The black insurgence movement and experiments in Caribbean socialism, following the work of the committed revolutionary CLR James, have resounding significance for the political struggles of today. This book addresses class struggle and the battle against racialized capitalism, which in turn makes us reconceptualize the idea of revolution, liberation and rebellion by focusing on this great revolutionary theorist. Renowned political theorist Drucilla Cornell argues that the universal heartbeat of the struggle for socialism is a new praxis of being human together beyond the exploitation of colonial-racial capitalism. On this basis, this book's intervention emphasizes the continuous history of revolution, rather than understanding revolutions as "events" that either succeed or fail. In today's moment, with the simultaneity of the collapse of the post-Cold War neoliberal order and climate change, the struggle over what it means to be human on the planet today has taken on a new urgency. Cornell argues that today, the greatest vectors of this revolutionary struggle for a new humanity are Black, decolonial, and queer movements, as they show us ways of being beyond the reign of white economic man. Placing the insights of these struggles in conversation with "traditional" Marxist thought, this book speaks to the pragmatic questions of insurrection, insurgency, rebellion, revolution in a way that speaks to the politics of our time.
Drucilla Cornell is distinguished professor emerita of political science, women's & gender studies, and comparative literature at Rutgers University as well as Professor Extraordinaire of Law at the University of Pretoria (South Africa) and visiting professor at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author and editor of over twenty books and numerous articles and is widely influential in the fields of feminist theory, legal theory, Continental philosophy, and South African jurisprudence. Her most prominent books include Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (1991; 2nd ed: 1999); The Philosophy of the Limit (1992); The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography & Sexual Harassment (1995); Moral Images of Freedom (2008); Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity (2009); and Law and Revolution in South Africa (2014). She is also the director of the uBuntu Project, a research and advocacy project into the role of indigenous values in the new constitutional dispensation in South Africa, which she founded in 2002.
