ABOUT THIS BOOKIn Beyond Constraint, Shona N. Jackson offers a new approach to labour and its analysis by demonstrating the fundamental relation between black and Indigenous People’s sovereign, free, and coerced labour in the Americas. Through the writings of Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, and Sylvia Wynter, Jackson confronts the elision of Indigenous People’s labour in the black radical tradition. She argues that this elision is an effect of the structural relation of antiblackness to anti-indigeneity through which native and black bodies are arranged on either side of a split between unproductive labour and productive work necessary for capital accumulation and for how we read capital in political economic critique. This division between labour and work forces the radical tradition to sustain the break between black and Indigenous peoples as part of its critical strategies of liberation. To address this impasse, Jackson reads the tradition against the grain for openings to indigeneity and a method for recovering lost labours.
REVIEWS“Anyone who desires black and Indigenous freedoms in the Americas must read Beyond Constraint. Shona N. Jackson’s deep regard for the black radical tradition results in a stunning reading practice that transforms the conceits of cherished radicalisms anchored in work into openings for a shared history of Indigenous and black labours to build futures outside of the time of capital and coloniality. Taking the reader through multiple middle/passages, spaces of relation, and processes of conversion, Jackson rigorously reconnects black and Indigenous labor in the Caribbean. I have been waiting a long time for this brilliant contribution that moves us closer to a horizon beyond work and its entrapments.”
-- Tiffany Lethabo King, author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies