The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom

by Rinaldo Walcott

In The Long Emancipation Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom. Taking examples from across the globe, he argues that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, a potential freedom has been thwarted. Walcott names this condition the long emancipation—the ongoing interdiction of potential Black freedom and the continuation of the juridical and legislative status of Black nonbeing. Stating that Black people have yet to experience freedom, Walcott shows that being Black in the world is to exist in the time of emancipation in which Black people must constantly fashion alternate conceptions of freedom and reality through expressive culture. Given that Black unfreedom lies at the center of the making of the modern world, the attainment of freedom for Black people, Walcott contends, will transform the human experience worldwide. With The Long Emancipation, Walcott offers a new humanism that begins by acknowledging that present conceptions of what it means to be human do not currently include Black people.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Theory

144 pages, Paperback

Published April 30, 2021

About the author

Rinaldo Walcott is a Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto, author of Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies, and coauthor of BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom.

Reviews

[Sarah Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very deep book about transcending the imposed. A slow read because Walcott brings so many ideas to the foreground.

[Hollis]

This book provides some productive new terms for discussing antiblackness and abolition, while treading somewhat less interesting rehashes of Afropessimistic (of the Sexton and Wilderson school) engagements (really, failures to engage) with indigeneity, which is surprising (and disappointing) given Walcott's general openness to nonhegemonic genres of living. For Walcott, freedom is a way “of being human in the world that exists beyond the realm of the judicial and that allows for bodily sovereignty… freedom marks an individual and a collective desire to be in common and in difference in a world that is nonhierarchical and nonviolent” (2). After reading this book one comes away with the distinct impression that indigenous investments in landed sovereign relations are necessarily hierarchical, and perhaps even violent, from Walcott's vantage. This is despite the fact that Walcott urges Black Diasporic Studies to take seriously the decimation of Indigenous populations of the Americas as relevant to the dispersal of Black people from the African continent (23-4).

Walcott argues that a pure decolonial project must take seriously the invention of Blackness as it relates the modernity and colonialism (56). True enough. Things get interesting when he goes on to suggest that because the invention of Blackness separated Black people from concepts like land and place, “we might have to think indigeneity as a more flexible process of critique and resistance to modernity rather than as an organic identity” (57). You know, this is ann interesting and fair move to make, given the variety of non-Black positionalities that have directly taken up forms of political resistance directly inspired and informed by Blackness. Of course, when he goes on to further suggest that radical politics should avoid investments in belonging tied to place (67), this feels a lot more like the Sexton-Wilderson shying away from Indigenous critical perspectives.

Nonetheless, for all the time Walcott spends alternating between treating Indigenous struggle in concert with Black activism and then treating (non-Black) Indigeneity in opposition to Blackness, his brief study is also richly involved in the topics of Black Study as a practice, sexuality, diaspora, and the relations between racialized surveillance and brief occasions for Black freedom.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walcott explores the ways that emancipation has yet to be realized for Black Americans and Canadians while gesturing towards the ways enslavement reverberates throughout history. While I do think many of his ideas feel redundant when placed in conversation with others like Christina Sharpe and Franz Fanon, Walcott's meditations on the conflicts Black human identity faces as a result of historical and modern conditions does merit reflection on the questions central to Walcott's book: What does it mean for Black people to experience freedom? Why are these experiences different? Why is this freedom not already available to Black people? The Long Emancipation may best be read as a book to encourage thought and reflection rather than a book crafting epistemology-defining terminology.

[Zena · Rating 3 out of 5]

super thought-provoking. definitely challenges the way you look at contemporary Black identity and politics. most analogies and analyses I found incredibly moving. at times, it feels like the author is trying super hard to say something brand-new— coming up with new terms for things explored. but I appreciate that they mostly come together into a cohesive idea. the language/sentence structuring is very typical academia, often quite hard to decipher. luckily walcott balances that with very short and highly tackle-able chapters.

okay. these have been nice pre-book review thoughts, but i have an assignment due in 42 hours.

[Peter Woltemade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the ProQuest Ebook Central edition. The ProQuest Ebook Central "Book Details" specify 145 pages for this book; these pages include the cover. My Goodreads updates for this book refer to the respective Arabic-numeral page numbers for the pages of the ProQuest Ebook Central edition that have Arabic page numbers; the last such page in the ProQuest Ebook Central edition is page 132.

[Barbara McVeigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was particularly interested in the sections on Funk and Newness, and was introduced to the 1996 documentary, “The Last Angel of History.” The concept of Black life-forms is revelatory.

[brenda tan · Rating 4 out of 5]

FUNK ETHICS LETS GOOO