BLACK POWER AFTERLIVES: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party by Diane Fujino

The first book to comprehensively examine how the Black Panther Party has directly shaped the practices and ideas that have animated grassroots activism in the decades since its decline, Black Power Afterlives represents a major scholarly achievement as well as an important resource for today's activists. Through its focus on the enduring impact of the Black Panther Party, this volume expands the historiography of Black Power studies beyond the 1960s-70s and serves as a bridge between studies of the BPP during its organizational existence and studies of present-day Black activism, allowing today's readers and organizers to situate themselves in a long lineage of liberation movements.

A major scholarly achievement, bridging the traditional purview of Black Power studies-the 1960s and 70s-and contemporary studies in Black activism, Black Power Afterlives moves beyond nostalgic reflections on the Black Panther Party and instead seeks to explore the social networks, ideas, practices, and ongoing social movement activities directly related to, or arising from, the Black Panther Party. Despite the surge in publications on the BPP in 2016, which marked the 50th anniversary of the birth of the Party, there remains a notable gap in scholarship examining the enduring influences of the BPP beyond the organization's demise. Black Power Afterlives effectively fills this gap, recovering a "useable past" that can inform present organizing and visions of a new future in the process. The collection deals both with more commonly known legacies of the Black Panther Party, touching thought and activism in the areas of prisons, policing, and art, and less well known spheres of activity like global Pan-Africanism, spirituality and healing, and ecosocialism. This wide-ranging engagement with the sweeping influence of the BPP, as well as the breadth of contributors to the collection, will ensure this volume's place in classrooms and activist libraries alike.

Diane C. Fujino is an activist-scholar teaching and writing about Asian American radical struggles, Black Power struggles, and Afro-Asian solidarities and is professor of Asian American Studies and former director of the Center for Black Studies Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Fujino has long participated in political prisoner, education, and US Third World liberation solidarity struggles and is active with the Ethnic Studies Now! Santa Barbara Coalition. She is author of Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (2005) and Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life (2012); and editor of Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader (2009).