Struggle on Their Minds

Nick Bromell, University of Massachusetts, Amherst:
Struggle on Their Minds places Alex Zamalin at the forefront of scholars concerned with the political thought of African American activists. I can think of no reading more timely than this rich account of the centrality of black resistance to U.S. democracy and democratic citizenship.

Neil Roberts, author of Freedom as Marronage, Williams College:
Fred Moten memorably wrote that the "history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist." Alex Zamalin reaffirms this assertion through exquisite examination of narratives of resistance—not merely protest—by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Huey Newton, and Angela Davis. Zamalin's deft treatise demonstrates how Afro-modern political thought refashions our fundamental understandings of resistance and the attendant ideals of democracy and freedom.