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Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities
Author(s): Joao H. Costa Vargas (Author)
- Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (UK)
- Publication Date: 15 Mar. 2008
- Language: English
- Print length: 262 pages
- ISBN-10: 0742541010
- ISBN-13: 9780742541016
Book Description
By examining two cities linked by common experiences of Blackness, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, this book identifies a prevailing genocidal force that organizes individuals and groups across society. The 1965 and 1992 riots in Los Angeles, the work of the Black Panther Party and favela activists in Brazil, and police brutality in struggles between black communities and the state in both L.A. and Rio de Janeiro all figure importantly in Costa Vargass compelling account. What emerges from this analysis is a call for the destruction of the conditions that foster the marginalization of black communities and a halt to the internal conflicts between black social groups themselves.
Editorial Reviews
Review
In this bold and beautiful book, João Costa Vargas proves that the relentless marginalization and premature death of large numbers of Black people in modern societies are not aberrant injustices, but rather central principles of a social system that oppresses us all. Brilliantly mapping the full moral and cognitive dimensions of anti-Black racism, Vargas also demonstrates the importance and liberating potential of grass roots activist anti-racist mobilizations emerging within aggrieved Black communities in Brazil and the United States. His deft blend of careful ethnographic observation and independent ideological critique offers a way out of our collective racial nightmare, while at the same time demonstrating that the scholarship of tomorrow is already here today. — George Lipsitz, author of Footsteps in the Dark and Professor of Black Studies and Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
