Invitation to Lecture "To Make Force Obsolete: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Abolition Democracy after Black Reconstruction" Anthony Obst (FU Berlin),

We warmly invite you to the online lecture by Anthony Obst on „To Make Force Obsolete: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Abolition Democracy after Black Reconstruction“ on 28 June 2023. The lecture will be held in English from 6 until 8 pm.

In his study of the U.S. Civil War and its aftermath, Black Reconstruction (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term “abolition-democracy” to describe the historical movement that brought the regime of racial chattel slavery in the American South to an end. In addition to the term’s historical dimension, the philosopher and Du Bois scholar Robert Gooding-Williams (2020) has suggested that abolition democracy also described a democratic ideal for Du Bois: a vision of universal democratic participation, free from exploitation, domination, and the rule of force. As a history of the present, Black Reconstruction at once located abolition as an unfinished process in the present (rather than an event in the past) and raised fundamental questions about the future of democracy in a moment of global political and economic crisis, which Du Bois elaborated on in his subsequent writing.

            "By drawing on the ways in which “abolition democracy” has been taken up by scholars and activists organizing around the abolition of prisons and police—most notably Angela Davis (2005)—my talk aims to shift the framework in which Du Bois’s late-1930s democratic theory is commonly understood. Through an analysis of his unpublished novel A World Search for Democracy as well as his contemporaneous newspaper column for the Pittsburgh Courier and his first autobiography, Dusk of Dawn (1940), I show how Du Bois’s writing in the wake of Black Reconstruction contains elements that may help us imagine what a world without prisons and police might look like. While Davis and others have crucially expanded Du Bois’s concept of abolition democracy, I argue that his attention to the aspects of the political-economic, the epistemic, and the affective remain instructive and useful for the dismantling of racial capitalism’s structures of domination and exploitation in our own time."

To receive the zoom link, please register with daniel.james@tu-dresden.de.

We look forward to your coming, an exciting lecture, and the exchange afterwards.