In this lecture, Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly examines how the scholar-activism of Black anti-capitalists like Claudia Jones, James Ford, William Patterson, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Hunton, and W.E.B. Du Bois offered a fundamental challenge to the entanglements of United States racism, capitalism, and imperialism throughout the twentieth century.

They offered positions on the “Negro Question,” super exploitation, self-determination, and the economic basis of racial antagonism that not only challenged U.S. racial capitalism, but also envisioned a world predicated upon peace, socialism, mutual cooperation, and human flourishing.

The talk also explicates the form of repression and state-sanctioned violence to which these freedom fighters were subjected because of their political orientation. This dialectic between Black radicalism and violent repression shaped the ways in which these actors forged movements, organisations, and communities that undergirded their struggles for a world beyond Euro-American exploitation and oppression.

Register to attend here

Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is the 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar in the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College. A scholar of critical Black studies, political theory, political economy, and intellectual history, Dr. Burden-Stelly is the co-author, with Dr. Gerald Horne, of W.E.B Du Bois: A Life in American History. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Anti-blackness, Anti-communism, and the Rise of Capitalism in the United States.

Between Radicalism and Repression: U.S. Black Communists Against Racial Capitalism is co-hosted by the Wattis Institute with the Graduate Programme in Visual and Critical Studies and is organised by Jacqueline Francis, Diego Villalobos and Kim Nguyen.