Reading Black Reconstruction Today with Geo Maher

Please register to attend. 

We stumble through 2024 in search of new political coordinates. Long gone is the myth of the end of history, and today we instead confront sharp questions about the fraught tangle of race, class, and gender. Explosive struggles against racist police brutality and colonial domination worldwide remind us that the work of the past remains largely unfinished. Our moment needs urgent decoding, and we have no Rosetta Stone better suited to the task than W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction. This presentation, the product of a forthcoming collective volume on Du Bois’ text, provides a broad overview of what it means to read Black Reconstruction alongside ongoing abolitionist and anticolonial struggles today.

Lunch refreshments will be provided. The Matrix is wheelchair accessible via the east entrance of Social Sciences Building and Elevator 2, which goes directly to the 8th floor. 

Geo Maher is an abolitionist educator, organizer, and writer based in Philadelphia. He has taught previously at the University of Pennsylvania, Vassar College, Drexel University, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas, and has held visiting positions at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Decolonizing Humanities Project at the College of William & Mary, NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, and the Institute of Social Research at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

He is the author of five books: We Created Chávez (2013); Building the Commune (2016); Decolonizing Dialectics (2017); A World Without Police (2021); and Anticolonial Eruptions (2022); and co-editor of the Duke University Press book series Radical Américas.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Barbara Montano at bmontano14@berkeley.edu or 510-664-4324 with as much advance notice as possible.