Reconstruction, the Risorgimento, and the Relational Politics of Abolition

Keywords: Reconstruction, abolition, Risorgimento, Italy, Black geographies, Gramsci, Du Bois
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In this paper, I take on a conjunctural reading of the Reconstruction period after the U.S. Civil War and abolition of slavery (1865–1877) and the Risorgimento period of Italian national unification (1848–1871). Both the United States and Italy were embroiled in fierce contestations over the relationship between an agricultural South and an industrial North, the place of Blackness within the national body, and the potential citizenship rights of long-subjugated, racialized, and economically exploited groups. Debates about Italianness even explicitly unfolded in relation to struggles over race and citizenship in the United States, with supporters of Italian unification often comparing the plight of Italians to the subjugation of Black Americans. I will weave these stories together by placing W.E.B. Du Bois’ writings about Reconstruction and the arrested project of abolition democracy in dialogue with Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the Risorgimento as a failed bourgeois revolution. These interrelated struggles elucidate a relational, transnational history of racial capitalism that disrupts nationally-bounded analyses. I conclude by considering what this link between Gramsci and Du Bois can elucidate about the connection between contemporary abolitionist struggles in the United States oriented on the abolition of policing and prisons, and those unfolding in Italy focused on the abolition of borders and citizenship.