US Electoral Circus: A perspective from the left

international | anti-capitalism | event notice Thursday February 07, 2008 17:25 by 4WW

Interview with Brian Kelly

This Monday 11th of February 6.30-7pm at The Fourth World War in Féile FM 103.2 Béal Feirste or online at www.feilefm.com we'll be having a look at the US election campaign.

Is it true that Obama is better than Clinton? or is it just the opposite? or neither of two? What does the left movement think about all of it? and what it's more important, how is the anti-capitalist movement organised in the US?

We hope to have some answers from Brian Kelly, Senior Lecturer in History in Queen's University, who will be with us at the studio.

Dr. Brian Kelly earned his PhD at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, coming to Queen's in 1999 after a brief stint teaching in Miami. His research is focused on the tangled relationship between race and class in the American past, and particularly on the post-emancipation US South. His first book, Race, Class and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-21 (Illinois, 2001), explored the persistence of working-class interracialism among black and white coal miners in Birmingham, Alabama, illuminating the role played by industrial elites in maintaining racial divisions at the bottom of southern society. The study won a number of prestigious awards, including the Southern Historical Association’s Francis Butler Simkins Award for the best first book by an author in the field of southern history and it’s H. L. Mitchell Award for a distinguished book in southern working class history.

His current research takes up a number of the salient themes present in the Alabama study: labor militancy and elite power in the industrializing South; tensions between the black working class and established ‘race leadership’ over competing strategies for racial progress; and racial antagonism and its impact on working-class politics in the United States. He has published a number of related articles in scholarly journals on both sides of the Atlantic: "Sentinels for New South Industry: Booker T. Washington, Industrial Accommodation, and Black Workers in the Jim Crow South," appeared in Labor History in Spring 2003 and will be included in Eric Arnesen’s collection, The Black Worker: Race, Labor and Civil Rights since Emancipation (Illinois, 2005). He has contributed an extended introductory essay for the reissue of Bernard Mandel’s 1955 classic, Labor: Free and Slave, which is forthcoming from the University of Press (2006), and is completing a textbook with documents on African Americans and the Labor Movement(Rowman and Littlefield).

Together with several scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, Dr Kelly is currently engaged in a long-term research project on Race, Labour and Politics in the Post-Emancipation South. His most recent article, “A Storm Beyond their Control: Black Laborers, the Republican Party and the Overthrow of Reconstruction in Lowcountry South Carolina,” is forthcoming in the International Review of Social History, and he is at work on a monograph, Counterrevolution in the Lowcountry: Black Workers and the Overthrow of Reconstruction in Coastal South Carolina.