Speaker: George Maher
Title: "Black Reconstruction in (Latin) America"

Abstract: Too often, Black Reconstruction is read narrowly as a historical account of the U.S. Civil War and its long aftermath. But just as the Confederacy looked southward toward a sprawling slave empire in the Caribbean, the late Du Bois’ own political horizon was also a radically transnational one grounded in the unity and solidarity of the “dark proletariat” of the Global South. This paper reads Black Reconstruction interstitially and symptomatically, plumbing both the glaring silence and structural presence of the region in and beyond the text to ask not only what Du Bois can teach us about Latin America, but what Latin America can teach us about Du Bois and the struggles looming on our own political horizon.

Bio: Geo Maher is a Philadelphia-based writer and organizer, and Visiting Associate Professor of Global Political Thought at Vassar College. He has taught previously at Drexel University, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas, and has held visiting positions at the College of William and Mary's Decolonizing Humanities Project, NYU's Hemispheric Institute, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He his co-editor of the Duke University Press series Radical Américas and author of five books: We Created Chávez (Duke, 2013), Building the Commune (Verso, 2016), Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke, 2017), A World Without Police (Verso, 2021), and Anticolonial Eruptions (University of California, 2022).