Never Meant to Survive Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities

Never Meant to Survive present a historical, political, and social assessment of anti-Black genocide and liberatory struggles that arose to resist it. Based on fine-grained accounts of community life at the street level, Joo H. Costa Varga's work considers crucial examples of political resistance and community activism. The 1965 and 1992 riots in Los Angeles, the Black Panther Party and favela activists in Brazil, and police brutality in struggles between Black communities and state in both L.A. and Rio de Janeiro all figure importantly in this compelling account. Book jacket.

Joo 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.