Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles ― Critical Perspectives on Blackness, Belonging and Civil Rights

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles: Critical Perspectives on Blackness, Belonging and Civil Rights examines the construction of blackness within shifting post-civil rights, post-colonial and neo-colonial contexts. It examines understudied locations and protagonists, and it articulates the necessarily ambiguous aspirations, goals, protest rationales and strategies associated with the reclamation of agency and the affirmation of self. In this volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern "bulwarks" of the civil rights movement; and diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many-faceted struggle for recognition and belonging. The essays assembled in Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles are salient and timely.

The volume helps to contextualize the contemporary political vicissitudes of the Black experience and the ongoing struggle for agency, belonging, and civil rights. By critically reading and connecting different Black experiences in various global regions, cultures, and communities, this volume pushes beyond the usual case studies of the American Civil Rights struggle. In doing so, it offers fresh perspectives on familiar concepts such as activism and belonging, suggesting more innovative approaches for the study of African diasporic experience in the 21st century.

Violet Showers Johnson is Professor of History and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Texas A&M University.

Gundolf Graml is Associate Professor of German at Agnes Scott College.

Patricia Williams Lessane is Executive Director of the Avery Institute of Afro-American History & Culture at the College of Charleston.