Skip to product information
1 of 1

Black socialities

Regular price $130.00
Regular price $0.00 Sale price $130.00
Sold out
The book explores black urban resistance against racist imagery, policing, and housing insecurity in the Parisian region. Based on ethnographic research and qualitative interviews, this study explo...
Read More
  • 28 April 2026
View Product Details
This book shows how black urban movements from the racialized working-class districts of Paris develop collective place-making strategies in their anti-racist mobilizations, beyond calls for recognition or collective identity formation. These modalities of collective action - from the disruption of racist and carceral geographies through the appropriation of public and semi-public space, the creation of self-made infrastructures for evicted families, to the organization of multi-racial resistance to policing - unfold as socialities that shape anti-racist organizing against state racism, policing, and structural abandonment. They open the horizon for new formations of political blackness and abolitionist politics, beyond Paris and beyond Europe.
files/i.png Icon
Price: $130.00
Pages: 224
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Racism, Resistance and Social Change
Publication Date: 28 April 2026
ISBN: 9781526168641
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban, Sociology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Race & Ethnic Relations, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Human Rights, Political activism / Political engagement, Social and cultural anthropology
REVIEWS Icon

'Vanessa E. Thompson’s beautiful text shows how Black Studies, feminist studies, and Marxism interactively strengthen our ability to notice and analyse dynamics that might otherwise remain obscure. Her lively concept 'Black socialities' is materially grounded and symbolically stunning. This is a magnificent work of abolition geography.'

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, City University of New York

'With this book, Vanessa E. Thompson offers an English-speaking audience a way to think about anti-racist struggles in France by linking material demands, symbolic struggles, and their spatial grounding in working-class neighborhoods. A very important intervention that moves beyond U.S.-centered frameworks.'

Joao Gabriel, historian and author


'This beautifully written book demonstrates how conviviality and creativity operate as everyday social practices that create spaces of care, breath and organization. It is a crucial contribution to our understanding of black political subjectivity, the making of black social movements, and ultimately global liberation struggles. This book offers urgent lessons for challenging times.'

Beverley Mullings, University of Toronto

'Drawing on her organizing work in Paris and beyond, and with a sharp analytical eye, Vanessa E. Thompson demonstrates the ways urban space provides the conditions for renewed understandings of placemaking, community, conviviality, and social change. Beautifully written and fiercely argued, Black Socialities is a thoughtful invitation to notice how black struggles for liberation generate multi-scalar cooperative activities that fracture simplistic understandings of race and belonging. The book is an offering of sorts—a set of smart spatial lessons that teach us about organizing, how to conceptualize radical transformation, and what it means to activate multi-racial solidarities.'

– Katherine McKittrick, Queen’s University

Vanessa E. Thompson is Assistant Professor and Distinguished Professor in Black Studies and Social Justice at Queen’s University, Canada

Introduction
1.Engaging the quartiers populaires
2 Struggles beyond recognition
3 Policing as un-breathing
4 Resistance and creation in paris
5 Black liminal infrastructures
From black struggles to abolition