About

This is a space intended for critical inquiry and problem-solving, community-building and structure-razing, revelation and revolution, remembrance of pasts and imaginings of futurity that takes the city of Newark, New Jersey as its focus. As a writing/thinking/doing collective, COINewark (A Community of Organic Intellectuals in Newark) have developed this blog as a site/sight for examining Newark as place, as a medium through which the typified narratives of the urban brickspace can be complicated, and as a storehouse of those knowledges that are transmitted through the various bodies living/surviving in our shared space/place. We believe that theorizing from within presents a necessary challenge to the politics of knowledge production and consumption that occurs without.

As a collective, we seek to accomplish what most text book chapters [whose language and analyses are disconnected from the people, from the ground, from the spirit of this place that some of us call home and others a stop on our longer journeys, that is, Newark] do not, namely, the performing of a personal-political act of resistance: the telling of our stories and providing testimony of experiences! In so doing, we seek to subvert, resist, undermine, challenge domains of power that constrict us: our bodies, our minds, our spirits, our pockets and we celebrate, re-imagine, remember, and call into being our selves and our communities