Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg

Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg develops a pathbreaking approach to the work and legacy of the Jewish-Polish-German revolutionary. While Luxemburg’s works are well-known and often referred to in a globalizing left discourse, the question of how they are politically and culturally embedded – in particular in the non-Western world – has rarely been posed. The editors Drucilla Cornell and Jane Anna Gordon bring together an amazing group of authors to discuss the relevance of a „creolized“ Luxemburg to historical as well as contemporary issues such as slavery, the „primitive accumulation of whiteness“, migrant caravans, the Arab spring, contemporary South Africa, and the Black radical tradition. A must-read for everybody interested in socialist theory and practice.

-- Albert Scharenberg, Director of Historical Center, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation

This book is an antidote to over a century of leftist bad faith and condescending misogynist fetishism that has betrayed Rosa over and over again. It honorably offers Rosa as a continuing resource for communist , abolitionist, and internationalist imagination and practice in the present. Following her birds in emancipating concepts and possibility--and each other while we are at it—Creolising Rosa walks away from the brute hostage-taking in which the professional, “expert,” left still indulges, a left that remains clearly insecure about its (in)capacity to match the actual historical materialism of those who do not separate being from knowing, relation from action, lives from afterlives, love from struggle, and politics from the possible—or sacrifice one at the altar of the other.

-- Asma Abbas, professor of politics & philosophy, Bard College at Simon’s Rock

From Guyana to Tahrir Square, this dynamic and wide-ranging collection demonstrates the relevance of Rosa Luxemburg’s work to the study of colonialism and global political struggles, both contemporary and historical. Scholars and activists interested in theorizing racial capitalism and decolonial political economy will appreciate the treatment of Rosa’s incisive examination of the entanglements of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and militarism. I particularly appreciate that the authors engage with Rosa’s legacy in all its complexity: her deep insights into the nature of capitalism, her prescient warnings about the environment, her blind spots, her anticipation of world-systems theory, her undying love of plants, and the tender, life-affirming humanity that accompanied her fiery revolutionary spirit.

-- Jacqueline Wang, author of 'Carceral Capitalism’

Rosa Luxemburg dedicated her life to intellectual reflection and political mobilisation because she could not tolerate injustice of any kind. She expressed and lived solidarity with all who suffered under exploitation and oppression – humans, and members of other species. Her yearning for a more human world undoubtedly resonates with today’s thinkers and activists in the movements for radical humanism in the Global South and North. Jane Anna Gordon and Drucilla Cornell must be thanked for bringing together a captivating collection of articles that look at Rosa’s beguiling legacy for our times.

* Review of African Political Econo