Keisha-Khan Perry from Brown University will be joining the Center of the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD) to present her research.

Dr. Perry’s talk will focus on the political work of poor black women in struggles for land and housing rights in cities throughout the Americas, this presentation examines the gendered racial logic of spatial dispossession. I illustrate how these women confront the violence of urban redevelopment that includes mass evictions, housing demolitions, and militarized policing. I emphasize that black women are key political protagonists, mobilizing at the grassroots and exploding the conversation on racial and gender violence from North America to the Southern Cone. Moreover, they understand black dispossession (loss of land/territorial rights, access to adequate housing, gentrification) to be a form of anti-black violence that shapes their gendered experiences and political formation in unique ways. This presentation represents my ongoing call for black feminist scholars to return our analyses to the material issues that are at the heart of women-led grassroots struggles and that informed black feminist thought in the first place.

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is currently an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University where she specializes in race, gender and politics in the Americas, urban geography and questions of citizenship, intellectual history and disciplinary formation, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy and political engagement. Her first book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (fall 2013, Minnesota Press), is an ethnographic study of black women’s activism in Brazilian cities. She currently has three book projects under way: 1) Evictions and Convictions: The Gendered Racial Logic of Black Dispossession in New York City; 2) The Historical Paradox of Citizenship: Black Land Ownership and Loss in the Americas; and 3) Anthropology for Liberation: Research, Writing and Teaching for Social Justice.