Not Giving Up on a Better Ending: Reclaiming the Hood in Black Lives Matter Young Adult Literature

How does the discovery that the city, the urbs, has failed to become civitas for African Americans confronting the unfinished project of freedom and the continuing legacy of slavery, impact contemporary literary representations of the ghetto? This essay looks at Young Adult novels which have taken up the theme of black vulnerability, narrating stories of black teens’ violent encounters with white supremacy, from the perspective of the Black Lives Matter movement, which denounces police brutality not as mere individual malfeasance, but as a tool of systemic racism and state violence. The essay investigates the narrative strategies through which the contemporary disposability of black bodies in the urban space is represented in a category of literature that is usually geared towards progressive narratives of gained autonomy and control over one’s life.