Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance [Paperback]

Contemporary urban spaces are critical sites of resistance for black women. By focusing on the spatial aspects of political resistance of black women in Newark, this book provides new ways of understanding the complex dynamics and innovative political practices within major American cities.Framing Black Women's Politics: Spatializing Intersectionality, Spatializing Resistance Politics Out of Place: Black Women, Racialization, and Urban Resistance  Historicizing Resistance: The Makings of a Marginal Community in the Central Ward  The Politics of Homemaking: Black Feminist Transformations of a Cityscape Mobilizing after Murder: The Politics of the Life and Death of Sakia Gunn  Keepin' Up the Fight: Black Feminism and the Hip Hop Convention Movement Social Capital, Political Space, and the Limits of Blackness

This is a powerful book that makes visible the political labor of black women in all its forms. The author broadens our understanding of black women's resistance to include both traditional acts of political engagement as well as black women's work to build social capital and create political spaces of engagement The women in this book are engaged in producing transformation in their city and communities, but Isoke also highlights the fluidity that surrounds their identities, political ideologies and strategies of engagement. This work destabilizes any idea of a monolithic black politics or a monolithic black feminist politics by paying attention to the interventions of queer and hip hop activists. This is an important book that builds on and extends our understanding of how intersectionality is enacted by black women at the local level. - Cathy J. Cohen, David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago

Zenzele Isoke's Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance provides much-needed research on Black political women's constraints and possibilities in implementing resistanlÃ{