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.

Acknowledgments  ix
1. Moving Toward Black Freedom  1
2. Black Life-Forms  9
3. Death and Freedom  11
4. Black Death  15
5. Plantation Zones  19
6. Diaspora Studies  23
7. The Atlantic Region and 1492  27
8. New States of Being  33
9. The Long Emancipation  35
10. Catastrophe, Wake, Hauntology  43
11. Bodies of Water  47
12. Slave Ship Logics/Logistics  51
13. Problem of the Human, or the Void of Relationality  55
14. No Happy Story  59
15. I Really Want to Hope  65
16. Funk: A Black Note on the Human  69
17. Newness  75
18. Toward a Saggin' Pants Ethic  81
19. Black Men, Style, and Fashion  87
20. No Future  91
21. (Future) Black Studies  99
22. The Long Emancipation Revisited  105
Notes  111
Bibliography  119
Index  125