Zoe Samudzi

States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum navigates the temporal and spatial dimensions of France’s states of emergency across three colonial space-times: the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), the Kanak Insurrection (1984–1988), and the French banlieues riots (2005) and their fallout (2015–). In recounting the mechanics of this counter-revolutionary legal framework across multiple geographies—extending and fortifying key anti-colonial solidarities past, present, and future—this book reads the state of emergency not as an exception but as a heightened form of every-day colonial state violence. Contrasting the architecture of sites like “regroupement’ camps in Algeria, the white settler city of Nouméa, and the police stations of Paris’s suburbs with that of Algiers's Casbah, Kanaky’s tribes, and Paris’s banlieues neighborhoods, States of Emergency narrates the bureaucracies and protocols that continue to enable and underwrite the far reaching violence of this legal measure, as well as the anticolonial and antiracist resistance brought against it. The book thus offers a guide and a method for making the colonial continuum legible across contexts and for spatializing the many actors, agents, immigrants, and revolutionaries working both for and against the shared project of liberation. Translated from French by Lara Vergnaud, with a preface by Zoé Samudzi.

In the United States, both struggles against oppression and the gains made by various movements for equality have often been led by Black people. Still, though progress has regularly been fueled by radical Black efforts, liberal politics are based on ideas and practices that impede the continued progress of Black America. Building on their original essay "The Anarchism of Blackness," Samudzi and Anderson show the centrality of anti-Blackness to the foundational violence of the United States and to the racial structures upon which it is based as a nation. Racism is not, they say, simply a product of capitalism. Rather, we must understand how anti-Blackness shaped the contours and logics of European colonialism and its many legacies, to the extent that "Blackness" and "citizenship" are exclusive categories. As Black As Resistance makes the case for a new program of self-defense and transformative politics for Black Americans, one rooted in an anarchistic framework that the authors liken to the Black experience itself. This book argues against compromise and negotiation with intolerance. It is a manifesto for everyone who is ready to continue progressing towards liberation. With a Foreword by Mariame Kaba.