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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.
List of contents
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
About the author
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.
Summary
Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom, showing that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, a potential freedom became thwarted.
