| Contents |
For your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail": Sylvia Rivera's -- "Flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone": James Baldwin's kinship politics -- "You have to hear what's being said to you": Hansberry and Horne's interruption -- Interlude "My friends, these people are our people": Pat Buchanan's nostalgic and demonological appeals -- "Igniting the kindred": southerners on new ground's family values -- Conclusion "Remember that feeling because it's the same cage": appeals to boundness. |
| Abstract |
"If We Were Kin is about the we of politics-how that we is made, fought over, and remade-and how these struggles lie at the very core of questions about power and political change. While reigning frameworks in the study of politics leave forms of identification sedimented in the background as a priori identities or prop them up front as a part of a mechanistic and calculated game, political identification cannot be captured by these frameworks and is a far more significant and profound political process than they allow. While this book stakes a wider claim about the centrality of identification to politics, it attends most closely to its deeper registers, and in particular to attempts by political actors within racial and gender justice and queer and trans liberation movements to get people to shift or reshape their foundational identifications. Drawing on the political thought of Sylvia Rivera, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and grassroots LGBTQ activists in Southerners On New Ground, I identify a distinct lineage of calls which challenge the atomized and hierarchical racial formations that structure political life in the United States and advance powerful visions of political relationships rooted in mutuality and shared freedom. As I trace through activist archives, political speeches, and original interviews, these appeals demand not only a rethinking of fundamental assumptions in the study of politics, but provide critical resources for understanding the way power works in struggles to constitute a we, how commitments towards or away from racial justice are cultivated through battles over identification, and the dangers and possibilities of identificatory appeals"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Access restriction | Available only to authorized users. |
| Technical details | Mode of access: World Wide Web |
| Source of description | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. |
| Issued in other form | Print version: Beard, Lisa. If we were kin New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] 9780197517338 |
| Genre/form | Electronic books. |
| LCCN | 2022058427 |
| ISBN | 9780197517369 |
| ISBN | (hardback) |
| ISBN | 9780197517352 (epub) |
| ISBN | 9780197517345 |
| ISBN | (paperback) |
