*Lunch will be available at 12:00pm

Talk Title: Layers of Dispossession and Splendid Failures: Reimagining the Stories of Land and Freedom in Black Reconstruction

Abstract: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 redefined the political memory of the Reconstruction Era. In our time, the book’s lessons and radical vision shape how many people, especially on the political left, talk about, imagine and mobilize for a Third Reconstruction. I argue that one of the lessons from Black Reconstruction that we need to reconsider and reimagine concerns the role of land during and beyond the 1860-1880 period. Land is at the heart of Du Bois’s argument about the “splendid failure” of the Reconstruction Era, signifying the lost possibility for an abolition-democracy undergirded by political and economic freedom for Black Americans. However, the Indigenous peoples whose lands were dispossessed and the settler colonial practices that produced this dispossession remain, at best, barely visible to this story, while also being absolutely vital to it. This absence is more than just a mere exclusion, as it produces a constrained imaginary of that era’s radical potential. For when we succumb to the settler memory of the Reconstruction Era – placing Indigeneity and settler colonialism in the background - we do not attend to the fact that during these decades Indigenous and Black people experienced what I call layers of dispossession of their lands or promise of lands, and that there were also splendid failures (plural) in the fights for and against Indigenous and Black self-determination. By refusing the settler memory implicit in Black Reconstruction and, once again, reconstructing the political memory of the Reconstruction, we locate models for abolitionist and decolonial struggles that can recast and expand the imperatives regarding what a radical reconstruction must fight for to create a better world.

Bio: Kevin Bruyneel is a settler scholar and Professor of Politics at Babson College in Massachusetts. He is the author of Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States, published in the Critical Indigeneities Series of the University of North Carolina Press in 2021.