White Reconstruction

As thoughtful as it is fierce, White Reconstruction is a pleasure for those of us who study and teach history. Refusing to imagine the historian’s concerns as at odds with those of the theorist, Rodríguez shows white supremacy reinventing its forms without losing sight of its imperatives. In consolidating slick new moments of control, rulers retain old modes of domination. Moments of multiculturalism and those of terror against vulnerable populations do not succeed, but instead structure, each other in this compelling study.—David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political HistoryDrawing from a deep reservoir of radical writing and activism, leading abolitionist thinker Dylan Rodríguez creatively frames the current multiculturalist moment as the latest stage of historical reconstructions of white domination. He astutely distinguishes anti-Blackness and racial-colonial power while demonstrating how they remain linked by global white supremacist aspirations and logics. White Reconstruction challenges us to think more radically both by eschewing reformist ideas and terms and by learning from the creative genius of liberationist insurgencies that call us to abolitionist struggle.—Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

Dylan Rodríguez is Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He served as Chair of Ethnic Studies from 2009 to 2016, and as President of the American Studies Association in 2020–2021. He is the author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition. He is a founding member of Critical Resistance and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association.