About

Robin D. G. Kelley is a Distinguished Professor and the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Freedom Scholar Award. His research areas have ranged widely, covering radical movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora, and Africa, notably South Africa; Black intellectuals; labor history; culture such as music, visual art, and film; racial capitalism and political economy; colonialism; Marxism; surrealism; and policing. Kelley has authored several influential books, including the prize-winning "Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original," "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination," and "Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression." He is currently completing two books, "Making a Killing: Cops, Capitalism, and the War on Black Life" and "The Education of Ms. Grace Halsell: An Intimate History of the American Century," and is a co-editor of multiple volumes addressing Black studies, race, rights, and history. His essays have appeared in numerous prominent publications, and he has contributed to the jazz world through hosting a podcast and writing liner notes for recordings by jazz legends and contemporary artists.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History
• Political Science
• Political economy
• Aerospace engineering
• Art
• Archaeology
• Physics
• Engineering
• Neoclassical economics
• Geography
• Economics
• Art history
• Aeronautics
• Law
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Fear of a Black Planet:

  2026-02-10

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• History from the Ground Up

  Small Axe A Caribbean Journal of Criticism · 2025-11-01

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  This essay argues that Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024) offers a new model for the study of racial capitalism by examining Atlantic slavery’s core antagonisms. By thoroughly interrogating the often hidden ideological and material basis of Jamaica’s plantation economy through its most famous slaveholder and proponent, Hall has written a new history of Jamaica, the Atlantic world, and the development of modern racism.

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• Humanities in the Face of Genocide

  2025-02-17

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  is one of the scholars I feel very fortunate to have met because of the "Humanities for Humans" project.I knew his name, his reputation, and had read some of his work prior to our online conversation, beginning, actually, with his book on the great jazzman Thelonious Monk (2009), as my husband is a

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• Communist Party of the United States

  2025-01-23

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• Blues People and the Poetic Spirit: Recovering Surrealism’s Revolutionary Politics

  African American Review · 2025-03-01

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  Abstract: In 1975, Paul Garon published Blues and the Poetic Spirit . Rejecting the nonsense about the blues’ lack of critical intelligence, he insisted that the blues is poetry, or more specifically, that the blues is the poetic expression of the Black working class. He argued that “the revolutionary nature of the blues” lay in “its fidelity to fantasy and desire,” generating “an irreducible and, so to speak, habit-forming demand for freedom and what Rimbaud called ‘true life.’ ” While I don’t disagree, Jayne Cortez reminds us of yet another characteristic of the blues and of Black music generally that is not rooted in fantasy but rather in truth-telling and critique. We often miss this quality because even surrealists tended to view the blues as a primitive form, locked in a particular time and place. Its lyrics were often coded, of necessity camouflaged under the iron fist of Jim Crow. I will reexamine (Afro)surrealism’s revolutionary politics through the blues by attempting to answer a question Amiri Baraka once posed to me many years ago: What if “The Internationale” were a blues? If we understand the blues not just as art but as a dialectic—a people in motion confronting catastrophe, deepening radical social consciousness, making revolution with all its contradictions laid bare, producing a new synthesis through the blues— then it stands to reason that a blues “Internationale” would be less an expression of the triumphalism of an imagined proletariat marching, linked arm-in-arm, preparing to overthrow the bourgeoisie, and more of an open-ended structure with its own imperative to improvise as many verses or statements as needed. It would be less mascu-linist, reveling instead in humor, raw honesty, a fearless embrace of pleasure, pain, sex, celebrating everybody—men and women, cis, trans, queer, toilers of all kinds while decentering toil. Also, to reimagine “The Internationale” as a blues is to rethink our conception of revolutionary time, a time away from linear time and teleology. Blues time stretches, is flexible and improvisatory, and is simultaneously in the present, the past, the future, and the timeless space of the imagination. Finally, blues time and (Afro)surrealism’s revolutionary politics embraces the “revolutionary pessimism” of surrealist thinker Pierre Naville, as expressed in his 1926 pamphlet, The Revolution and the Intellectuals . Revolutionary pessimism has nothing in common with Afropessimism; it is arguably its negation. Revolutionary pessimism was born out of a critique of optimism—specifically the optimism of Stalinist assertions about the inevitable triumph of socialism or Social Democratic beliefs that the socialist commonwealth could come about through parliamentary means. Revolutionary pessimism is aimed at preventing the onset of disaster by all possible means, interrupting those historical processes that lead to catastrophe. This is why the revolutionary pessimism of the blues is always accompanied by what André Breton termed “anticipatory optimism”—the commitment to struggle in dark times and through this, the preparation for victory.

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• The Power of Hope in the Movements for Freedom: An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley

  Transatlantica · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Freedom Dreams delves into the ideologies, hopes and dreams of liberation that fuel black radical social movements, and shape their collective vision of the future.Kelley's work is a bridge between the dreams of freedom and the people practicing liberation.In a new edition (2022), the historian reflects on the ways recent and contemporary movements have expanded and transformed his own vision of freedom.Twenty years after it was published for the first time, Freedom Dreams confirms Kelley as one of the most important thinkers of our time.In the following conversation, he discusses how hope is still driving social movements in American cities.

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• Racial capitalism: an unfinished history

  2024-03-19 · 2 citations

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• Racial capitalism: an unfinished history

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2023 · 6 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  This afterword considers Cedric J. Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism in relation to the South African tradition as advanced in this special issue. Both formulations of racial capitalism developed in the same global conjuncture. And much like the South African tradition, Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism was always fundamentally a strategic one. As in the South African context, this meant transcending the stale impasse between Black nationalists and Marxists and developing novel theories to inform revolutionary strategy. Ultimately then, racial capitalism is “a concept forged and developed in struggle”, as the editors put it – and it cannot be considered otherwise.

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• The Jazz Loft Project

  2023-01-01

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• UFAHAMU Interviews Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley

  Ufahamu A Journal of African Studies · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  For this special retrospective issue commemorating 52 years of Ufahamu , the editors had the unique opportunity to interview former editor, and current Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley. Dr. Kelley is a renowned historian of social movements, culture, labor struggle, and Black intellectualism in the U.S., African Diaspora and African continent himself. Known for such acclaimed publications as Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination , and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression , Many are less familiar with Dr. Kelley’s background and academic training in African history. Dr. Kelley walks us through his time as a graduate student trying to study South African communists, and how Africa remained central in his work despite its shifting focus (in large part due to the political constraints of Apartheid) over the course of his time as a UCLA student. Becoming part of Ufahamu was amongst Dr. Kelley’s first endeavors on campus and, as he tells it, remained a hub of radical intellectualism throughout the 1980s. The conversation below spans a wide variety of topics, from his biographical experiences with the journal, and Dr. Kelley’s thoughts on shifting intellectual and political dynamics regarding Africa. The interview published below begins in the midst of our conversation on a discussion of a 1984 conference flyer and program handed to us and organized by Dr. Kelley titled “Imperialism: Real or Imagined . . . ”

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Frequent coauthors

• Kali Akuno

  41 shared

• Mat Callahan

  41 shared

• Scott DeVeaux

  New York University

  4 shared

• Ed Ayers

  University of Virginia

  4 shared

• Judith Becker

  4 shared

• Adria La Violette

  4 shared

• Judith Shatin

  University of Virginia

  4 shared

• Linda Tucker

  New York University

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., American Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1991

• M.A., American Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1987

• B.A., American Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1985

Awards & honors

• Guggenheim Fellowship
• Freedom Scholar Award