Remembering 1992 After the 2020 Rebellions: Global Racial Justice and the Everyday Politics of Crisis and Hope, 2021–22

The thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising comes at a moment of renewed public discourse about Black urban rebellion, policing and prisons, violence in Asian American communities, and the conditions that necessitate thinking these issues as extensions of one another. Still, contemporary academic and political narratives, and in some cases movement praxis, reflect both a departure from and stubborn adherence to the imaginative constraints that marked collective analyses of 1992 and subsequent ideas about what was to be done.

The carceral responses to recent attacks against Asian Americans, framed as instances of interpersonal rather than state violence, echo the analytical enclosures imposed by the “Black-Asian” conflict frame. At the same time, the already-emergent liberal attempt to misremember as a series of reformist, non-violent protests the imaginative openings to emerge from the flames of the 2020 rebellions, recalls the misreading of 1992 as a riot against an isolated and aberrant judicial outcome, rather than an uprising against the anti-Black foundations of the carceral state.

This symposium brings together scholars and organizers to discuss the enduring dilemmas that structure activist, scholarly, and popular attempts to understand Black and Asian American relationships to state violence, and to foster the radical possibilities to emerge from sustained rebellion against it.