Abstract
Contemporary youth activism—particularly activism that works toward social and racial justice—has begun to receive long-overdue attention in scholarly inquiries. Research on the prison-industrial complex is a prime example of such inquiries; in recent years, scholar-activists such as Angela Davis have turned their lenses to youth—incarcerated and not incarcerated—to document these youth’s perspectives and critiques of the prison industry and of its effects on black and brown populations.1 Organizations of youth activists, such as the Blackout Arts Collective in New York City, have developed multilayered projects meant to confront this industry. In workshops and projects with college youth and with incarcerated youth, those activists are attempting to build a critical mass of young people organized against state-sponsored racism. Black and brown youth activists in the United States are creating new forms of politics and establishing new communities and networks; some of the most creative antiracist projects are those in which youth activists use the black radical past to address racial issues of the present.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Leith Mullings, “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005): 667–93, at 667.
Ana Aparicio, “Contesting Race and Power: Second-Generation Dominican Youth in the New Gotham,” City and Society 19, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 179–201; Mullings “Interrogating Racism,” 667; Sunaina Maira and Elizabeth Soep, eds., Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, the Global (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); João Costa Vargas, “Black Radical Becoming: The Politics of Identification in Permanent Transformation,” Critical Sociology 32, nos. 2–3 (2006): 475–500.
Manning Marable, Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future (New York: Basic Civitas Group, 2007); see also Manning Marable, “Building Coalitions Among Communities of Color: Beyond Racial Identity Politics,” in Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in Urban America: Status and Prospects for Politics and Activism, ed. James Jennings (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 29–43.
My work to date is heavily focused on organizations and activists in the United States, particularly in the Northeast among activists who identify as Latino, African American, part of the black diaspora, or any combination of these. However, there is a growing body of work that looks at youth activists around the United States and throughout the black diaspora. Scholars such as Vijay Prashad are examining centuries of historical connections and coalitions between the Asian and African diasporas, while Nitasha Sharma studies contemporary manifestations of these collaborations among Asian American and African American youth. Vijay Prasad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Nitasha Sharma, Claiming Space, Making Race: Desi Hip Hop and South/Asian Black Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
Ana Aparicio, Dominican Americans and the Politics of Empowerment (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006).
William W. Sales and Roderick Bush, “The Political Awakening of Blacks and Latinos in New York City: Competition or Cooperation?” Social Justice 27, no. 1 (2000): 19–42.
Ibid., 33.
Costa Vargas, Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008); see also Costa Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angels: Life and Meanings of Blackness in South Central Los Angeles. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
Manning Marable, The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002), 222.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2009 Manning Marable and Leith Mullings
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Aparicio, A. (2009). Reconstituting Political Genealogies. In: Mullings, L. (eds) New Social Movements in the African Diaspora. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104570_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104570_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-62149-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10457-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)