Call it “bad manners,” but the militants of Rise Up or Die!—Brazil's radical Black liberation movement—refuse to abide by the rules of a society that is killing Black people.

Confronting centuries of hyper-exploitation and dehumanization of Black people in Brazil, Rise Up or Die! invented a new political vocabulary for Black self-determination, introduced sexual health and food justice initiatives, attracted militants and activists from the most marginalized spaces of one of the largest Black nations in the world, and founded an autonomous Pan-Africanist school as part of their broader struggle for collective liberation.

As the activists of Rise Up or Die! say, “Creative hatred is what makes you build new things,” and indeed they have relentlessly pursued invention as the necessary alternative to the nation’s genocidal model of racial democracy. Known in Brazil as Reaja ou Será Morto/Reaja ou Será Morta, this is the story of their organization, in their own words, as they resist a culture that simply hates Black people.

PRODUCT DETAILS

Author: Andréia Beatriz Silva dos Santos & Hamilton Borges dos Santos
Publisher: Common Notions
ISBN: 9781945335280
Published: August 5, 2025
Format: Paperback
Size: 6.0 in X 9.0 in
Page count: 240
Subjects: Political Science / World / Caribbean & Latin American

About THE AUTHOR

Andreia Beatriz Silva dos Santos is a cofounder and main organizer of Reaja 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 organizer of Reaja ou Será Morto/Reaja ou Será Morta (Rise Up or Die!). Hamilton is a poet, writer, and 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.

Praise

"Rise Up or Die! is a fundamental work for understanding the multiple layers of the ongoing Black genocide in Brazil. But the book goes beyond denunciation — it offers a political project of reinvention, guided by the power of ancestry and by the refusal to accept death as destiny. Through an unflinching analysis of structures of power, while simultaneously sowing the seeds of a quilombist future, Andreia and Hamilton present us with a disturbing mirror for the global debate on the fight against racism. This book must be read and studied with the urgency that our time demands."

— Djamila Ribeiro, philosopher and professor at MIT

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