Robin D.G. Kelley

What is the meaning of freedom? Angela Y. Davis' life and work have been dedicated to examining this fundamental question and to ending all forms of oppression that deny people their political, cultural, and sexual freedom. In this collection of twelve searing, previously unpublished speeches, Davis confronts the interconnected issues of power, race, gender, class, incarceration, conservatism, and the ongoing need for social change in the United States. With her characteristic brilliance, historical insight, and penetrating analysis, Davis addresses examples of institutional injustice and explores the radical notion of freedom as a collective striving for real democracy - not something granted or guaranteed through laws, proclamations, or policies, but something that grows from a participatory social process that demands new ways of thinking and being. "The speeches gathered together here are timely and timeless," writes Robin D.G. Kelley in the foreword, "they embody Angela Davis' uniquely radical vision of the society we need to build, and the path to get there." The Meaning of Freedom articulates a bold vision of the society we need to build and the path to get there. This is her only book of speeches.

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.-- Back cover.

Noted historian Robin D. G. Kelley is tired of people talking about his mama and folks like her. He's tired of victim-blaming critics and policies that pin most of our social ills on the black urban poor. In Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! Kelley fights back. In this provocative and timely book, he examines how scholars, activists, policy makers, and displaced working people themselves have made sense of the contemporary ghetto. At the same time, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! gives voice to the very urban populations rendered silent by their attackers. He asks us to see culture and community as more than responses to, or products of, oppression. Ultimately, this is a hopeful book. Kelley reveals how new multiracial social movements emerging today have the potential of transforming the nation.

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.

"To Make Our World Anew reconstructs U.S. history through the experiences and struggles of black Americans. Written by a team of historians, this volume offers a view of black life, with first-person accounts that invite readers to view the past through the eyes of African Americans."--BOOK JACKET.

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.

"In his short life, Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the foremost thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Wherever he was, Rodney was a lightning rod for working-class Black Power organizing. His deportation sparked Jamaica's Rodney Riots in 1968, and his scholarship trained a generation how to approach politics on an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the thirty-eight-year-old Rodney was assassinated. Walter Rodney's Russian Revolution collects surviving texts from a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Dar es Salaam, an intellectual hub of the independent Third World. It had been his intention to work these into a book, a goal completed posthumously with the editorial aid of Robin D. G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin. Moving across the historiography of the long Russian Revolution with clarity and insight, Rodney transcends the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. Surveying a broad range of subjects--the Narodniks, social democracy, the October Revolution, civil war, and the challenges of Stalinism--Rodney articulates a distinct viewpoint from the Third World, one that grounds revolutionary theory and history with the people in motion."--Provided by publisher.

"The close diplomatic, economic, and military ties that comprise the 'special relationship' between the United States and Great Britain have received significant attention from historians over the years. Less frequently noted are the countries' shared experiences of empire, white supremacy, racial inequality, and neoliberalism--and the attendant struggles for civil rights and political reform that have marked their recent history. This state-of-the-field collection traces the contours of this other 'special relationship,' exploring its implications for our understanding of the development of an internationally interconnected civil rights movement. Here, scholars from a range of research fields contribute essays on a wide variety of themes, from solidarity protests to calypso culture to white supremacy"--

This set contains: two sixty-minute audiotapes that include original live recordings of interviews with former slaves and dramatic readings by celebrities from written interviews; and, a hardcover book that includes a comprehensive introductory essay by preeminent slavery historian Ira Berlin, chapters on aspects of slave life, including relationships with owners, work, family culture, the Civil War, and Emancipation; complete transcript of the live recordings and dramatic readings of interviews with former slaves, contained on the companion tapes; extensive additional interviews with former slaves; little-known period photographs, including some of the former slaves interviewed on the companion tapes.

Offers an historical account of black global resistance, covering relevant liberation movements throughout Africa and the diaspora.