Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities [Paperback]

Never Meant to Survivepresents 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, Costa Vargas's work presents crucial examples of political resistance and community activism.

By examining two cities linked by common experiences of Blackness, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, this book identifies a prevailing genocidal force that organizes individuals and groups across society. The 1965 and 1992 riots in Los Angeles, the work of the Black Panther Party and favela activists in Brazil, and police brutality in struggles between black communities and the state in both L.A. and Rio de Janeiro all figure importantly in Costa Vargas's compelling account. What emerges from this analysis is a call for the destruction of the conditions that foster the marginalization of black communities and a halt to the internal conflicts between black social groups themselves.

Never Meant to Surviveis 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 analyslcI