Precarious Life and Political Possibility FUSE 30-4 (original) (raw)
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Drawing upon an ethnography of recent Congolese diasporic protests in central London, this article pays attention to the traversal histories of ‘race’ and the postcolonial dynamics that precede the emergence of a contemporary diasporic ‘right to the city’ movement. The authors critically engage with Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ as a way of explaining how the urban is not only the site but also, increasingly, a stake in urban protests. In doing so the authors relocate urban centrality – its meaning, symbolic power and heuristic status in protests – in a context where activists’ claims are not restricted to one city or, simply, the political present. Rather, protestors talk about making geopolitical connections between local and global scales and contemporary and historical injustices. Drawing upon Simone’s notion of ‘black urbanism’, the authors claim to enrich Lefebvre’s original formulation by unpacking the complex performative dimensions of protest as they intersect with race and, more specifically, blackness and postcolonialism. It is concluded that activists’ experience is fundamentally ambivalent; they are at once enchanted and disenchanted with protest in central London.
Precarious Life and Political Possibility
Over the past four decades the demographic maps of large and small cities across North America, Europe and Australia have been reconfigured with rich and deepening hues of third-world migrations.The noisy spectacles of carnival capitalism, which increasingly co-opt these diversities into orgies of commodification cannot mask the divides and degradations of everyday life. As urban perimeters become utterly porous with residential sprawl and corporate agriculture, material and metaphoric walls are cut-ting through the centres of Eurocentric cities. Old and new colonial exploits are indeed coming home to roost. In the Anglo-American Imperialism of the early 21st century, the war on the home front is as critical as overseas conquest. And it is an urban war, pulsing like an approaching drumbeat under an increasingly transparent ideological skin. From the defiant ghettos of the Paris suburbs to the tough inner cities of New York and Los Angeles, from the gentrifying waterfronts of Barcelo...
Unsettling time(s): reconstituting the when of urban radical politics
Unsettling time(s): reconstituting the when of urban radical politics, 2022
In Indigenous/settler colonial contexts, cities are both rich and lived, multitemporal Indigenous places/spaces and sites of ongoing Indigenous dispossession. In this paper, we aim to unsettle linear notions of time associated with mainstream constructions of colonization. We suggest that doing urban politics on stolen land requires a reconstitution of the when of urban struggles to engage with colonising pasts, presents and futures, and with multi-temporal survivances of Indigenous peoples and Country, in the here and now. Time in and as city-as-Country is multiple, non-linear, active, and made through/as relationships. As we engage with the gifts and responsibilities of non-linear time, we are led by Meanjin [socalled Brisbane, Australia], the teachings of activists from the Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy and week-long protest actions that took place to coincide with the G20 Leaders Meeting in 2014. We do this as two settler geographers, with complicities and responsibilities in/to the present, past and future as uninvited guests on unceded Aboriginal land. We signal a need to deepen the engagements of urban geographical and anti-capitalist politics with the specificities of the urban as Indigenous place/space/Country in order to complicate geographical conceptualisations of the urban and work towards decolonising the city in Indigenous/settler-colonial contexts.
When hypothesizing about the complete urbanization of society in The Urban Revolution, Henri Lefebvre insisted that this process was worldwide but virtual--incomplete and uneven. 1 Among other things, this was so because urbanization remained shot through with territorial relations between dominant and dominated social spaces. Lefebvre proposed that these relations between "centers" and "peripheries" can be compared across scalar divides, and that they also refract, in part, the very historical realities (of "city" and "countryside") that urbanization helps supersede. The not-only metaphorical language he used to describe center-periphery relations ("colonization") cautions us to be mindful of how neocolonial realities, past and present, still weigh on the urban world. Two generations after the publication of Lefebvre's book, this point is still relevant even though the Three Worlds of the postwar period have been reconfigured and the center of gravity of worldwide urbanization has long shifted away from Euro-America. A comparative analysis of the boundary-destroying dynamics of global urbanization must take into account the reterritorializing neocolonial and neo-imperial forces that fracture urban landscapes.
Privatization, Segregation and Dispossession in Western Urban Space
ABSTRACT Within the shifting geography of capitalist imperialist power, the war on the home front has become a critical line of battle. Western urban centres are more than empty landscapes for the enactment of global agendas. They actively contribute to the international ascendancy of neoliberalism and the bodies of women and people of colour within them are the front line of economic, political, social and ideological marginalization. This paper takes up the intersectionality of race, gender and class relations as they are located within, and shaped by, urban processes in the West. Looking through the lens of David Harvey’s theory of the production of capitalist urban space and its conceptual links with Marx’s ‘primitive’ accumulation in his recent work on imperialism, I present an initial proposal on the material basis of gender and ‘race’ exploitation. I further explore how this interacts with more fully elaborated theories of class in the Marxist tradition, and how together they shape and are shaped by Western urban spaces and places. Harvey’s work is important, not because it speaks directly or comprehensively to racialized or gendered divisions but because it is a highly detailed Marxist theorization of urban space. I do not take Harvey’s ideas simply at face value, but ‘rub them’ together with theoretical and historical work on racialization, imperialism, urbanism and gender. Thus I make some necessary modifications to Harvey’s propositions. It is my thesis that ongoing accumulation by dispossession as a second mode of accumulation that operates in a dialectical relationship to the system of commodity production, is the material basis of persistent racialized and gendered divisions in society as a whole and at the urban scale in particular. Accumulation by dispossession has been ideologically subordinated by capitalism as part of its triumphalist discourse of progress and freedom. But in actuality, it is the expression of patriarchal and racist imperialism within and alongside capitalism. Its ongoing coercive and violent appropriations, spatial segregation, and privatizations displace the costs of capitalist accumulation for accumulation’s sake onto gendered and racialized bodies, separating them from the economic, political and social fruits of the capitalist system. My secondary argument suggests three distinct, sometimes conflicted, yet intertwined logics of power within modern society: capitalist logic, which rests primarily on the interests of capitalist producers; territorial logic, which expresses the imperative to command space at all scales; and corporeal logic, a patriarchal and racist, bio-political and carceral drive to control and socially construct gendered and racialized bodies. Finally, I propose that we take seriously the warnings of academics and activists who caution that the term ‘neoliberalism’ has become so broad and all encompassing that it is losing its incisiveness. As critical thinkers we need to analytically separate the processes of neoliberalism from neoracism, neopatriarchy, and neo imperialism. By applying an understanding of accumulation by dispossession as the ongoing basis of these latter configurations, and a renewed influence on capitalist commodity production, we can move past the polarized disciplinary landscapes of academic inquiry and segregated progressive politics that have resulted from a lack of precision in our analysis.