(Ebook) Black Ghost of Empire : The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation by Kris Manjapra ISBN 9781982123505, 9781982123475, 1982123508, 1982123478, 2021059433

(Ebook) Black Ghost of Empire : The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation by Kris Manjapra ISBN 9781982123505, 9781982123475, 1982123508, 1982123478, 2021059433

If the 1619 Project illuminated the ways in which life in the United States has been shaped by the existence of slavery, this “historical, literary masterpiece” (Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy) focuses on emancipation & how its afterlife further codified the racial caste system—instead of obliterating it.

To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts us today, we must look closely at the way it ended. Between the 1770s & 1880s, emancipation processes took off across the Atlantic world. But far from ushering in a new age of human rights & universal freedoms, these emancipations further codified the racial caste systems they claimed to disrupt.

In this paradigm-altering book, acclaimed historian & professor Kris Manjapra identifies five types of emancipations across the globe & reveals that their perceived failures were not failures at all, but the predictable outcomes of policies designed first & foremost to preserve the status quo of racial oppression. In the process, Manjapra shows how, amidst this unfinished history, grassroots Black organizers & activists have become custodians of collective recovery & remedy; not only for our present, but also for our relationship with the past.

Black Ghost of Empire will rewire readers’ understanding of the world in which we live. Timely, lucid, & crucial to our understanding of contemporary society, this book shines a light into the gap between the idea of slavery’s end & the reality of its continuation—exposing to whom a debt was paid & to whom a debt is owed.

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Kris Manjapra is the author of Colonialism in Global Perspective, Age of Entanglement: German & Indian Intellectuals Across Empire, M.N. Roy: Cosmopolitanism & Colonial Marxism, & Cosmopolitan Thought Zones of South Asia.