Jennifer Goett Black Autonomy Hardcover sku-53719737

Jennifer Goett's hardcover Black Autonomy, listed under Ages 9-12 Kids' Books as sku-53719737, examines race, gender and the struggle for autonomous rights in an Afrodescendant Creole community in Nicaragua. Decades after Latin America's first multicultural reforms, Afrodescendant people in the region remain disproportionately impoverished, underserved, policed and incarcerated.

Drawing on fifteen years of research, Goett follows a community movement from its start in the late 1990s through the establishment of an autonomous territory in 2009 and beyond. She explores what black autonomy means to women and men living with postwar violence, both as a political aim and as a way to build selfhood and solidarity.

Goett argues that gains in multicultural recognition have not ended the effects of capitalist intensification, racialized policing and drug war militarization in Afro-Nicaraguan Creole territories. She traces activists' emphasis on race pride, territoriality, self-determination and self-defense to African diasporic identification and gendered practices used to assert control over bodies, labor and space.