Social ecologist and lifelong revolutionary organizer Modibo Kadalie returns alongside editor Andrew Zonneveld for this virtual event to celebrate the release of Intimate Direct Democracy.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, many African people who were enslaved in North America emancipated themselves and fled into vast swamplands and across colonial borders, beyond the reach of oppressive settler-colonialism and the institution of slavery. On the peripheries of empire, these freedom-seeking "maroons" established their own autonomous, ethnically diverse, and intimately democratic communities of resistance.

In this new volume, Modibo Kadalie offers a critical reexamination of the history and historiography surrounding two sites of African maroonage: The Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina; and Fort Mose in Florida.

Modibo Kadalie has spent nearly six decades as an activist, organizer, teacher, and scholar in the civil rights, Black power, and Pan-African movements. In Pan-African Social Ecology: Speeches, Conversations, and Essays, he reflects on the sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, urban rebellions, and anticolonial movements that have animated the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Kadalie demonstrates how the forms of direct democracy that have evolved through these freedom struggles present the promise of a future defined by social liberation as well as ecological healing.

Andrew Zonneveld is an independent scholar, writer, and musician from Atlanta, Georgia. He is the editor of The Commune: Paris, 1871 and To Remain Silent is Impossible: Emma Goldman & Alexander Berkman in Russia.