by Houria Bouteldja
Pluto Press
11/20/2024, paperback
SKU: 9780745349558
In Europe and North America, the white working class is increasingly tempted by right-wing political parties. Fascistic candidates and ideas seem to reap the fruits of social unrest everywhere. With her usual thought-provoking and unyielding insights, Houria Bouteldja shows how the history of the left explains this conundrum and how we can overcome it.
Drawing from Black radical and decolonial Marxism, she shows that privileging white constituencies, unions, and left parties laid the foundations for a racial contract that binds workers and the poor to the state.
However, there may still be a way out of this trap. Uniting "rednecks" (the white working class) and "barbarians" (the racially oppressed) requires a project of popular sovereignty, where national identity is transformed through revolutionary love. Looking to the future, Bouteldja imagines antiracism as a redemptive struggle aimed at rehabilitating marginalized communities and redefining white dignity.
Reviews:
"This book is for anyone who wants to learn more about French decolonial theory and to read one of the most interesting antiracist decolonial activists in France today, Houria Bouteldja. Known for her incisive analysis of moral antiracism in France, Bouteldja offers here a strong argument for the unity between "rednecks" and "barbarians". This is essential to fight the foundations of the total racial state and its racial pact which maintains the division between these two groups." - Françoise Vergès, author of A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum
"Houria Bouteldja throws all our certainties into the air, and with brilliant precision, reassembles them. With a clear and uncompromising eye, she points towards a truly emancipatory future in which, following Fanon, all the Wretched of the Earth can 'look for something else', far beyond the racial state'" - Alana Lentin, author of Why Race Still Matters
About the Author:
Houria Bouteldja is a French-Algerian political activist and writer. She served as spokesperson for the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic until 2020. She is the author of Whites, Jews and Us: Towards a Politics of Revolutionary Love.