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

by Rhae Lynn Barnes (Editor), Keri Leigh Merritt (Editor), Yohuru Williams (Editor)

Overview

After Life is 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.

Providing context for the entire volume, After Life’s 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.

After Life 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.


Contributors include: Gwendolyn Hall, Heather Ann Thompson, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Keith Ellison, Keri Leigh Merritt, Martha Hodes, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Mary L. Dudziak, Monica Muñoz Martinez, Peniel E. Joseph, Philip J. Deloria, Rhae Lynn Barnes, Robert L. Tsai, Robin D. G. Kelley, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Stephen Berry, Tera W. Hunter, Ula Y. Taylor, and, Yohuru Williams.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642598292
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	10/25/2022
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Rhae Lynn Barnes is an Assistant Professor at Princeton Universityand the Sheila 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 book Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface.

Keri Leigh Merritt is a historian, writer, and activist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, and the co-editor of Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power.

Yohuru Williams is Distinguished UniversityChair and Professor of History, and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul.  He is the author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven, and Teaching Beyond the Textbook: Six Investigative Strategies, and, co-author with Bryan Shih of The Black Panthers: Portrait of an Unfinished Revolution.

Table of Contents

Preface: American Culture after Life Rhae Lynn Barnes Keri Leigh Merritt xi

Introduction: The Present Crisis Rhae Lynn Barnes Keri Leigh Merritt 1

Part I American Exceptionalism: Colonization and Immigration

1 El Paso in Mourning Monica Munoz Martinez 27

2 2020: A Year for Epic Victories amid Historic Loss Mary Kathryn Nagle 41

3 Guitars, Dreams, Dogs, and Tears: Grieving Hard Histories Philip J. Deloria 53

4 Somewhere, USA Robert L. Tsai 65

Part II Mass Death and White Supremacy: The Civil War and Civil Rights

5 Confederates Take the Capitol Stephen Berry 81

6 Two Catastrophes and Ten Parallels: Lincoln's Assassination and COVID-19 Martha Hodes 95

7 COVID-19: A New "Negro Servants' Disease" Tera W. Hunter 105

8 From the Colfax Massacre to the 2020 Election: White Supremacist Terrorism in America Gwendolyn Midlo-Hall 117

9 Man of Means by No Means: King of the Road Rhae Lynn Barnes 129

10 The Afterlife of Black Political Radicalism Peniel E. Joseph 149

Part III Finding Light in the Darkness: Memory and Grief

11 The Grief That Came before the Grief: A Home Archive Jacquelyn Dowd Hall 169

12 An Uncountable Casualty: Ruminations on the Social Life of Numbers Mary L. Dudziak 177

13 Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child Keith Ellison 183

14 Losing My Starbucks Table Ula Y. Taylor 195

Part IV The Reckoning

15 Buried History: The Death and Life of Donald S. Kelley Robin D. G. Kelley 207

16 Suicide and Survival: Deaths of Despair in the 2020s Keri Leigh Merritt 221

17 "How Do We Live?": A Journal of a Lost Year Scott Poulson-Bryant 233

18 The Permeability of Celts: Vulnerability and Trauma in the Age of Mass Incarceration Heather Ann Thompson 245

19 Dreams of My Great-Grand father Yoburu Williams 257

Conclusion: Stress Test and Saving the Soul of America Keri Leigh Merritt Yohuru Williams 273

Appendix I A Brief History of Public Health in America Rhae Lynn Barnes Keri Leigh Merritt 285

Appendix II Black Lives Matter and the Beginnings of the Third Reconstruction Yohuru Williams 309

Acknowledgments 321

Notes 323

About the Contributors 367

Index 373

Editorial Reviews

In this moment, when plague reality continues to underscore how under-cared-for we all are, reading After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America has been a balm. It soothed like the first in-person funeral after so much death: gathering together people and their stories and different and overlapping memories and giving me permission to grieve, to cry into my mask, for the friend who was gone but also for the millions of others, for all the lost moments of our lives….  Grief for America is uncomfortable, messy, at times hard to see. But part of grieving is letting go of the pretty illusions that we cling to; it is exactly in the refusing to tell the easy lies that we allow ourselves to truly mourn. It is in this way, I think, that After Life can help us process the pain of the last two and a half years of death and isolation. It attempts, through an honest accounting of harm done, to leave us with the hope that there’s something worth reconstructing out of the ashes of pandemic America.” —Sarah Jaffe, The New Republic

“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

From the Publisher