Inside one of the most daring and provocative Black organizations in Brazil of the last two decades, from the perspective of its founders and militants.

Rise Up or Die! describes the origins, main concepts, distinct phases, and visions of the future of one of the most innovative, daring, and militant Black organizations in Brazil. Firmly rooted in that country’s long tradition of resistance and rebellion against a nation that depends on the continued hyper-exploitation, dehumanization, abandonment, and social and physical death of Black people, the organization invented what it refers to as “bad manners in Black politics.” If bad manners mean a refusal to abide by expectations of decorum, analysis, collective organization—and indeed the Brazilian genocidal model of racial democracy—then Rise Up certainly fits the description. The organization invented a new political vocabulary, led to the formation of an autonomous Black School in Salvador (the Winnie Mandela School), and constantly attracts people from the most marginalized Black spaces of the largest Black nation in the world, second only to Nigeria.

Drawing on a constantly replenished matrix of Black radical traditions, the activists of Rise Up or Die relentlessly pursue invention as the necessary alternative to a social formation that simply hates Black people.

PRODUCT DETAILS

Author: Andréia Beatriz Silva dos Santos & Hamilton Borges dos Santos
Publisher: Common Notions
ISBN: 9781945335280
Published: August 2025
Format: Paperback
Size: 6.0 in X 9.0 in
Page count: 240
Subjects: Political Science / World / Caribbean & Latin American

About THE AUTHOR

Andréia Beatriz Silva dos Santos is a cofounder and main organizers of Reja ou Será Morto/Reaja ou Será Morta (Rise Up or Die!). She is trained as a medical doctor.

Hamilton Borges dos Santos is a cofounder and main organizers of Reja ou Será Morto/Reaja ou Será Morta (Rise Up or Die!); Hamilton is a poet, writer, amateur gardener.

João H. Costa Vargas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside and the author of The Denial of Antiblackness: Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering.

Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College, is the author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)life of Erica Garner. Her recent titles include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love and Beyond Cop City. James’s numerous political theory articles on policing, prisons, abolitions, feminisms; and anti-Black racism include “The Womb of Western Theory,” an exploration of the Captive Maternal.

Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. He is a faculty member in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. He is the author of three books, most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021) which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface: Joy James

Introduction: João Costa Vargas

1. Beginnings
How Andréia and Hamilton’s personal and community experiences prepared them for the formation of Rise Up in 2005, from their childhood to the consolidation of their political perspective.

2. Phases
The distinct phases of Rise Up, including its expansions, retractions. A description of the ways in which Rise Up went from a campaign against the genocide of Black people to a political organization.

3. Fundamentals
The key concepts informing the development of Rise Up, as well as the analytical perspectives that emerged out of Rise Up’s trajectory of struggle.

4. Futurity
Rooted in yet modifying Abdias do Nascimento and Beatriz Nascimento’s concepts of Quilombismo, this final chapter focuses on Rise Up’s perspective on a desired future that is autonomous and Black affirming.

Afterword: Dylan Rodríguez