Infrastructure and the Black Panther Party: Toward an Infrastructural Politics

Abstract

The Black Panther Party was one of the most important American radical groups of the 1960s, although few scholars have examined them as a model of a revolutionary vanguard party. Following recent political theory, this study performs a discourse analysis of The Black Panther newspaper through the lens of infrastructure. It offers a reading of the Panthers as articulating an infrastructural politics by activating infrastructure as a site of political struggle, providing infrastructure to the people as a mode of political praxis, and drawing attention to the communicational infrastructures that sustain political movements. The study contributes to the growing literatures of infrastructure studies, critical theory, and the Black Panther Party.