Please join the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program for our next session of Behind the Publication, a behind the scenes workshop series on faculty research in gender and sexuality.

The series continues with Charisse Burden-Stelly, Associate Professor of African American Studies. Prof. Burden-Stelly is a Black Studies scholar of political theory, political and intellectual history, and political economy. Among Dr. Burden-Stelly’s numerous articles, book chapters, editorials, and edited books, this presentation, entitled "Blackness as Methodology," will draw on the research for Organize, Fight, Win (Verso 2022) and Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State (University of Mississippi Press 2022).

About the series: The central goal this series is to offer graduate and undergraduate students a series of informal workshops where faculty encourage and demystify research by sharing their own experiences. We invite WSU faculty members to share a little about the genesis of their current or recent research. We ask them to discuss the joys and frustrations of the project; to elaborate on the decisions around the scope the work; to highlight the importance of colleagues, librarians, friends, and other interlocutors more generally for their work; and to offer tips and strategies to help students through their own projects. 

Organize, Fight, Win 

Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete materialist analysis of the conditions of Black workers, these women argued that racial and economic equality can only be achieved by overthrowing capitalism.

The first collection of its kind, Organize, Fight, Win brings together three decades of Black Communist women’s political writings. In doing so, it highlights the link between Communism and Black liberation. Likewise, it makes clear how Black women fundamentally shaped, and were shaped by, Communist praxis in the twentieth century.

Organize, Fight, Win includes writings from card-carrying Communists like Dorothy Burnham, Williana Burroughs, Grace P. Campbell, Alice Childress, Marvel Cooke, Esther Cooper Jackson, Thelma Dale Perkins, Vicki Garvin, Yvonne Gregory, Claudia Jones, Maude White Katz, and Louise Thompson Patterson, and writings by those who organized alongside the Communist Party, like Ella Baker, Charlotta Bass, Thyra Edwards, Lorraine Hansberry, and Dorothy Hunton.

Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State 

Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State collects thirteen key essays on the Caribbean by Percy C. Hintzen, the foremost political sociologist in Anglophone Caribbean studies. For the past forty years, Hintzen has been one of the most articulate and discerning critics of the postcolonial state in Caribbean scholarship, making seminal contributions to the study of Caribbean politics, sociology, political economy, and diaspora studies. His work on the postcolonial elites in the region, first given full articulation in his book The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination, and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad, is unparalleled.

Reproducing Domination contains some of Hintzen’s most important Caribbean essays over a twenty-five-year period, from 1995 to the present. These works have broadened and deepened his earlier work in The Costs of Regime Survival to encompass the entire Anglophone Caribbean; interrogated the formation and consolidation of the postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean state; and theorized the role of race and ethnicity in Anglophone Caribbean politics. Given the recent global resurgence of interest in elite ownership patterns and their relationship to power and governance, Hintzen’s work assumes even more resonance beyond the shores of the Caribbean. This groundbreaking volume serves as an important guide for those concerned with tracing the consolidation of power in the new elite that emerged following flag independence in the 1960s.