Robin D.G. Kelley – författare

"To Make Our World Anew" reconstructs U.S. history through the experiences and struggles of black Americans.Written by a stellar team of historians, this volume offers a panoramic view of black life, rich with first-person accounts that invite readers to view the past through the eyes of African Americans.Beginning with the African background and the colonisation of the AMericas, "To Make Our World Anew" examines the transformation of slavery from a brutal form of indentured servitude to a full-blown system of racial domination; the critical role African Americans played in shaping and ultimately destroying American racial slavery; their unflagging efforts to define freedom, not only for themselves but for the entire nation; and the ways in which industrial and post-industrial transformations shaped black life, thought, culture, and resistence in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Yet this is not a story of victims, but a dramatic saga of a people who dared to fight back: a people who quite literally reamade America several times over. In spite of their condition, African Americans were still human beings endowed with intellect, creativity, and vision. They came to North American shores from various ethnic groups and speaking many languages, but they forged a strong sense of community and created new identities from their ethnic past and racial present. The authors pay special attention to difference and diversity. By exploring the hidden social and cultural history of women and ordinary working people (free and slave), they paint a fully textured portrait of black communities that cosiders divisions by gender, class, colour, and sexuality. And the authors extend their vision beyond the united States, examining the impact of key events such as the Haitian Revolution and the Spanish-American War. By acknowledging African Americans as part of a larger African diaspora, the book links the struggles of blacks in the United States to those of displaced Africans throughout the world.With new insightand impeccable scholarship, "To Make Our World Anew" dramatically demonstrates how generations of Africa's descendeants, in their ongoing quest for freedom, have transformed our world and made it a better place - for everyone.

Surrealism as a movement has always resisted the efforts of critics to confine it to any static definition-surrealists themselves have always preferred to speak of it in terms of dynamics, dialectics, goals, and struggles. Accordingly, surrealist groups have always encouraged and exemplified the widest diversity-from its start the movement was emphatically opposed to racism and colonialism, and it embraced thinkers from every race and nation.Yet in the vast critical literature on surrealism, all but a few black poets have been invisible. Academic histories and anthologies typically, but very wrongly, persist in conveying surrealism as an all-white movement, like other "artistic schools" of European origin. In glaring contrast, the many publications of the international surrealist movement have regularly featured texts and reproductions of works by comrades from Martinique, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, South America, the United States, and other lands. Some of these publications are readily available to researchers; others are not, and a few fall outside academia's narrow definition of surrealism.This collection is the first to document the extensive participation of people of African descent in the international surrealist movement over the past seventy-five years. Editors Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley aim to introduce readers to the black, brown, and beige surrealists of the world-to provide sketches of their overlooked lives and deeds as well as their important place in history, especially the history of surrealism.

Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From''the preeminent historian of black popular culture'' (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.

Deeply committed to social justice, artist Tomashi Jackson creates vibrant prints, paintings, videos, textiles, and sculptures that powerfully explore systemic inequities found throughout US history. This is the first book to present the evolution of Jackson’s work.Over the course of her career, Jackson has closely investigated specific histories related to cities, lands, and individuals in the United States, with the purpose of revealing how systemic racism and civil rights advocacy have informed America’s approach to housing, education, transportation, voter disenfranchisement, police brutality, migration, and agriculture. Inspired by Josef Albers’s research on the relativity of color, she employs image layering and the effects of light and perception toward illuminating underrecognized patterns of activism, resistance, oppression, and societal advances.This volume offers an opportunity to look comprehensively at overarching themes and developments in her process by gathering bodies of work in a variety of media created over time and in different locations. Jackson’s engaging and nuanced approach to US history situates her as one of the most relevant artists practicing today.