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 and 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 and 1880s,
emancipation processes took off across the Atlantic world. But far
from ushering in a new age of human rights and universal freedoms,
these emancipations further codified the racial caste systems they
claimed to disrupt.
In
this paradigm-altering book, acclaimed historian and professor Kris
Manjapra identifies five types of emancipations across the globe and
reveals that their perceived failures were not failures at all, but
the predictable outcomes of policies designed first and foremost to
preserve the status quo of racial oppression. In the process,
Manjapra shows how, amidst this unfinished history, grassroots Black
organizers and activists have become custodians of collective
recovery and 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, and crucial to our understanding of contemporary
society, this book shines a light into the gap between the idea of
slavery’s end and the reality of its continuation—exposing to
whom a debt was paid and to whom a debt is owed.