ABSTRACT
Zenzele Isoke's ethnographic focus on Black women's narratives and resistance politics in Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance represents a political undertaking in the anthropological scholarship on social movements and urban politics. Black women live the myriad effects of "structural intersectionality," which Isoke defines as the "convergent systems of race, class, sexual and gender violence". Isoke follows in the intellectual footsteps of Black feminist geographers such as Katherine McKittrick and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, furthering our understanding of why place and space matter for Black people and politics. The Black women who Isoke describes provide us with key insights into how intersectionality that contemplates all aspects of Black womanhood—including sexuality—is actually mobilized for social and political change on the streets, in storefronts, and on doorsteps in downtown Newark. The Black-women-led hip-hop convention held in Newark in 2004 also conjured up a collective fear of Black insurgency inherent in Blackness and Black cultural performance.
