Grant’s North Mississippi Campaign, Chickasaw Bayou, and the Bottomlands

Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s North Mississippi Campaign (November 1862 until January 1863) planted a powerful Federal army only a few miles north of Vicksburg. The most important Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River, Vicksburg was the key to control of the valley that split the Confederacy in two. Grant failed to capture it, but he opened a two-hundred-mile stretch of the valley from Memphis to Vicksburg for federal exploitation. From January to the end of April 1863, during the Bottomlands phase of Grant’s campaign, his men confiscated food and animals from the region, collected slaves as laborers and soldiers, and cared for Black women and children. Federal agents worked abandoned plantations with refugee Black labor. Temporarily stymied in capturing Vicksburg, the Federals reaped benefits from the fertile Mississippi Delta land they occupied, broke down the institution of slavery, and made effective Lincoln’s new directions in war policy.

The Chinese Century and the City of Gold: Rethinking Race and Capitalism

This article tells a story about the unfolding “Chinese Century” in South Africa centered on China Malls, wholesale shopping centers for Chinese goods that have cropped up along Johannesburg's old mining belt since the early 2000s. Based in ethnographic and historical analysis, the essay takes a palimpsestic approach to imagine how Chinese capital enters into a terrain profoundly shaped by race, labor, and migration and is entangled with the afterlives of gold. Chinese migrant traders in South Africa draw on legacies of migrant mine labor and refashion processes that devalue Black labor. Whereas these histories are lost upon Chinese newcomers, African workers experience working for “the Chinese” through the memory of the mines. With the aim of theorizing emergent formations of race and capital in the Chinese Century, the essay threads this new epoch through the history of colonial and racial capitalism of the City of Gold.

The Laboring of Black Politics: Decolonial Meditations on Claudia Jones

This article examines the role of labor as a political concept within the work of Caribbean thinker and activist, Claudia Jones. It argues for a reformulation of black labor politics. Specifically, it contends Jones’ formulation of labor requires moving beyond its conventionally economic articulations, to consider, in tandem, labor’s expressly political, existential (racial), and epistemic dimensions to actualize a coherent project of transnational liberation. Doing so requires decolonizing labor, reimagining it anew—outside Eurocentric thought. Such a multilayered, imbricated approach widens the philosophical margins of liberatory politics, interrogating, in the process, the Arendtian model of labor, so as to speak meaningfully to the emancipatory possibilities that lie within the labor practices of the colonized. As such, I theorize these added dimensions of labor from the position of the black subject—offering an explicit discussion of black labor for the project of liberatory politics.

Dread Dialectics

Rounding out a discussion of Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness, the author engages in a dialogue with his respondents about the significance of the congress. This essay assesses the legacy of the 1968 congress as a manifestation of the black radical tradition and a critical involvement with socialism. Drawing on C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, it argues that black freedom struggles in the Americas and Europe, including slave revolts, have been an essential part of the history of labor and freedom struggles. It also contends that race has been overdetermined in ways that have historically understated the centrality of black labor to the emergence of modern capitalism, to anticapitalist struggle, and to the movement for universal freedom and a more broadly defined socialism. The essay concludes by asserting that black radical politics pose a challenge to the color- and colonial-blindness of the conventional Left while at the same time reimaging what freedom can mean in the present.

Framing Black Labor: On Archives and Mine Dancing in South African Gold Mines, 1950–1970

Promoted as a tourist attraction to highlight the benevolent treatment of black migrant laborers at South African gold mines, mine dance performances by workers became a symbol of both “authentic” preindustrial African culture and, paradoxically, the progress made towards industrializing the nation. Excavating both state-sponsored, industrial archives and the photographs of black South African Ernest Cole enables a reframing of the ways dance was mobilized and extracted during apartheid.