![]() ![]() Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts tells in graphic novel form the research that comprised Hall’s dissertation and subsequent academic work. Far from playing a marginal role, Hall’s work reveals women who were at the heart of organizing and leading revolts across the vast and pernicious expanse of the slave trade. ![]() Rebecca Hall’s scholarship not only builds on this foundation but also highlights the critical role of women in these revolts. Instead, there’s a growing recognition that Black Americans emancipated themselves, taking a lead role in rendering slavery untenable through work stoppages and armed revolts. No longer is the field rooted in that inaccurate stereotype, dominant for much of the 20th century, that slaves were emancipated by 18th-century British activists, or by Abraham Lincoln and Unionist armies. Scholarship on slavery, meanwhile–a necessary foundation for these contemporary dialogues–is also expanding in interesting directions. ![]() ![]() Yet at the same time, the white supremacist legislators of Republican-dominated US states seem determined to rekindle the flames of that civil war, eschewing reparations and accountability for a mad drive to disenfranchise Black Americans of their rights and citizenship at any cost. On the one hand is an increasingly serious discussion about the importance of reparations, of accountability, and actually fulfilling the emancipation process that stalled so shamefully following the US Civil War. Political discourse around race in the United States can seem like a two-headed monster. ![]()
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