Perry draws from examples in Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States to illustrate how latent and subtle forms of aggression buttress the unequal social order and show how Black women are key political protagonists in the fight against this aggression. She explores the similarities as well as the global mechanisms of gendered racial subjection that challenge narratives of social progress in the United States and Jamacia, and racial democracy in Brazil. Moving between rural and urban spaces, she focuses on how Black women’s politics are deeply connected to resistance against geographic domination as practiced in policing and forced neighborhood removals. The stories of political struggle provide concrete examples of the gendered racial dimensions of state-sanctioned violence transnationally and why Black hemispheric solidarity matters for our collective political work for social justice.

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Perry comes to Penn from Brown University, where she was Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Her research is focused on 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", won the 2014 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is currently at work on her second book, which is focused on the ways in which state violence limits activist research and writing.