Blog post

Seizing Freedom—A Symposium

Alex Doherty21 January 2016

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The latest edition of the journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies includes a symposium on David Roediger's award winning radical history of Emancipation, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All. David is Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas. In 2015 Seizing Freedom was the winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award.


 
Contributors to the symposium include Graham Cassano, Alberto ToscanoVron Ware, and Kevin Mumford. Toscano, author of Fanacticism: On the Uses of an Idea uses his contribution to place Seizing Freedom in the context of the development of a tragic conception of emancipation in the Marxist and Black Radical traditions, analysing its theoretical components, and drawing out its contribution to contemporary emancipatory thought. For her part Vron Ware, author of the pioneering study on white women and racism Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History investigates three aspects of Roediger's book: the notion of revolutionary time, the breakdown of revolutionary solidarity following the splits over suffrage at the end of the Civil War, and Roediger's analysis discussion of disability as an analytical lens, particularly in relation to the racialized body of the war veteran. 

The symposium concludes with a response from Roediger himself.

Filed under: black-liberation