White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide

Winner, The Frantz Fanon Award for an Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought

We are in the fray of another signature moment in the long history of the United States as a project of anti Black and racial-colonial violence. Long before November 2016, white nationalism, white terrorism, and white fascist statecraft proliferated. Thinking across a variety of archival, testimonial, visual, and activist texts-from Freedmen’s Bureau documents and the Join LAPD hiring campaign to Barry Goldwater’s hidden tattoo and the Pelican Bay prison strike-Dylan Rodriguez counter-narrates the long post-civil rights half-century as a period of White Reconstruction, in which the struggle to reassemble the ascendancy of White Being permeates the political and institutional logics of diversity, inclusion, formal equality, and multiculturalist white supremacy.

Throughout White Reconstruction, Rodriguez considers how the creative, imaginative, speculative collective labor of abolitionist praxis can displace and potentially destroy the ascendancy of White Being and Civilization in order to create possibilities for insurgent thriving.