Race, Class, and History: Verso Student Reading

Book strip #1

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  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...
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  Late Fascism

  by Alberto Toscano

  The rich archive of twentieth-century debates on fascism can steer a path through an increasingly authoritarian present. Developing anti-fascist theory is an urgent and vital task. From the ‘Great ...
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  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...
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  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...
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  The Reckoning

  by Robin Blackburn

  The Age of Revolution (1776–1848) destroyed the main slave regimes of the Caribbean but a ‘Second Slavery’ surged in the US South, Cuba and Brazil, powered by demand for plantation produce and a sy...
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  Red Africa

  by Kevin Ochieng Okoth

  Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the...
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  The South

  by Adolph L. Reed Jr.

  Foreword by Barbara J. Fields

  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 ...
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  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...
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  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...
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  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...
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  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...
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  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...
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  Toward Freedom

  by Touré Reed

  For many progressives, racial identities are the engine of American history, and by extension, contemporary politics. They, in short, want to separate race from class. While policymakers and pundit...
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  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...
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  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...
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  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...
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  The Jewelers of the Ummah

  by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

  Can we return to worlds destroyed by colonial violence? In a series of letters to her father, her great-grandmothers, and her children—and to thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt—Ariella...
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  The American Crucible

  by Robin Blackburn

  For over three centuries, slavery in the Americas fuelled the growth of capitalism. But the stirrings of a revolutionary age in the late eighteenth century challenged this “peculiar institution” an...
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  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...
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  A Kick in the Belly

  by Stella Dadzie

  The forgotten history of women slaves and their struggle for liberation.Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. In this riveting work of historical r...
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  Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

  by Vivek Chibber

  Postcolonial theory has become enormously influential as a framework for understanding the Global South. It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universali...
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  Invisibility Blues

  by Michele Wallace

  First published in 1990, Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace’s considerations of the black experience in America include ...
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  Beyond Black and White

  by Manning Marable

  Many in the US, including Barack Obama, have called for a 'post-racial' politics: yet race still divides the country politically, economically and socially.In this highly acclaimed work, Manning Ma...
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  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...
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  Race, Nation, Class

  by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein

  Forty years after the defeat of Nazism, and twenty years after the great wave of decolonization, how is it that racism remains a growing phenomenon? What are the special characteristics of contempo...
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  Imagined Communities

  by Benedict Anderson

  What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and tran...
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  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...
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  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...
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  White Skin, Black Fuel

  by The Zetkin Collective and Andreas Malm

  In recent years, the far right has done everything in its power to accelerate the heating: an American president who believes it is a hoax has removed limits on fossil fuel production. The Brazilia...
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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...
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  Revolutionary Feminisms

  by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah

  Edited by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah

  In a moment of rising authoritarianism, climate crisis, and ever more exploitative forms of neoliberal capitalism, there is a compelling and urgent need for radical paradigms of thought and action....
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  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...
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  Beyond the Pale

  by Vron Ware

  Foreword by Mikki Kendall

  How have ideas about white women figured in the history of racism? Vron Ware argues that they have been central, and that feminism has largely developed as a political movement within racist societ...
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  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...
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  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 ...
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  Seizing Freedom

  by David R. Roediger

  How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger’s radical new history redefines the idea of fr...
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  How Race Survived US History

  by David R. Roediger

  In this absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, David R. Roediger explores how the idea of race was created and recreated from the 1600s to the present day. From the late seventeenth...
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  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...
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  Towards the Abolition of Whiteness

  by David R. Roediger

  Towards the Abolition of Whiteness collects David Roediger’s recent essays, many published here for the first time, and counts the costs of whiteness in the past and present of the US. It finds tho...

Book strip #11

• 

  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...

Book strip #12

• 

  The American Crucible

  by Robin Blackburn

  For over three centuries, slavery in the Americas fuelled the growth of capitalism. But the stirrings of a revolutionary age in the late eighteenth century challenged this “peculiar institution” an...

Book strip #14

• 

  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...

Book strip #15

• 

  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...

Book strip #16

Book strip #17

• 

  Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

  by Vivek Chibber

  Postcolonial theory has become enormously influential as a framework for understanding the Global South. It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universali...

Book strip #18

• 

  Invisibility Blues

  by Michele Wallace

  First published in 1990, Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace’s considerations of the black experience in America include ...

Book strip #19

• 

  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...

Book strip #20

• 

  Race, Nation, Class

  by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein

  Forty years after the defeat of Nazism, and twenty years after the great wave of decolonization, how is it that racism remains a growing phenomenon? What are the special characteristics of contempo...

Book strip #21

• 

  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...

Book strip #22

Book strip #23

• 

  Beyond Black and White

  by Manning Marable

  Many in the US, including Barack Obama, have called for a 'post-racial' politics: yet race still divides the country politically, economically and socially.In this highly acclaimed work, Manning Ma...