Forceful and detailed account of the struggle for "freedom" after the American Civil War
David Roediger is Kendrick Babcock Chair of History at the University of Illinois. Among his books are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner), How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.
Seizing Freedom persuasively documents the self-emancipation of the
enslaved Black folk of the American South. A meticulously
researched book, it offers close readings of verbal and visual
texts, unfailingly attentive to issues of race, gender, and labor
coming together and falling apart. It brilliantly brings together
disability studies, race in the Civil War, and the disappearance of
the gold standard. A worthy supplement to Du Bois'sBlack
Reconstruction.
*Columbia University*
This sparkling book does more than merely restore and underscore
the agency of bold worker-slaves in attempts to make the US
democratic and free. It aims artfully at the underlying mechanisms
of revolutionary transformation: imagination and solidarity, time,
labor and the human body, gender, class and race. In Roediger's
hands, these are neither dry nor overly abstract categories. The
insurgent history of abolition gets resuscitated and used vividly
to address a host of stalled contemporary debates and ossified
styles of thought.
*Paul Gilroy, King's College London*
Sweeping in its 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 1860 and
1865 and how beholden the national labor movement and the woman
suffrage campaigns were to the 'general strike' they
won...Evocative and inspiring, Seizing Freedom represents a
landmark study by one of the foremost scholars of the history of
race and labor in our time that will fundamentally challenge the
way we understand the moral and practical power of
emancipation.
*Thavolia Glymph, Duke University*
Seizing Freedom, David Roediger's spellbinding account of black
self-emancipation and the array of movements accelerated by this
'general strike of the slaves' as DuBois put it, reminds us that it
is never too late to take up the democratic promise of Radical
Reconstruction.
*Angela Y. Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz*
In insisting that the emancipation of the slaves has continuing
relevance to the human quest for freedom, Roediger invites us to
engage in the on-going conversation between past(s) and present(s)
that inform all emancipatory struggles.
*Peter Rachleff, East Side Freedom Library*
Roediger suggests that we might learn from this period as we
observe similar moments of convergence rise and fall...decidedly
scholarly in its tone and careful positioning of its
assertions.
*Booklist*
In resurrecting Du Bois' insight, Roediger supplies a useful
corrective to overly simplistic, top-down emancipation narratives.
Where this book works best is in 'telling a good set of stories
usually kept apart' and illustrating how freedom struggles can
succeed, as well as how they fail.
*Cleveland Plain Dealer*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |