Black Reconstruction Revisited

90 years ago W.E.B. Du Bois published his radical revisionist account of the U.S. Reconstruction period, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Largely ignored in its own time, Du Bois’ text has since emerged as a critical touchstone in conversations about the history of Reconstruction, legacies of the plantation, the Black radical tradition, the capitalist character of New World slavery, and the relation between class exploitation and racial oppression in the history of American capitalism. 

In our present moment, amid contested interpretations of the Civil War and the rise to power of white supremacists, Black Reconstruction provides a timely critique of national historiography’s dependence on truth-denial, its diffusion of historical agency, and fomentation of egotistic patriotism. Du Bois articulates a complex account of the broader historical determinations, conflicting actors, and contingent circumstances that shaped the Reconstruction period. His analyses carry insights into the social constitution of the nation which remain operative and evident today.

This seminar invites critical reassessments of Black Reconstruction in light of our present conjuncture. How might Du Bois’ text illuminate contemporary convulsions of racial capitalism, including intensified assaults on civil rights, deportation regimes, class demobilization and fragmentation, and new colonial and racial orderings of human populations both within and beyond the U.S. body politic? How might we position ourselves in relation to what Du Bois sees as the revolutionary program of Reconstruction, on one hand, and to what he calls the “counter-revolution of property,” on the other? What new approaches can we muster to Black Reconstruction’s aesthetic and poetic ambitions in its conceptualizations of history?

We are particularly interested in papers that place Du Bois in relation with historical events and sociocultural phenomena outside his explicit analytic ambit. Contributors might mobilize concepts from Du Bois’ text—the wages of whiteness, the general strike, etc.—as heuristics for the interpretation of literary, aesthetic, and cultural objects. We are also interested in Du Bois’ relation to contemporaneous radical cultural production in the 1930s, or the influence of Black Reconstruction on subsequent moments of Marxist, U.S., or Black radical intellectual history. Conversely, we welcome inquiries into how contemporary historical developments can reorient our readings of Black Reconstruction. We also invite research with a global comparative frame that can chart the influence that Black Reconstruction has exercised beyond national demarcations. We hope for an interdisciplinary conversation that opens multiple interpretive pathways into and beyond Du Bois’ foundational text.