Details

ISBN-10: 1478006684
ISBN-13: 9781478006688
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 11/15/2019
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 6.00" W, 0.60" H

Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco

Paperback

Price: $25.95

Overview

San Francisco is the endgame of gentrification, where racialized displacement means that the Black population of the city hovers at just over 3 percent. The Robeson Justice Academy opened to serve the few remaining low-income neighborhoods of the city, with the mission of offering liberatory, social justice–themed education to youth of color. While it features a progressive curriculum including Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde, the majority Latinx school also has the district’s highest suspension rates for Black students. In Progressive Dystopia Savannah Shange explores the potential for reconciling the school’s marginalization of Black students with its sincere pursuit of multiracial uplift and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and six years of experience teaching at the school, Shange outlines how the school fails its students and the community because it operates within a space predicated on antiblackness. Seeing San Francisco as a social laboratory for how Black communities survive the end of their worlds, Shange argues for abolition over revolution or progressive reform as the needed path toward Black freedom.

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Reviews
"By locating the everyday mechanisms of the neoliberal state in a progressive school in San Francisco, Savannah Shange brings the lived experiences of social actors often only talked about as 'Black and Brown bodies' into discussions of the afterlife of slavery. And in so doing, she reveals the fissures in Afropessimism and critical anthropology. Progressive Dystopia is scholarship at its finest and an essential contribution."–Aimee Meredith Cox, author of "Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship"
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Details

ISBN-10: 1478006684
ISBN-13: 9781478006688
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 11/15/2019
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 6.00" W, 0.60" H
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