SALE ON KIDS & YA BOOKSCOOL! SHOW ME

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

After Life

A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America

Rhae Lynn Barnes Keri Leigh Merritt Yohuru Williams

$44.99

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

QTY:

English
Haymarket Books
07 February 2023
"After Lifeis a collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the near presidential coup in 2021 following the 2020 election.

Inspired by the writers who documented American life during the Great Depression and World War II for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the editors asked twenty-first-century historians and legal experts to focus on the parallels, convergences, and differences between the exceptional ""long 2020"", while it unfolds, and earlier eras in U.S. History.

Introduction explains how COVID-19 and America's long history of inequality, combined with a corrupt and unconcerned federal government, produced one of the darkest times in our nation's history. Discussing the rise of the COVID-19 death toll in the United States, eventually exceeding the 1918 flu, the AIDS epidemic, and the Civil War, it ties public health, immigration, white supremacy, elections history, and epidemics together, and provides a short history of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the beginnings of a Third Reconstruction.

documents how Americans have dealt with grief, pain, and loss, both individually and communally, and how we endure and thrive. The title is an affirmation that even in our suspended half-living during lockdowns and quarantines, we are a nation of survivors-with an unprecedented chance to rebuild society in a more equitable way."
Edited by:   , ,
Imprint:   Haymarket Books
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 215mm,  Width: 139mm, 
ISBN:   9781642598292
ISBN 10:   1642598291
Pages:   360
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Rhae Lynn Barnesis an Assistant Professor at Princeton University andtheSheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.She was the 2020 President of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. Barnes is the author of the forthcoming bookDarkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface. Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power. Teaching Beyond the Textbook: Six Investigative Strategies.

Reviews for After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America

So much grief. So many gone. We need an account-one that is deeply personal and objective. Some way to make sense of what has happened and what is happening to us. After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America is that accounting. Read every page. Absorb its lessons. Feel this book in these challenging times and experience something, at once, powerfully healing and insightful. -Eddie S Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lesson for Our Own Breathtakingly refreshing in scope and content, After Life is history the way history should be written. Bringing together an incredibly diverse group of scholars, this book walks us through the worst days of the pandemic but offers us tools to create a better future. -Ibram X. Kendi Sometimes, you don't know what you really need until you read it. In After Life, some of America's most searching minds sift through the wreckage of the pandemic to provide us precious shards of light, so that the unfathomable loss of life-more than all the Americans who died in the Civil War or in World War II-will not be in vain. -Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America These essays seek to understand how we got here, document the pandemic's impact on the lives of regular Americans, and write early drafts of the history of such cataclysmic pandemic-era events as June 2020's Black Lives Matter rallies and January 2021's white nationalist uprising at the U.S. Capitol. After Life is timely, compassionate, and necessary. -Booklist Do nations have souls? Has America lost its soul? Loss and redemption are two deeply human and American ideas; generally we like the second one better. In this amazing collection of perspectives, loss takes its proper place as genuine tragedy. Largely by tapping historians, Barnes, Merritt and Williams have found a gold mine of reflection on the moral, medical, racial, and political condition of the American experiment. These pieces show, darkly but beautifully, how thoughtful people have been hurt, or destroyed, past and present; but they also inspire paths forward not to a promised land, but to a functional, honest society and a new republic. -David W. Blight, Yale University, author of Pulitzer-prize winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom Rhae Lynn Barnes, Keri Leigh Merritt, and Yohuru Williams have ring-mastered an excellent book of powerful thinkers mourning all the unnecessary losses of the past few years-and pointing, possibly, toward American redemption. -Brad DeLong, author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century, 1870-2010 How do we make sense of the senseless? This remarkable collection begins to answer that question for the tragedy that was America's politicized response to a lethal pandemic and everything that happened alongside it, including an attempted coup. As daring in scope as it is diverse in voice, After Life can help us heal with a fuller understanding of the reach of this formative and often disastrous time. The editors tell us that the early 2020s will define our lives --the sooner we understand that time, the sooner we'll understand ourselves. This book is an indispensable guide. -Andrew L. Seidel, author of The Founding Myth and American Crusade


See Also