Freedoms Gained and Lost: Forging Citizenship, Transforming Labors, and Negotiating Solidarity in Reconstruction Era South Carolina concludes with reading list comprised of books that address and confront the continued struggles with the “afterlife of slavery”, a phrase first articulated by scholar Saidiya Hartman to describe the legacies of oppression born during the period of enslavement:
“If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of Black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too long memory, but because Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.”
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press, 1963.
Barber, William J. and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement. Boston: Beacon Press, 2016.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
Cooper Owens, Deirdre. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.
Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped From the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books, 2016.
Khan-Cullors, Patrice and Asha Bandele. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.
Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2016.
Williams, Chad, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain, eds. Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016.