We created this podcast in recognition that there are a number of podcasts for the American “left,” but many of them focus heavily on the organizing of social democrats, progressives, and liberal democrats. Aside from that, on the left we are always fighting a war of ideas and if we do not continue to build platforms to share those ideas and the stories of their implementation from a leftist perspective, they will continue to be ignored, misrepresented, and dismissed by the capitalist media and as a result by the general public. Our goal is to provide a platform for communists, anti-imperialists, Black Liberation movements, ancoms, left libertarians, LBGTQ activists, feminists, immigration activists, and abolitionists to discuss radical politics, radical organizing and share their visions for a better world. Our goal is to center organizers who represent and work with marginalized communities building survival programs, defense programs, political education, and counterpower. We also plan to bring in perspectives on and from the global south to highlight anti-capitalist struggles outside the imperial core...
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episode 205: “How Do We Relate to Our Ghosts?” - Kris Manjapra’s Black Ghost of Empire, Demystifying Emancipation, Excavating Pan-Africanism
In this episode we interview Dr. Kris Manjapra.
Kris Manjapra works at the intersection of transnational history and the critical study of race and colonialism. He is the author of five books, in this episode we discuss his comparative study of global emancipation processes and the implications for reparations movement today: Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation.
In addition to his scholarly work, he is the founder of a site-based nonprofit, Black History in Action, dedicated to the restoration and reactivation of a Black cultural heritage center in Cambridge, MA. Kris also co-organizes a free online community certificate course, entitled Black Futures Matter, serving people’s assemblies across the US and the Caribbean.
Our conversation with Manjapra focuses on Black Ghosts of Empire and on unsettling our mystified and highly inaccurate dominant views of emancipation processes globally. Dr. Manjapra walks us through the origin and history of the legal apparatus of emancipation and takes a materialist approach to analyzing whose interests were served through these processes to demonstrate how these historical shifts preserved and upheld the interests of slave owners. He also demonstrates the various ways that emancipation processes were designed to place Black people into a state of indebtedness and delay their freedom from bondage. This is an excellent discussion for thinking through the ways that the white supremacist capitalist state and the property owning classes seek to respond to crises in ways that preserve existing hierarchies and power relations.
We also discuss many of the vibrant Black abolitionist movements that demanded, organized, and struggled for alternative futures. Taking a look at some of the earliest Pan Africanist and Black Feminist thinkers, cultural workers, and organizers Manjapra stitches together a rich tapestry of movement lineage that carries into the current ongoing struggles for reparations for slavery and its long afterlives.
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Links to some companion conversations:
Rinaldo Walcott - On Black Freedom and the Abolition of Property
Saidiya Hartman - Scenes of Subjection at 25
Robin DG Kelley - Freedom Dreams at 20