Which side are you on?: Black and South Asian American youth, solidarity activism, and new generation politics

The last two decades, from the anti/alter-globalization mobilizations of the late 1990s to the ongoing Movement for Black Lives, mark a season of contemporary political upheaval in the United States, provoked by the crisis of neoliberalism. Emerging during this period is a new youth politics that does not fit neatly into a single unified description or tradition. This dissertation seeks to examine the historical emergence and contemporary use of internationalism, intersectionality, and multiculturalism as some of the primary frameworks of youth mobilizations over the last several decades. It simultaneously seeks to examine the transitions in organizational form of such mobilizations---from more traditional democratic centralist formations to non-hierarchical anti-authoritarian forms. The dissertation argues that these emergent forms of mobilization can best be described as polycultural. I engage the above frameworks by tracing an activist ethnography of two contemporary political youth groups and their predecessors---United Roots/Art in Action among a segment of the African American youth population of Oakland and Bay Area Solidarity Summer/Youth Solidarity Summer among a segment of the South Asian youth populations of the Bay Area and New York. These ethnographies are located against the backdrop of a strategic history of the two communities, African American and South Asian, over the long American century. This informs what has emerged as the most prominent leitmotivs of the dissertation. Firstly, what does an anti-capitalist politics look like that recognizes the centrality and history of Black oppression in the United States? Secondly, where do South Asians fit as a dislocated/relocated population in terms of US racial politics and how does such positionality impact commitments to political solidarity? These two questions lead to the final dissertation question: What new generation politics are emerging in resistance to the current neoliberal crisis that might inform the direction of our political futures?;The dissertation does not seek to outline a single or simple coherent logic to emergent youth politics in relation to Black, white and South Asian racial dynamics, but rather to pose clearly a non-exhaustive set of re-articulations of the above frameworks to posit important questions for our political futures.