R D G Kelley
Biographic Data
| ID | 28203 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R D G Kelley |
| GIVEN NAMES | R D G |
| FAMILY NAME | Kelley |
| SIGNATURE | KELLEY R D G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1648-0726 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 77 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 460 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 77 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Building Solidarity in Struggle: A Conversation with Robin D. G. Kelley
Blues People and the Poetic Spirit: Recovering Surrealism’s Revolutionary Politics
In 1975, Paul Garon published Blues and the Poetic Spirit . Rejecting the nonsense about the blues’ lack of critical intelligence, he insisted that the blues is poetry, or more specifically, that the blues is the poetic expression of the Black working class. He argued that “the revolutionary nature of the blues” lay in “its fidelity to fantasy and desire,” generating “an irreducible and, so to speak, habit-forming demand for freedom and what Rimb…
History from the Ground Up
This essay argues that Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024) offers a new model for the study of racial capitalism by examining Atlantic slavery’s core antagonisms. By thoroughly interrogating the often hidden ideological and material basis of Jamaica’s plantation economy through its most famous slaveholder and proponent, Hall has written a new history of Jamaica, the Atlantic world, and the develo…
The Power of Hope in the Movements for Freedom: An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley
Freedom Dreams delves into the ideologies, hopes and dreams of liberation that fuel black radical social movements, and shape their collective vision of the future.Kelley's work is a bridge between the dreams of freedom and the people practicing liberation.In a new edition (2022), the historian reflects on the ways recent and contemporary movements have expanded and transformed his own vision of freedom.Twenty years after it was published for the…
Old school socialist”
What did Mike Davis mean when he referred to himself as an “old school socialist”? In this tribute, I argue that Davis laid out a theory and praxis of revolutionary ethics. With a focus on Davis's first book, Prisoners of the American Dream, I show how he gives us one of the earliest and sharpest critiques of neoliberalism while being hopeful about multiracial insurgency. I argue that even in the bleakest of times, Davis maintained a Gramscian co…
Making History, Making Worlds
Making History, Making Worlds Robin D. G. Kelley (bio) In a way, the obsessions that drove me into and then rapidly away from drama were those most beautifully summarized in a few thoughts of Marx: by mixing our labor with the earth, we change the external world and thereby change our own nature. That's what drama is; that's what geography is: making history, making worlds. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "What Is to Be Done" (2022) Ruth Wilson Gilmore's A…
Racial capitalism: An Unfinished History
This afterword considers Cedric J. Robinson's theory of racial capitalism in relation to the South African tradition as advanced in this special issue. Both formulations of racial capitalism developed in the same global conjuncture. And much like the South African tradition, Robinson's theory of racial capitalism was always fundamentally a strategic one. As in the South African context, this meant transcending the stale impasse between Black nati…
The fire this time: A conversation with Angela Y. Davis, Herman Gray, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Josh Kun
Afterword
Keywords: “Free The Land”internationalismMutulu ShakurRepublic of New AfrikaresistancePrisoner of Warliberation
Inseguro: Policiamento sob o capitalismo racial
Tradução inédita em português do artigo originalmente publicado em Spectre: A Marxist Journal em 2020. Traduzido por Sean Purdy Este artigo descreve a natureza do policiamento sob o capitalismo racial nos EUA e defende a abolição da polícia. Ele faz um levantamento da história da polícia no país, concentrando-se principalmente nas ideias e práticas racistas contra os afro-americanos. Inclui a análise de casos recentes de assassinatos de negros pe…
Interregnum
This eclectic set of essays includes work about Zoom, the murder by police of Rayshard Brooks, blackness and public space, and black joy and uchromatism
Western Civilization is Neither”: Black Studies’ Epistemic Revolution
As I reflect on the question, “What Was Black Studies?” I’m reminded of one of my favorite images: a photograph of 25-year-old Angela Davis delivering her first lecture as Acting Assistant Professo
Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange ”: An RM Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, Part 2
Part 2 of RM's interview with historian Robin D. G. Kelley—"Solidarity is Not a Market Exchange"—picks up in detail on Kelley's indebtedness to, and understanding of Cedric Robinson's concept of "racial capitalism." This part of the interview also covers Kelley's use of the Marxian/Hegelian notion of "contradiction;" the intellectual and activist traditions that most influenced Kelley's thinking; Kelley's take on scholars of historical black radi…
From the River to the Sea to Every Mountain Top: Solidarity as Worldmaking
This essay questions a key takeaway from the Ferguson/Gaza convergence that catalyzed the current wave of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity: the idea that “equivalence,” or a politics of analogy based on racial or national identity, or racialized or colonial experience, is the sole or primary grounds for solidarity. By revisiting three recent spectacular moments involving Black intellectuals advocating for Palestine—Michelle Alexander's …
Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange ”: An RM Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, Part 1
The following is part 1 of an interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, the distinguished UCLA historian. The interview covers the following topics: Kelley’s biography of Thelonious Monk, Monk’s “surrealism,” and Monk’s radical jazz practices; the notions of “authenticity,” “empathy,” and “solidarity” in Kelley’s writings; the black freedom struggle since the 1970s; Kelley’s relationship to the utopian critiques of black feminism; Kelley’s connection to…
Black Study, Black Struggle
On Violence and Carcerality
A chief contribution of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s 1992 essay, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” was her insights into the formative role that racialized violence played in constructing gender and sexuality. Black women, she suggested, had no choice but to express their sexual identity and bodily sovereignty in the context of immense violence. While contemporary readers may find these observations unsurprising, tw…
The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native
The Rest of Us:Rethinking Settler and Native Robin D. G. Kelley (bio) Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem. —Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth Neither the English people themselves nor the masses of imperial subjects could be expected to perpetually accede to the imperial myth of civilizing in the face of the overtly selfish and catastrophic preoccupations of white settler c…
Generations of Struggle: Panel Discussion on Protest before, during, and after the Ferguson Rebellion
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression
This book studies the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," and tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 1940s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a…
Beyond Black Lives Matter
Few activists who march behind the banner of Black Lives Matter conceive of their struggle as an appeal to white people for recognition, but until recently the movement’s objective echoed this implicit line of reasoning: if the dominant class, and/or the state, could just recognize that our lives matter, we would be treated differently. Such assumptions can easily lead us down a slippery slope of reducing five centuries of racism, slavery, and co…
Another Freedom Summer
During the summer of 2014, the U.S. government once again offered the State of Israel unwavering support for its aggression against the Palestinian people. Among the U.S. public, however, there was growing disenchantment with Israel. The information explosion on social media has provided the public globally with much greater access to the Palestinian narrative unfiltered by the Israeli lens. In the United States, this has translated into a growin…
The Third International and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa
[no abstract]
Our South African Freedom Dreams
[no abstract]
Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem
In the midst of vast cultural and political shifts in the early twentieth century, politicians and cultural observers variously hailed and decried the rise of the “New Negro.” This phenomenon was most clearly manifest in the United States through the outpouring of Black arts and letters and social commentary known as the Harlem Renaissance. What is less known is how far afield of Harlem that renaissance flourished—how much the New Negro movement …
Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World
Les AA. explorent la definition et le sens meme de diaspora en tant que concept. Une grande part des debats actuels continue a suggerer que la diaspora est tout simplement une manifestation logique de la dispersion, qu'importe comment cette diaspora a ete creee ou depuis combien de temps elle existe. Les AA. tentent de demontrer que les relations qui lient la diaspora doivent s'articuler et ne sont pas inevitables, et que la diaspora est a la foi…
We Are Not What We Seem: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South
Journal Article "We Are Not What We Seem": Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South Get access Robin D. G. Kelley Robin D. G. Kelley associate professor of history, African-American studies, and American culture University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 1, June 1993, Pages 75–112, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079698 Pu…
The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native
The Rest of Us:Rethinking Settler and Native Robin D. G. Kelley (bio) Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem. —Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth Neither the English people themselves nor the masses of imperial subjects could be expected to perpetually accede to the imperial myth of civilizing in the face of the overtly selfish and catastrophic preoccupations of white settler c…
But a Local Phase of a World Problem: Black History's Global Vision, 1883-1950
Journal Article “But a Local Phase of a World Problem”: Black History's Global Vision, 1883–1950 Get access Robin D. G. Kelley Robin D. G. Kelley professor of history and Africana studies New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 3, December 1999, Pages 1045–1077, https://doi.org/10.2307/2568605 Published: 01 December 1999
What Is to Be Done
What Is to Be Done? Ruth Wilson Gilmore (bio) I'm going to need your help tonight, as I always do. At some point I'm going to do this. You'll remember. I move a lot when I talk, but I'll only once do this [raises arms over her head]. And when I do this, you will say, other than your gender or transgender or other identity of choice, woman-man, person, human, lover, masculine-center, whatever you're going to say, make it fit, in two syllables, "Ot…
Black like Mao: Red China and black revolution
From the River to the Sea to Every Mountain Top: Solidarity as Worldmaking
This essay questions a key takeaway from the Ferguson/Gaza convergence that catalyzed the current wave of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity: the idea that “equivalence,” or a politics of analogy based on racial or national identity, or racialized or colonial experience, is the sole or primary grounds for solidarity. By revisiting three recent spectacular moments involving Black intellectuals advocating for Palestine—Michelle Alexander's …
Unfinished Migrations: Commentary and Response
With “Unfinished Migrations,” Patterson and Kelley have provided an indispensable overview of the recent resurgence of African diaspora scholarship. Describing this “rebirth” in light of contemporary concerns with globalization and transnationalism, they usefully update the work of scholars such as St. Clair Drake, Joseph Harris, and George Shepperson, who over the past thirty-five years have provided similar catalogues and calls. Rather than con…
How the West was One: On the uses and Limitations of Diaspora
MOST READERS of the Black Scholar know fully well that the concept of an African diaspora is hardly new. Even if we limit our discussion to scholarly investigations of the African diaspora, we will discover a rich discourse dating back at least to the 1950s and 1960s, if not before. It served as both a political term with which to emphasize unifying experiences of African peoples dispersed by the slave trade and an analytical term that enabled sc…
Black Study, Black Struggle
Nap Time: Historicizing the Afro
An Archaeology of Resistance
Racial capitalism: An Unfinished History
This afterword considers Cedric J. Robinson's theory of racial capitalism in relation to the South African tradition as advanced in this special issue. Both formulations of racial capitalism developed in the same global conjuncture. And much like the South African tradition, Robinson's theory of racial capitalism was always fundamentally a strategic one. As in the South African context, this meant transcending the stale impasse between Black nati…
Making History, Making Worlds
Making History, Making Worlds Robin D. G. Kelley (bio) In a way, the obsessions that drove me into and then rapidly away from drama were those most beautifully summarized in a few thoughts of Marx: by mixing our labor with the earth, we change the external world and thereby change our own nature. That's what drama is; that's what geography is: making history, making worlds. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "What Is to Be Done" (2022) Ruth Wilson Gilmore's A…
Western Civilization is Neither”: Black Studies’ Epistemic Revolution
As I reflect on the question, “What Was Black Studies?” I’m reminded of one of my favorite images: a photograph of 25-year-old Angela Davis delivering her first lecture as Acting Assistant Professo
A Poetics of Anticolonialism
Author's note: Mad props to Christopher Phelps for inviting me to write this essay; to Franklin Rosemont for passing along key documents, commenting on and correcting an earlier draft, and for his untiring support; to Cedric Robinson for forcing me to come to terms with Césaire's critique of Marxism in the first place; to Judith MacFarlane for her wonderful and exact translations; to Elleza and Diedra for cultivating the Marvelous. This essay is …
Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange ”: An RM Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, Part 2
Part 2 of RM's interview with historian Robin D. G. Kelley—"Solidarity is Not a Market Exchange"—picks up in detail on Kelley's indebtedness to, and understanding of Cedric Robinson's concept of "racial capitalism." This part of the interview also covers Kelley's use of the Marxian/Hegelian notion of "contradiction;" the intellectual and activist traditions that most influenced Kelley's thinking; Kelley's take on scholars of historical black radi…
Beyond the "Real" World, or Why Black Radicals Need to Wake Up and Start Dreaming
(2002). Beyond the 'Real' World, or Why Black Radicals Need to Wake Up and Start Dreaming. Souls: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 51-64
A Sole Response
Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. By Brian Ward. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998. 576 pages. $60.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Reading Brian Ward's Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations reminded me of my craziest dance floor experience. About six or seven years ago, my wife and I were invited to a dance party at a colleague's house …
The Proletariat Goes to College
So we're here in Pittsburgh: Where are the steel workers? Why aren't they here? This question was raised at the 1995 American Studies Association meeting during a special panel titled Does Cultural Studies Ignore Class? The discussion had reverted to the same old left academic angst over whether we are capable of addressing people in the world. Someone suggested that the ASA program committee invite Pittsburgh's steel workers to formally particip…
The Third International and the Struggle for ational Liberation in South Africa
No abstract
Inseguro: Policiamento sob o capitalismo racial
Tradução inédita em português do artigo originalmente publicado em Spectre: A Marxist Journal em 2020. Traduzido por Sean Purdy Este artigo descreve a natureza do policiamento sob o capitalismo racial nos EUA e defende a abolição da polícia. Ele faz um levantamento da história da polícia no país, concentrando-se principalmente nas ideias e práticas racistas contra os afro-americanos. Inclui a análise de casos recentes de assassinatos de negros pe…
Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange ”: An RM Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, Part 1
The following is part 1 of an interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, the distinguished UCLA historian. The interview covers the following topics: Kelley’s biography of Thelonious Monk, Monk’s “surrealism,” and Monk’s radical jazz practices; the notions of “authenticity,” “empathy,” and “solidarity” in Kelley’s writings; the black freedom struggle since the 1970s; Kelley’s relationship to the utopian critiques of black feminism; Kelley’s connection to…
Another Freedom Summer
During the summer of 2014, the U.S. government once again offered the State of Israel unwavering support for its aggression against the Palestinian people. Among the U.S. public, however, there was growing disenchantment with Israel. The information explosion on social media has provided the public globally with much greater access to the Palestinian narrative unfiltered by the Israeli lens. In the United States, this has translated into a growin…
Our South African Freedom Dreams
[no abstract]
The Making of Contemporary Africa: The Development of African Society Since 1800
No abstract
Problems of Socialist Transofrmation in Africa: The Congolese Experience
No abstract
Tchula Mississippi, 1984
No abstract
Mozambique: The Revolution and Its Origins
No abstract
No Mystery
No abstract
The Role of the International Sports Boycott in the Liberation of South Africa
No abstract
Philosophy and Black Liberation: An Extended Review of Leonard Harris' Philosophy Born of Struggle
No abstract
The Marcus Garvey and Universal Improvement Association Papers
No abstract
The Third International and the Struggle for ational Liberation in South Africa
No abstract
Comrades, Praise Gawd for Lenin and Them!”: Ideology and Culture among Black Communists in Alabama, 1930-1935
A new war in Dixie: Communists and the unemployed in Birmingham, Alabama, 1930–1933
Conditions were so bad that many people believed that the only way they could ever get better was to start a new war. As I read the handbill I very naively was under the impression that the Unemployed Council was calling all Negro and white workers to a new war. Angelo Herndon1 You up against the wall and no way you can go but come out forwards. You had to come out in the struggle. But was a whole lot of people was afraid. Hosea Hudson2
The Oral History of the Left in the United States: A Survey and Interpretation
Journal Article The Oral History of the Left in the United States: A Survey and Interpretation Get access Paul Buhle, Paul Buhle director of the Oral History of the American Left Tamiment Library, New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robin D. G. Kelley Robin D. G. Kelley assistant professor of history Emory University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar J…
Remapping the U.S. Left
Review of Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left by Paul Buhle.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Race and Class Consciousness Revisited
The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II.
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern History
Where Communism was Black
An Archaeology of Resistance
Chapter 9: The Black Poor and the Politics of Opposition in a New South City, 1929-1970
We Are Not What We Seem: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South
Journal Article "We Are Not What We Seem": Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South Get access Robin D. G. Kelley Robin D. G. Kelley associate professor of history, African-American studies, and American culture University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 1, June 1993, Pages 75–112, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079698 Pu…
Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass
Affirmative action or quotas? the safety net heredity, inequality, and crime making sense of urban ghettos is the American underclass growing? reforming welfare
Dead Labor
Review of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century by Peter Linebaugh.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Race and Racism: A Symposium
Tricia Rose, Andrew Ross, Robin D. G. Kelley, Joe Wood, Howard Winant, Jacquie Jones, Michael Eric Dyson, Phillip Brian Harper, Steven Gregory, Grant Farred, Gina Dent, David Roediger, Amiri Baraka, Stanley Aronowitz, Lewis R. Gordon, Kevin Gaines, Race and Racism: A Symposium, Social Text, No. 42 (Spring, 1995), pp. 1-52
The Proletariat Goes to College
So we're here in Pittsburgh: Where are the steel workers? Why aren't they here? This question was raised at the 1995 American Studies Association meeting during a special panel titled Does Cultural Studies Ignore Class? The discussion had reverted to the same old left academic angst over whether we are capable of addressing people in the world. Someone suggested that the ASA program committee invite Pittsburgh's steel workers to formally particip…
Nap Time: Historicizing the Afro
Political science (49 works) · Sociology (44 works) · History (39 works) · Race, History, and American Society (39 works) · Law (31 works) · Politics (24 works) · Gender Studies (23 works) · History (23 works) · Art history (18 works) · Art (17 works)