Reading list

Race and Ethnicity: Verso Student Reading

Featuring Walter Rodney, Stella Dadzie, Angela Davis and more!

Verso Books22 August 2023

Race and Ethnicity: Verso Student Reading

Featuring Angela Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walter Rodney, our student reading includes books on the emptiness of liberal antiracism, the future of Black radicalism, racialized global policing, and much more!

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What Is Antiracism?

by Arun Kundnani

Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and...

Decolonial Marxism

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean and o...

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Angela Davis

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, R...

The Groundings With My Brothers

by Walter Rodney

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, th...

Making the Revolution Global

by Theo Williams

Making the Revolution Global shows how black radicals transformed socialist politics in Britain in the years before decolonisation. African and Caribbean activist-intellectuals, such as Amy Ashwood...

Self-Defense

by Elsa Dorlin

Translated by Kieran Aarons

Is violent self-defense ethical? In the history of colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, there has long been a dividing line between bodies "worthy of defending" and those who have been disar...

Darkwater

by W. E. B. Du Bois

Foreword by Manning Marable

Introduction by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

“I have been in the world, but not of it,” W.E.B. Du Bois begins this book, a continuation of the project he began in his celebrated work The Souls of Black Folk, describing the devastation of segr...

If They Come in the Morning

by Angela Davis

The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America's most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Ange...

The Black Atlantic

by Paul Gilroy

In this ground-breaking work, Paul Gilroy proposes that the modern black experience can not be defined solely as African, American, Carribean or British alone, but can only be understand as a Black...

Organize, Fight, Win

by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean

Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete mater...

Abolition Geography

by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, of...

After Black Lives Matter

by Cedric G. Johnson

Why did a movement as powerful as the one inspired by the murder of George Floyd fall short of securing its most militant demands? After Black Lives Matter argues that the core of the movement itse...

The Wages of Whiteness

by David R. Roediger

Preface by Priyamvada Gopal

Introduction by Kathleen Cleaver

An enduring history of how race and class came together to mark the course of the antebellum US and our present crisis. Roediger shows that in a nation pledged to independence, but less and less ab...

The Invention of the White Race

by Theodore W. Allen

When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there; nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. Historical debate about the orig...

Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity

by Noel Ignatiev

Foreword by David R. Roediger

Edited by Geert Dhondt, Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan

For sixty years, Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of “whiteness” — a social fiction and an unmitigated disaster for all working-class people. This new essay collection from the late fi...

Prophet against Slavery

by David Lester

Illustrated by David Lester

Edited by Paul Buhle and Marcus Rediker

Prophet against Slavery is an action-packed chronicle of a remarkable and radical individual. It is based on the award-winning biography by Marcus Rediker, which prompted the Quaker community that ...

Deadly and Slick

by Sita Balani

If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded ...

We're Here Because You Were There

by Ian Sanjay Patel

What are the origins of the hostile environment against immigrants in the UK? Patel retells Britain's recent history in an often shocking account of state racism that still resonates today. In a se...

Britain's Empire

by Richard Gott

As the call for a new understanding of our national history gets louder, this book turns the received imperial story of Britain on its head. Britain’s Empire recounts the long overlooked narrative ...

Connected History

by Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is becoming well known for the same sort of reasons that attach to Fernand Braudel and Carlo Ginzburg, as the proponent of a new kind of history – in his case, not longue durée ...

Race, Place, Trace

Edited by Susan Slyomovics and Lorenzo Veracini

This edited collection celebrates Patrick Wolfe’s contribution to the study and critique of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination. The chapters collected here focus on the settler-co...

Racecraft

by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

Praised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft "ought to be positioned," as Bookforum put it, "at the center of any discussion of race in American life." Most p...

The South

by Adolph L. Reed Jr.

The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but ...

The Panthers Can't Save Us Now

by Cedric G. Johnson

In the wake of the mass protests over the police murder of George Floyd, nearly every major consumer brand proclaimed their commitments to antiracism, often with new ad campaigns to match their Twe...

We Uyghurs Have No Say

by Ilham Tohti

In Xinjiang, the large northwest region of China, the government has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs in re-education camps. One of the incarcerated--whose sentence, unlike most others, has n...

Mistaken Identity

by Asad Haider

Whether class or race is the more important factor in modern politics is a question right at the heart of recent history’s most contentious debates. Among groups who should readily find common grou...

Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

Much has been written on the how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. The possibility of reverse...

Hostile Environment

by Maya Goodfellow

Longlisted for the 2019 Jhalak Prize. From the 1960s the UK’s immigration policy - introduced by both Labour and Tory governments - has been a toxic combination of racism and xenophobia. Maya Good...

Latinx

by Ed Morales

“Latinx” (pronounced “La-teen-ex”) is the gender-neutral term that covers the largest racial minority in the United States, and the poorest but fastest-growing American group, whose political empow...

Heart Of The Race

by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe

Introduction by Lola Okolosie

Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting...

Elegy for Mary Turner

by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams

In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, ten black men and one black woman, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time, were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens. Through hauntingly det...

Reactionary Democracy

by Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter

Democracy is not necessarily progressive, and will only be if we make it so. What Mondon and Winter call ‘reactionary democracy’ is the use of the concept of democracy and its associated understand...

Algiers, Third World Capital

by Elaine Mokhtefi

Introduction by Jeremy Harding

Mokhtefi (née Klein), a Jewish American from Long Island, has had an exhilarating life. In the 1960s, she served as a press adviser to the National Liberation Front in postwar Algiers, before going...

Traces of History

by Patrick Wolfe

Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on A...

Our History Is the Future

by Nick Estes

In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenou...

Policing the Planet

Contributions by Mizue Aizeki, Kafui Attoh, Breanna Champion, Becky Dennison, Martín Espada, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Craig Gilmore, Christina B. Hanhardt, Justin Hansford, Rachel Herzing, Brian Jordan Jefferson, Anjali Kamat, Robin D.G. Kelley, Hamid Khan, Arun Kundnani, Marisol Lebrón, George Lipsitz, Page May, Don Mitchell, Naomi Murakawa, Steven Osuna, Vijay Prashad, Asha Rosa Ransby-Sporn, Alex Sanchez, Lynn A. Staeheli, Alex S. Vitale and Pete White

Edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton

Combining firsthand accounts from activists with the research of scholars and reflections from artists, Policing the Planet traces the global spread of the broken-windows policing strategy, first e...

Futures of Black Radicalism

Edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin

Black rebellion has returned, with dramatic protests in scores of cities and campuses, bringing with it a renewed engagement with the history of Black radical movements and thought. Here, key schol...

Annihilation of Caste

by B.R. Ambedkar

Introduction by Arundhati Roy

B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste ...

De Colores Means All of Us

by Elizabeth Sutherland Martînez

Foreword by Angela Davis

Introduction by Karma R. Chavez

Elizabeth Martínez’s unique Chicana voice arises from over thirty years of experience in the movements for civil rights, women’s liberation, and Latina/o empowerment. In De Colores Means All of Us,...

The Black Romantic Revolution

by Matthew F. Sandler

During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers - enslaved and free - allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to...

The Common Wind

by Julius S. Scott

The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of o...

The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain

by Ron Ramdin

This is the first comprehensive historical perspective on the relationship between Black workers and the changing patterns of Britain’s labour needs. It places in an historical context the developm...

Class, Race, and Marxism

by David R. Roediger

Seen as a key figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions...

If They Come in the Morning

by Angela Davis

Traces of History

by Patrick Wolfe

Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on A...

Racecraft

by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

Our History Is the Future

by Nick Estes

Serve the People

by Karen L. Ishizuka

Foreword by Jeff Chang

The political ferment of the 1960s produced not only the Civil Rights Movement but others in its wake: women's liberation, gay rights, Chicano power, and the Asian American Movement. Here is a defi...

Policing the Planet

Edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton

Futures of Black Radicalism

Edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin

For the Muslims

by Edwy Plenel

Translated by David Fernbach

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, leading intellectuals are claiming “There is a problem with Islam in France,” thus legitimising the discourse of the racist National Front. Such claims...

Annihilation of Caste

by B.R. Ambedkar

Introduction by Arundhati Roy

De Colores Means All of Us

by Elizabeth Sutherland Martînez

Foreword by Angela Davis

Introduction by Karma R. Chavez

Darkwater

by W. E. B. Du Bois

Foreword by Manning Marable

Introduction by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

The Black Romantic Revolution

by Matthew F. Sandler

The Common Wind

by Julius S. Scott

The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain

by Ron Ramdin

The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1

by Theodore W. Allen

Introduction by Jeffrey Perry

When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white” people there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. In this seminal two-volume work,...

The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2

by Theodore W. Allen

Introduction by Jeffrey Perry

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King outlined a dream of an America where people would not be judged by the color of their skin. That dream has yet to be realized, but s...

Class, Race, and Marxism

by David R. Roediger

The Black Atlantic

by Paul Gilroy

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