Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 262
•
Trim: 6½ x 9½
978-0-7425-4101-6 • Hardback • February 2008 • $124.00 • (£95.00)
978-0-7425-4102-3 • Paperback • January 2010 • $40.00 • (£31.00)
978-1-4422-0331-0 • eBook • January 2010 • $38.00 • (£29.00)
Joao H. Costa Vargas is associate professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Catching Hell in the City of Angels: Life and Meanings of Blackness in South Central Los Angeles.
Chapter 1 Preface
Chapter 2 Introduction
Chapter 3 Genocide in the African Diaspora: Brazil, United States, and the Imperatives of Holistic Analysis and Political Method
Chapter 4 The Inner City and the Favel: Transnational Black Politics
Chapter 5 Hypersegregation and Revolt: The Los Angeles Black Ghetto in Historical Perspective
Chapter 6 The Los Angeles Times' Coverage of the 1992 Rebellion: Still Burning Matters of Race and Justice
Chapter 7 Hyperconsciousness of Race and its Negation: The Dialectic of White Supremacy in Brazil
Chapter 8 When Jacarezhino Dared to Become a Condominium: The Politics of Race and Urban Space in Rio de Janeiro
Chapter 9 Black Radical Becoming: The Revolution of Imperative Genocide
Chapter 10 Bibliography
Never Meant to Survive is one of the most provocative and compelling pieces of analysis and criticism that I've ever read in anthropology. The book rises to the intellectual and political challenge being articulated in transnational arenas such as the 2001 World Conference against Racism, which represented only a brief moment in the ongoing struggles of oppressed peoples-with African descendants conspicuous among them-to mobilize against crimes against their humanity. The common yet, at the same time, differentiated ground that African Americans and Afro-Brazilians occupy is not an abstraction or cerebral game in this work. Vargas shows how transnational approaches to research and social analysis as well as to community organizing are imperative for both deeper understanding and more effective forms of anti-racist agency.
— Faye V. Harrison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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