Articles by Saugher Nojan

Saugher Nojan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at University of California, Santa Cruz, with a designated emphasis in Education and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. Saugher studies Muslim and Afghan diasporic experiences with regards to education, migration, gendered racialization, Islamophobia and US empire.

Review of Civil Racism: The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion and The Crisis of Racial Burnout by Lynn Mie Itagaki (University of Minnesota Press)

Courtesy of Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Department of Energy (CC BY NC-SA 2.0).
By Saugher Nojan

Lynn Mie Itagaki contributes to cultural and comparative race studies by uncovering the implications of what she calls the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion—a constellation of events spurned on by the Rodney King verdict—for intersecting groups and communities including women, immigrants, Black, Asians, and Latina/o-Americans. Each chapter provides a different context (family, education, neighborhood) for structures and discourses that perpetuate civil racism, while at the same time illuminating specific acts of resistance and subversion that occur, in each instance, through media, activism, and art. Itagaki’s methodology moves beyond critical literary analysis to provide important social commentary and critique that will prove useful to interdisciplinary scholars seeking to learn about racial formations in the neoliberal U.S. context.