Annotated Bibliography

Sawyer Seminar “Claiming the City: Urban Citizenship, Hybrid Cultures, and Governance in the Modern Era” 

UC San Diego, 2018-2020

Compiled by Sofia Lana and Taylor Gray

October 12, 2018 

Appadurai, Arjun and James Holston. “Cities and Citizenship.” Public Culture 8, no. 2 (1996): 187-204.

In their introductory essay to this issue of Public Culture, Appadurai and Holston make the case that formal citizenship in a nation-state is challenged by the urban mobilizations of those excluded from it. They argue that increased economic and social inequalities encouraged urban dwellers to articulate new claims to socio-economic rights often, although not exclusively, based around identity politics. The authors explain that the loss of the significance of formal liberal citizenship presaged a time of uncertainty with respect to what a new substantive citizenship would look like, developing often simultaneously with the violent reactions that attempted to claim space for one group over another.

Lefebvre, Henri. “Right to the City.” In Writings on Cities, 147-159. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

Henri Lefebvre, post-war French sociologist known for his work on the production of space and modernity, first published this chapter within an eponymous book in 1968. This chapter, focusing on the co-production of urban spaces and city life, later became a part of a collection of his writing on cities in 1996 called Writing on Cities.  In this chapter, Lefebvre traces the ‘death’ of the old or traditional city and the need for the co-production of a new city. The traditional city - an old humanism - died during the wars, yet “there have been great cries...that the death of classical humanism was that of man”. In the process, the ‘old city’ became a piece in a museum, a tourist’s experience, a nostalgic encounter. The city as a commodity cannot exist for those in the present nor can it foster future life. The bourgeoise claimed their 'right over nature' as space of leisure and respite from the congested city, but Lefebvre countered that: "there is still another way, that of urban society and the human as oeuvre in this society which would be an oeuvre and not a product.” (149)  The call to claim the ‘right to the city’ is a call for collective action to reclaim space by those who built the space, to create the new man of the ‘urban society’.  

October 26, 2018

Schmidt, Volker  H. “Multiple modernities or varieties of modernity?” Current Sociology 54, no. 1 (2006): 77-97. 

In this article, Schmidt rejects the ‘multiple modernities’ paradigm, which emerged in the 1990s in the discipline of sociology, and in its place would like to suggest that scholars employ instead the nascent concept of ‘varieties of modernity.’ While the proponents of multiple modernities largely employ the concept because they believe it avoids supposed problems inherent in modernization theory’s assumptions of convergence, Schmidt believes that acknowledging convergence, for example, in the adoption of market economies the world over, is not necessarily inaccurate. Schmidt expounds upon the idea that ‘varieties of modernity’ is able to account for a variety of different historical trajectories while still recognizing overall trends shared by modern social entities, although he concedes that much empirical work needs to be done to cement such a theory as a new hegemonic paradigm.

Cameron, John. “Bolivia’s Contentious Politics of ‘Normas y Procedimientos Propios’.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 8, no. 2 (2013): 179-201.

Cameron (2013) engages with the concept of contention as opposed to tacit agreement in indigenous people’s struggles over indigenous autonomy in Bolivia during Evo Morales’s presidential regime (2005-2019). The site of disagreement was over a new political identity/platform from which to gain political power and access to resources. Cameron’s argument reveals how the category of indigenous autonomy (and its content) is restrictive and homogenizing. Within various communities, the need to define indigenous autonomy-and its contents-in a single way (that will grant certain indigenous people ‘authentic’ legitimacy and therefore (restricted) access to political/material power) has led to debates over which symbols, words and histories are adopted from the current dominant narrative and from the various voices that agree or disagree with them. Given that the dispute over the content of indigenous autonomy and the way in which it defines who has access to what in which ways is imposed by the state, the state not only defines the topic of contention but also has a final say in which way this is framed and through what symbols/meanings. Questions that arise from Cameron’s article are related to greater role of the state: How are these institutional frameworks within which meanings/symbols are embedded being disputed? How is the state negotiating with these local forces and are they (and if so, how) contesting or presenting alternative forms/discursive frameworks beyond a liberal/”traditionally” indigenous one from which to construct "indigenous autonomies"?

Thede, Nancy. “Democratic agency in the local political sphere: Reflections on Inclusion in Bolivia.” Democratization 18, no. 1 (2011): 211-235.

 Nancy Thede’s article challenges constructivist political literature on democratization processes underpinned by a notion that democracy and human rights are interrelated, i.e. more democracy necessarily leads to more human rights. She does so by exploring what has been presumed to exist prior to processes of democratization by current literature: “the fundamental issue of where political agents come from: how are they constituted?” (211) In order to study the process of co-constitution of the local political sphere by institutions and political agents, she focuses on the effect of a decentralization reform named Law of Popular Participation in the Departments of La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, Bolivia passed in 1994. Her analysis is based on over 100 interviews with local political actors in over 20 (generally rural) municipalities that she conducted between May-July 2008. In particular, she is interested in the possibilities of inclusion for two historically excluded ‘citizen’ groups: indigenous and/or peasant groups (generally urban) and women (rural or urban). The results point to the highly contested and sometimes violent character of the formation processes of public spheres (with and by institutions and political actors). A disaggregated analysis of these traditionally excluded groups show that while certain indigenous groups (in different geographic areas) gained political power, women continued to be excluded. The formation of new political spheres does not only reproduce exclusions, but also exacerbate them, therefore not generating progressively greater spaces of inclusion (as the literature would argue of democracy and human rights). For these reasons, Thede insists that the political sphere must be understood as a highly contested and dynamic space, whose characteristics will be influenced by the clash and confluence of aspiring political actors and institutions’ interests.

November 16, 2018

Yacobi, H. (2012). God, globalization, and geopolitics: on West Jerusalem's gated communities. Environment and Planning A, 44 (11), 2705-2720.

Haim Yacobi’s work focuses on mass privatization of urban space in West Jerusalem. As opposed to other global scenarios where neoliberalism privatizes space, politics here is particularly significant given ongoing Israeli-Arab conflict. Yacobi argues that “close ties between market and state are more evident in settler societies, particularly where ideological and material affinities between state and land are preserved.” (Yacobi 2012: 2707) In these cases, the author contends that neoliberalism has strengthened the power of the state. In fact, he describes the free market as the ‘gatekeeper’ and insists that “unveiling the free market discourse might expose the influential role of the state and bureaucratic apparatuses.” (Yacobi 2012: 2711) Thus, he concludes that neoliberal policies on the privatization of space and ‘ethno-security’ discourses are complementary.

Shtern, M. (2018). Towards ‘ethno-national peripheralisation’? Economic dependency amidst political resistance in Palestinian East Jerusalem. Urban Studies, 0042098018763289.

In characterizing the marginalization of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Marik Shtern contrasts state projects with neoliberal projects. He does so by distinguishing processes of urban neoliberalism as descriptive of “economically driven regional marginalization” (Shtern 2018: 5) from what he terms “ethno-national peripheralization.” (Shtern 2018: 3) Such a distinction, he writes, serves the purpose of understanding the inherent contradictions in the state-led project (primary) and the second, more peripheral project, of neoliberalism. Moreover, and contrary to what assumptions of neoliberalism may be, “enforced segregation in a unified urban space”, the Shtern states, “is undermined by neoliberal municipal governance and the evolving demands of emerging consumer and labor markets.” (Shtern 2018: 14) Thus, neoliberalism has in no way shrunk the power of the state. In fact, Shtern seems to suggest that neoliberalism may be undermining the state’s project of ‘ethno-national peripheralization’.

November 30, 2018 -  Of Other Cities: Heterotopic Sociality

Taşkafa, Stories of the Street. Directed by Andrea Luka Zimmerman. Grasshopper Film, 2013.

In this 2013 documentary film, Zimmerman explores Istanbul’s tradition of street dogs and the efforts by city residents to uphold the canine population’s right to exist in the face of campaigns by politicians and planners to eradicate them. Poignant readings by John Berger from his novel King, itself named after and told from the perspective of a street dog, introduce new scenes, often shot low to the ground, as from a dog’s point of view. The film calls into question who, exactly, has the right to exist and pertain to the growing city’s urban community, while residents speak candidly on camera, often revealing that the dogs’ presence enriches their lives. 

Berger, John. “6:00 a.m.” in King: A Street Story. New York: Vintage, 1999.

In this opening chapter to Berger’s novel, an only gradually revealed canine narrator named King tells us of his current living quarters: a homeless encampment built on a wasteland, a “scrap mountain” called Saint Valery, located somewhere in France. With a rich description of the camp’s other inhabitants, King also shares tales of his upbringing, and introduces the reader to his new primary companion, Vico, a sexagenarian Neopolitan man, whom he met by the docks some time before. 

Pamuk, Orhan. The Innocence of Objects. Translated by Ekin Oklap. New York: Abrahms, 2012.

While Pamuk’s earlier 2008 novel, The Museum of Innocence, depicted a still fictional museum, this highly original 2012 work is a guidebook to Pamuk’s now existing house-museum of the same name, located in the Çukurcuma neighborhood of Istanbul. In addition to carefully describing the museum’s 83 meticulously prepared display cases (each corresponding to a chapter of the 2008 novel), Pamuk outlines his philosophy of museology in sections such as “A Modest Manifesto for Museums,” explicating his belief that museums should speak for individuals, not the state. Pamuk started to collect the mostly forgotten everyday objects - “an odd photograph, a bottle opener, a picture of a boat, a coffee cup, a postcard” - from Istanbul’s flea markets, using them to recreate the fictional lives of his protagonists, Kemal and Füsan.

Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013).

Harney Stefano and Fred Moten make us rethink principles of liberalism that sustain democracy, that is, the notion of commonness and politics of disagreement as potential sites of reproduction of power relations. It is precisely at this point that we can situate their work, Undercommons, as a call to rethink the notion of commons as a 'politics of ends' that protects nothing but an illusory notion of rights that those excluded to begin with do not have. Once “rights” are given, the common ends: “uncut devotion to the critique of this illusion makes us delusional...the false image and its critique threaten the common with democracy, which is only ever to come, so that one day, which is only never to come, we will be more than what we are. ” (Harney and Moten 2013: 19) Here we have neither agreement or disagreement, but apposition, where things are side by side or ‘close together’. When commons becomes citizenship, when it is inserted into democracy, it is co-opted, enclosed, regulated, policed. “Institutions are political...political is correctional...we need correctional institutions in the common, settling it, correcting us.” (Harney and Moten 2013: 19) The University becomes a prime site of Harney and Moten’s critique of the commons, one that creates the need to critique and rethink the underpinnings of enlightenment and in the process reproduces a workforce that 'teaches for food'. The questions they open up are: What does beyond the commons, beyond teaching, mean? What is the cost of inhabiting this space and what are other worlds we can imagine from these places where we become “unfit for subjection”?

Moten, Fred. The Gramsci Monument (2014)

Engaging with the questions posed in The Undercommons, Fred Moten’s Gramsci Monument proposes an instance of ‘commoning’ not through creating enclosures/enclaves that are regulatory or attempt to ‘contain ambiguity’. The question that arises is whether this proposal represents an  instance of a new form of politics. These instances of commoning that are not products of direct democracy (nor intend to be), such as the Gramsci Monument, may be political in that they disrupt the existing social order and emerge as a result of radical disagreement. 

January 11, 2019

Zeiderman, Austin. “Securing the Future.” In Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá, 161-192. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 

Austin Zeiderman’s ethnographic work in the urban peripheries of Colombia focuses on the politics of temporality in zones of high risk within the past decade. La Caja, the institution that deals with urban self-made settlement in Ciudad Bolivar, is the primary institution through which dwellers in this area can have face to face access with the municipal government. In order to assess risk and vulnerability, while creating incentives for voluntary resettlement as tied to ‘progressive development’, concepts of ‘future’ and hope have structured the program’s discourse. Zeiderman argues that, although time is a political construct, it is not to be understood as a ’totality’. In fact, various modes of ‘futurity’ are framing risk management in Bolivia and both clashing and merging with modes of modernity and development. At the same time, the author contends that time is not only an avenue of ’social control’, but also one “a terrain of political possibilities.” (Zeiderman 2016: 164) Thus, ‘anticipatory politics’ become the common ground within which critiques and demands of the government are articulated. 

Hall, Stuart. “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.” In Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, Paris: UNESCO, 1980.

Stuart Hall proposes to explore and question two main tendencies that have emerged to study racially structured social formations. He identifies these two tendencies, for the sake of his proposed task, as ‘economic’ and ’sociological’. The first comes together under economic determinism on social structures: “those social divisions which assume a distinctively racial or ethnic character can be attributed or explained principally with reference to economic structures and processes.” (Hall 1980: 306) The second sees race or ethnicity as a non-reducible category or social feature. Whereas the first tendency attributes mono-causality to economics, the second (in response to the first) attributes (though perhaps this isn’t as clear theoretically), causality to a plurality of factors. However, Hall (1980) argues that neither consider how dehistoricizing race (when it is seen as an object of study) or distinguishing it from economic structures as mere ‘effects’ “operat[e] a disabling reductionism.” (342)  Instead, any study of race and racism must understand and include the inherent and ongoing contradictions and struggles that continue to structure race as a vehicle and as features of other structures. 

February 15, 2019, 9:00 – 12:00 

Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-343.

Brian Larkin explores what has emerged at the intersection of anthropology and the study infrastructure in recent times. A common issue that has arisen out of attempts to link both have been methodological, that is, how to ethnographically analyze infrastructure that works as a technological system. Yet, he is interested in what both could offer to each other by building an ethnography of infrastructure that considers its contingency or dynamism. In search of a new methodology, he explores recent anthropological research on this subject that has embraced the ‘unruly' nature of the infrastructural unit of study, seeing the "productive instability of the basic unit of research". (Larkin 2013: 339)

Kusno, Abidin. “The green governmentality in an Indonesian metropolis.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 32 (2011): 314-331.

Abidin Kusno’s article focuses on green ‘culture-making’ and governance in post-authoritarian Jakarta, Indonesia. By building on Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality, Kusno focuses on the “reconfiguration of individuals” (Kusno 2011: 328) through the re-integration of ’nature and society’ in the ‘greening’ of urban spaces. However, Kusno argues that this is not merely an attempt to combat environmental degradation but a political tactic to gain legitimacy. Politics, in this case, invokes morality, tying imaginaries of a cosmopolitan, utopian, ‘clean’ future neatly to the current global climate crisis and liberal market, ‘marketed’ and marketable ideals. “Green” takes on an existence of its own, becoming fetishized, desired, and inseparable from the governmental enterprise of state actors and other vested interests. In the meantime, those deemed to be "blocking the success of urban green initiatives” (Kusno 2011: 314) are displaced from their living spaces but also from exercising their citizenship. Through subjectification, certain bodies are made to conform to specific roles and responsibilities that the state confers upon them to act as proper ‘green citizens.’ Yet, what the author highlights is that ‘greening urban spaces’ has become a point of intersection between activists and pro-poor educators, developers, reformers, planners, state agencies and middle-class communities, entangled in seemingly opposed but sometimes commensurable discourses.

Kusno, Abidin. “Runaway City: Jakarta Bay, the pioneer and the last frontier.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12, 4 (2011): 513-531.

In this article, Kusno traces the discourses from the mid-1990s surrounding plans to transform Jakarta into a new global city, specifically by developing its north coast. Supporters of the project believed that the transformation of the waterfront would allow the city to reinvent itself to become a “coastal city of the future” such as Tokyo or Singapore. Within this group, developers were keen to make such a project profitable, while planners believed such a project represented an intelligent use of space closer to the urban core. Greenlit during the authoritarian regime of Suharto, the project’s origins were met initially with little pushback, although since the turn to the twenty-first century, a more vigorous civil society has offered protest. Opponents to the project ground their protests primarily in environmental terms, concerned that further development will only worsen already perpetually severe flooding, but also in concern for the area’s current residents, mostly poor fishing communities, who would surely be evicted if and when the mega waterfront project moved forward. 

March 1, 2019

Mc Laughlin, Fiona. “On the origins of urban Wolof: Evidence from Louis Descemet’s 1864 phrase book.” Language in Society 37 (2008): 713–735.

While urban African contact languages are typically considered to be a postcolonial feature, in this article, Mc Laughlin argues that urban Wolof emerged much earlier in the 18th and 19th centuries in France’s first African settlement, the coastal island city of Saint-Louis de Sénégal. As indicated by the title of this piece, a phrase book published in 1864 reveals, already at this early date, a significant lexical borrowing from the French. Mc Laughlin explains that contemporary urban Wolof grew from this urban Wolof of the 19th century, which itself is understood as having emerged as a prestigious urban code, formed from the speech of bilingual elites.

Mbembe, Achille and Sarah Nuttall. “Introduction: Afropolis.” In Johannesburg: The elusive metropolis, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, 1-33. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 

Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (2009) invite us to think of the elusiveness of Johannesburg, unfixing the meaning of African modernity, and instead considering how subjects are constantly in transformation. One can only capture registers of what one is at moments to later represent them when they have changed. These liminal instances of existence that have not yet been measured or captured, but that nevertheless persist, allow us to think of what occurs to their meaning/place in space once they are effectively measured, administered, managed. The “privileging of surfaces and visuality can conceal the ubiquity of the metropolitan form...beneath the visible landscape and the surface of the metropolis, its objects and social relations, are concealed or embedded other orders of visibility, other scripts that are not reducible to the built form, the house facade, or simply the street experience of the metaphorical figure of the flaneur.” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2009: 22-23)

Newell, Sasha. “Enregistering Modernity, Bluffing, Criminality: How Nouchi Speech Reinvented the Nation.” In The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire, 33-61. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

In this first chapter after the Introduction, Newell explains how Nouchi, a hybrid of French and multiple native languages from the region, and once the language of the uneducated urban poor, transformed into that of Ivoirian popular culture beginning in the 1990s. Now the most spoken, and often primary, language of Côte d’Ivoire’s youth, the language has followed a diametrically opposite path to that of the classic case of purposeful state intervention. Rather, Nouchi spread from the bottom up, popular because it was indigenous to the Côte d’Ivoire, and represented an alternative form of modernity to the state-led French. In a country created by the French and made up of over 60 ethnolinguistic groups, Nouchi initially served to unite them, bridging ethnic and class gaps. In very recent years, however, Nouchi language and style has become associated with an exclusionary ethno-nationalism, seeking to deny non-speakers access to citizenship rights.

March 15, 2019 

Simone, AbdouMaliq. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16 (2014): 407-429.

AbdouMaliq Simone offers us an ethnographic glimpse into inner-city Johannesburg, where infrastructure is not merely physical but also social. Although Johannesburg’s hyper-urbanity may be characterized as a “place of ruins” (Simone 2004: 407), the author proposes that something else is contained in this “ruined urbanization.” (Simone 2004: 407) He asks how researchers, policy makers and activists can make sense of social infrastructure - what he terms ‘people as infrastructure’ - given its mutability and mobility in urban life. Simone insists that platforms of production and reproduction of city life are created in the ways that people inhabit space; researchers might attempt a radical openness to collaboration with fellow urbanites in marginalized areas like inner-city Johannesburg. Therefore, theoretical analyses of urban life must attend to this growing gap between ’normative’ expectations of urban life and the ways in which life is lived to make visible these "new fields of economic action.” (Simone 2004: 428)

Simone, AbdouMaliq. “The Politics of Urban Intersection: Material, Affect, Bodies.” In The New Blackwell Companion to the City, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 357-366. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011.

Taking African cities as the setting in this chapter, Simone articulates the uncertain and ever-changing dimensions of urban intersection - or the ways in which people and groups both intentionally and inadvertently live with one another. Simone makes clear that intersection does not necessarily imply cooperation or felicitous co-existence, and often entails paying astute attention to one’s surroundings and circumstances at all times. For example, the highly heterogeneous nature of cities of the global south, such as the DRC’s capital of Kinshasa, necessitates that one adopt certain behaviors as a form of survival:  namely, articulating oneself authoritatively by exaggerating one’s body and speech. Ultimately, Simone describes a precarious but future-leaning urban existence, with a constantly changing urban fabric, itself the result of the simultaneously shifting social networks of people trying to get by in cities with inadequate resources.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. “The Urban Poor and their Ambivalent Exceptionalities: Some Notes from Jakarta.” Current Anthropology 56, Supplement 11 (2015): S15-S23.

Simone utilizes his first-hand experience living and working in Jakarta to offer evidence to complicate the narrative that the city’s urban poor is an unmoving and easily-definable category. Rather, Simone contends, Jakarta’s urban poor make up complex and heterogeneous networks that “cut across clear-cut designations of social standing.” (S16) In terms of the spatial organization of the city, for example, relatively poor districts have grown up alongside and work in tandem with wealthier ones. When it comes to work, it can be difficult to draw a clear line between informal and formal employment. Thirdly, the ability for one to own and register land is difficult in a country in which much land is uncertified or tied up in costly red-tape or legal uncertainty. Due to the fact that policy makers and municipal and national authorities have not taken account of these intricacies of the urban poor, Simone explains, even their well-financed and well-intentioned policy measures have not brought their expected successes. 

Parnell, Sue and Jennifer Robinson. “(Re)theorizing Cities from the Global South: Looking Beyond Neoliberalism.” Urban Geography 33, no. 4 (2012): 593-617.  

Sue Parnell and Jennifer Robinson  draw from their own work in post-apartheid South Africa to question the limits of urban studies theories that stem from critiques of neoliberalism. Although they do not disagree with necessary critiques of the neoliberal regime and its effects on urban planning, they argue that most work that boasts having a ‘global’ reach comes from cities generally in the North Atlantic. At a time when most urban density and, thus, research on urbanity are moving towards the Global South, it is important to re-theorize frameworks considering local conditions beyond neoliberalism that shape and form cities. In order to do so, the authors draw from literature that re-thinks poverty to consider the ‘right to the city’ and another that questions urban governments. Their intent is to bring these theories together to propose the need to reconsider the importance of the state’s relationship to cities in the Global South. Paying heed to these nuances would not only reframe urban policy-making but also urban studies and notions of what can extend across borders and what cannot. 

April 5, 2019

Fischer, Brodwyn. “Between Insurgency and Dystopia: The Role of Informality in Brazil’s Twentieth-Century Urban Formation.” In Freia Anders and Alexandra Sedlmaier, eds., Public Goods Versus Economic Interests: Global Perspectives on the History of Squatting, 122-149. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Using the history of the Pernambucan city of Recife as a key example, Fischer challenges the commonly held postulate that informality is a catalyst for the securing of formal democratic citizenship rights. Rather, Fischer explains, even decades of the most vibrant social mobilization anywhere in Brazil has done little to dismantle the structures that maintain informality as a parallel and even growing urban phenomenon. While vociferous and organized demands for increased services and improved living conditions have often prompted official responses, those gains should be understood as important but incremental triumphs, after which the social movements that promulgated such demands often disband upon witnessing improvements. Fischer’s interpretation understands informality as a kind of ingrained social contract, in which it is part and parcel of the political power structure, thriving alongside and in tandem with officialdom. 

Ananya Roy, “Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities: Informality, Insurgency, and the Idiom of Urbanization.” Planning Theory 8, no. 1(2009): 76-87.

Ananya Roy's (2009) compelling article about urban planning contends that the “idioms of urbanization” (79) must be revisited to make sense of the role of informality in India. Although dominant views in urban studies have posited that informality is an extra-legal framework that must be understood as blocking attempts to develop modern infrastructure in India’s cities,  Roy (2009) argues that informality does not exist outside of legality. Instead, the state and legality in India are “permeated by the logic of informality.” (82) Thus, if the legal and illegal are blurred and informality does not distinguish either, then how does the state decide what is just and what isn’t? The author concludes that the same logic of deregulation that underlies urban development in India is the logic that makes urban planning a near impossibility. 

May 31, 2019

Roy, Ananya. “Dis/possessive Collectivism: Property and Personhood at City’s End.” Geoforum 80 (2017): 1-11.

In this article, Roy proposes a theory of what she terms “dis/possessive collectivism” as a potential way of thinking about and dealing with urban anti-eviction struggles in an age of what she terms “racial banishment,” a process by which entire communities of poor people of color are forcibly displaced. Using the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and their political efforts as a case study, Roy explains the ways the organization has attempted to occupy - what members of the group themselves would call ‘liberate’ - properties, while also trying to find ways to postpone evictions, turning them into protracted legal battles meant to dissuade financial institutions from moving forward. This essay ultimately questions our preconceived notions about liberal property ownership and invites the reader to envisage other potentialities. 

McKittrick, Katherine. ”On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place” Social & Cultural Geography, 12:8 (2011): 947-963.

In this article, McKittrick looks for an analytical frame that is able to locate and define a black sense of place in a way that looks beyond the current hegemonic framework, itself the result of slavery and plantation life, that necessarily sets a hostile blackness (those ‘without’) against a stable whiteness (those ‘with’). In order to discursively supercede this bifurcated frame, McKittrick suggests looking more closely into examples such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s study of the California State Prison system, Golden Gulag. McKittrick describes Gilmore’s attention to human life, and “insistence on human relationality” - in this case, showing the prisoners as being part of a connected social network - as being a key site of analysis that will allow scholars to see and understand the complexity of human alliances that will avoid the continuing normalization of black dispossession.