in which, though emancipated from slavery and colonization, they are still not free. . . . Recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals."
  - J. A. Kegley, Choice

"This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand how race relations still affect much of everyday socio-economic and political life in North America, Europe, and the rest of the world." - Ibrahim Bahati, E3W Review of Books

"[A] provocative, theoretically dexterous, and pleasurable read. . . ." - Brian Purnell, Society For US Intellectual History

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Price: $24.95

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Rinaldo Walcott is a Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto, author of Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies, and coauthor of BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom.

Table Of Contents

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Acknowledgments  ix
1. Moving Toward Black Freedom  1
2. Black Life-Forms  9
3. Death and Freedom  11
4. Black Death  15
5. Plantation Zones  19
6. Diaspora Studies  23
7. The Atlantic Region and 1492  27
8. New States of Being  33
9. The Long Emancipation  35
10. Catastrophe, Wake, Hauntology  43
11. Bodies of Water  47
12. Slave Ship Logics/Logistics  51
13. Problem of the Human, or the Void of Relationality  55
14. No Happy Story  59
15. I Really Want to Hope  65
16. Funk: A Black Note on the Human  69
17. Newness  75
18. Toward a Saggin' Pants Ethic  81
19. Black Men, Style, and Fashion  87
20. No Future  91
21. (Future) Black Studies  99
22. The Long Emancipation Revisited  105
Notes  111
Bibliography  119
Index  125

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