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Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg

Edited by Jane Anna Gordon and Drucilla Cornell

Rosa Luxemburg is unquestionably the most important historical European woman Marxist theorist. Significantly, for the purpose of creolizing the canon, she considered her continent and the globe from an Eastern Europe that was in constant flux and turmoil. From this relatively peripheral location, she was far less parochial than many of her more centrally located interlocutors and peers. Indeed, Luxemburg’s work touched on all the burning issues of her time and ours, from analysis of concrete revolutionary struggles, such as those in Poland and Russia, to showing through her analysis of primitive accumulation that anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles had to be intertwined, to considerations of state sovereignty, democracy, feminism, and racism. She thereby offered reflections that can usefully be taken up and reworked by writers facing continuous and new challenges to undo relations of exploitation through radical economic and social transformation Luxemburg touches on all aspects of what constitutes revolution in her work; the authors of this volume show us that, by creolizing Luxemburg, we can open up new paths of understanding the complexities of revolution.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International

Pages: 512 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-78661-442-1 • Hardback • April 2021 • $126.00 • (£97.00)

978-1-5381-5552-3 • Paperback • August 2022 • $50.00 • (£38.00)

978-1-78661-443-8 • eBook • April 2021 • $47.50 • (£37.00)

Series: Creolizing the Canon

Subjects: Philosophy / Political, Political Science / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Philosophy / Continental Philosophy, Philosophy / Philosophy of Race

Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Rosa Luxemburg is unquestionably the most important historical European woman Marxist theorist. Significantly, for the purpose of creolizing the canon, she considered her continent and the globe from an Eastern Europe that was in constant flux and turmoil. From this relatively peripheral location, she was far less parochial than many of her more centrally located interlocutors and peers. Indeed, Luxemburg’s work touched on all the burning issues of her time and ours, from analysis of concrete revolutionary struggles, such as those in Poland and Russia, to showing through her analysis of primitive accumulation that anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles had to be intertwined, to considerations of state sovereignty, democracy, feminism, and racism. She thereby offered reflections that can usefully be taken up and reworked by writers facing continuous and new challenges to undo relations of exploitation through radical economic and social transformation Luxemburg touches on all aspects of what constitutes revolution in her work; the authors of this volume show us that, by creolizing Luxemburg, we can open up new paths of understanding the complexities of revolution.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International

Pages: 512 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-78661-442-1 • Hardback • April 2021 • $126.00 • (£97.00)

978-1-5381-5552-3 • Paperback • August 2022 • $50.00 • (£38.00)

978-1-78661-443-8 • eBook • April 2021 • $47.50 • (£37.00)

Series: Creolizing the Canon

Subjects: Philosophy / Political, Political Science / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Philosophy / Continental Philosophy, Philosophy / Philosophy of Race

Author

Jane Anna Gordon is professor of political science at University of Connecticut, with affiliations in American studies, El Instituto, philosophy, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.
Drucilla Cornell is emeritus professor of political science, women’s studies, and comparative literature at Rutgers University.

Table of Contents

“I Have a Thousand More Things I Want to Say to You”: An Introduction to Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, Drucilla Cornell and Jane Anna Gordon
Debating Nationalism
A Troubled Legacy: Rosa Luxemburg and the Non-Western World, Peter Hudis
The Contemporary Transnational Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg’s Socialist Critique of National Self-Determination, Drucilla Cornell
Against a Single History, for a Revaluation of Power: Luxemburg, James, and a Decolonial Critique of Political Economy, Alyssa Adamson
Revolutionary Subjects
Walter Rodney’s Russian Revolution and the Curious Case of Rosa Luxemburg,
Robin D. G. Kelley
A Political Economy of the Damned: Reading Rosa Luxemburg on Slavery through a Creolizing Lens, Jane Anna Gordon
One Hundred Years of Rosa Luxemburg’s Marxism: Imperialism and Lessons in Democracy for the Contemporary South African Left, Gunnett Kaaf
Rosa Luxemburg, Nature, and Imprisonment, Maria Theresia Starzmann
The Mass Strike, Past and Present
“The Living Pulsebeat of the Revolution”: Reading Luxemburg and Du Bois on the
Strike, Rafael Khachaturian
Luxemburg on Tahrir Square: Reading the Arab Revolutions with Rosa
Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike, Sami Zemni, Brecht De Smet, and Koenraad Boegaert
Migrant Caravans and Luxemburg’s Spontaneous Mass Strike, Josué Ricardo López
Reconsidering Primitive Accumulation
Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation, Robert Nichols
“No Eyes, No Interest, No Frame of Reference”: Rosa Luxemburg, Southern African
Historiography, and Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, Jeff Guy
Luxemburg’s Contemporary Resonances in South Africa: Capital’s Renewed Super-Exploitation of People and Nature, Patrick Bond
Primitive Accumulation and the Government of the State in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Ahmed Veriava
Rosa Luxemburg and the Primitive Accumulation of Whiteness, Siddhant Issar,
Rachel H. Brown, and John McMahon
Creolizing The Accumulation of Capital through Social Reproduction Theory: A Distinctively Luxemburgian Feminism, Ankica Čakardić
Unfinished Conversations among Revolutionary Women
“Staying Human”: Rosa, Raya, and Total Revolution, Nigel C. Gibson
Claudia Jones, Political Economy, and the Creolizing of Rosa Luxemburg,
Paget Henry
“To Be Young, Gifted, and” Woman: Reading Rosa Luxemburg through Lorraine Hansberry and the Black Radical Tradition, LaRose T. Parris

Reviews

Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg develops a pathbreaking approach to the work and legacy of the Jewish-Polish-German revolutionary. While Luxemburg’s works are well-known and often referred to in a globalizing left discourse, the question of how they are politically and culturally embedded – in particular in the non-Western world – has rarely been posed. The editors Drucilla Cornell and Jane Anna Gordon bring together an amazing group of authors to discuss the relevance of a „creolized“ Luxemburg to historical as well as contemporary issues such as slavery, the „primitive accumulation of whiteness“, migrant caravans, the Arab spring, contemporary South Africa, and the Black radical tradition. A must-read for everybody interested in socialist theory and practice.

— Albert Scharenberg, Director of Historical Center, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation

This book is an antidote to over a century of leftist bad faith and condescending misogynist fetishism that has betrayed Rosa over and over again. It honorably offers Rosa as a continuing resource for communist , abolitionist, and internationalist imagination and practice in the present. Following her birds in emancipating concepts and possibility--and each other while we are at it—Creolising Rosa walks away from the brute hostage-taking in which the professional, “expert,” left still indulges, a left that remains clearly insecure about its (in)capacity to match the actual historical materialism of those who do not separate being from knowing, relation from action, lives from afterlives, love from struggle, and politics from the possible—or sacrifice one at the altar of the other.

— Asma Abbas, professor of politics & philosophy, Bard College at Simon’s Rock

From Guyana to Tahrir Square, this dynamic and wide-ranging collection demonstrates the relevance of Rosa Luxemburg’s work to the study of colonialism and global political struggles, both contemporary and historical. Scholars and activists interested in theorizing racial capitalism and decolonial political economy will appreciate the treatment of Rosa’s incisive examination of the entanglements of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and militarism. I particularly appreciate that the authors engage with Rosa’s legacy in all its complexity: her deep insights into the nature of capitalism, her prescient warnings about the environment, her blind spots, her anticipation of world-systems theory, her undying love of plants, and the tender, life-affirming humanity that accompanied her fiery revolutionary spirit.

— Jacqueline Wang, author of 'Carceral Capitalism’

Rosa Luxemburg dedicated her life to intellectual reflection and political mobilisation because she could not tolerate injustice of any kind. She expressed and lived solidarity with all who suffered under exploitation and oppression – humans, and members of other species. Her yearning for a more human world undoubtedly resonates with today’s thinkers and activists in the movements for radical humanism in the Global South and North. Jane Anna Gordon and Drucilla Cornell must be thanked for bringing together a captivating collection of articles that look at Rosa’s beguiling legacy for our times.

— Review of African Political Economy

Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg

Edited by Jane Anna Gordon and Drucilla Cornell

Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg

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