Endorsements

How do black urban movements resist state racism in Paris beyond calls for recognition or collective identity formation? What role does place-making play in urban black struggles against policing and housing inequalities? What kind of anti-racism and black politics hold the possibilities for radical solidarity? In Black Socialities. Urban resistance and the struggle beyond recognition in Paris, Vanessa E. Thompson shows how black urban movements from the racialized working class and working poor districts of Paris develop collective place-making strategies in their anti-racist political mobilizations. These places shape and inform practices of black solidarity as well as multi-racial alliances against state racism, policing, and organized abandonment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Parisian region, in-depth qualitative interviews and analyses of political and media discourses, Thompson explores how urban black-led movements disrupt racist and carceral geographies by claiming and appropriating public and semi-public spaces, protesting in front of racist imagery in the city, creating and supporting self-made infrastructures of expelled black families, and organize multi-racial resistance against policing. Bringing a spatial perspective to the study of blackness and anti-racism in France, and Europe writ large, Thompson provides a nuanced understanding of black urban politics in France, its relation to local and transnational spaces, and how they forge multi-racial alliances and new formations of political blackness.