Gramsci and the African Città Futura: Urban Subaltern Politics From the Margins of Nouakchott,Mauritania

This article offers reflection on how Gramscian theories can be useful for critically analyzing the political significance of the actions and resistances of urban subaltern Africans. It interrogates the potential of subaltern political forms to profoundly transform society and to thus prepare for the African “future city”. It merges a theoretical analysis of Gramsci's concepts relating to the città futura—and its relation to concepts of city, subalternity, political initiative and cittadinanza—with a comparative critique of urban theory applied to Africa and especially relating to the politicization of the city in Mauritania. Our reflections are based on Mauritania and the case of Nouakchott, its capital, where we have carried out our research for over a decade. We will interrogate the re‐appropriations or resistances, as well as the autonomous construction of modes of living and of city‐making, made by marginal inhabitants, in order to consider their political potentialities.     

Beneath the “Zunami”: Jacob Zuma and the Gendered Politics of Social Reproduction in South Africa

Abstract: In April 2009, African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma was swept into power in South Africa's fourth democratic general election. To date, this political “Zunami” has largely been presented as either a leftist rebellion against Mbeki's neoliberalism, a reassertion of patriarchal “traditionalism”, or an example of Zulu ethnic mobilization. This article draws on a long‐term ethnographic study to provide a critical gendered perspective on Zuma's rise. It argues that Zuma resonates with many poor South Africans, including women, in part because of his ability to connect the personal and political in ways that talk to South Africa's “crisis of social reproduction”. A key point the article emphasizes—one virtually absent from contemporary discussions about Zuma—is the profound gendering of growing class divisions, specifically the way this manifests itself in huge reductions in marital rates and heightened gendered contestations.     

The Post‐Industrial “Shop Floor”: Emerging Forms of Gentrification in San Francisco's Innovation Economy

The San Francisco Bay Area in California is undergoing a technology‐driven wave of growth arguably more thoroughgoing than the first “dot‐com” bubble, fueling hypertrophic gentrification and tales of a deeply class‐divided, “Blade Runner kind of society”. While Silicon Valley is still the industry's employment center, San Francisco is seeing faster tech firm growth, and is transforming its downtown to become more “livable” and promoting public space as key to innovation. In this context, this paper offers a reading of urban public space not just as a consumption amenity but also as the “shop floor” of a labor process that goes beyond the walls of the firm to mobilize the social itself in the production of privately appropriated value. With innovation now the watchword of gentrification, the stakes of this shift oscillate between the total commodification of urban vitality and the recognition of the social process of value production itself.     

Material,Political, and Biopolitical Dimensions of “Waste” in California Water Law

California's state constitution prohibits the “wasteful” use of water; however, waste is subjective and context dependent. This paper considers political, biopolitical, and material dimensions of waste, focusing on the role of legal processes and institutions. The paper examines a case involving legal accusations of “waste and unreasonable use” of water by the Imperial Irrigation District in Imperial County, California. The determination that water was being “wasted” justified the transfer of water from agricultural to urban areas. However, defining these flows of water as a waste neglected water's complexity and relationality, and the enclosure of a “paracommons” threatens to bring about negative environmental and public health consequences. The paper shows that the project of discursively labeling certain material resource flows as waste and re‐allocating these resources to correct this moral and economic failure relies upon legal processes, and carries political and biopolitical implications.     

Undoing Nature: The John Muir Trust's “Journey for the Wild”, the UK,Summer 2006

Abstract: I take as a point of departure for a discussion of the idea of nature the John Muir Trust's much publicised Journey for the Wild which took place in the UK during the summer of 2006. My objective is to explore how, at the same time that the “wild” was performed as a political category through the Journey, replicating the binary nature/society, prevalent norms of nature that depend on that binary, including, ironically, those of John Muir himself, were “undone”. I work with Judith Butler's (2004, Undoing Gender) ideas of “doing” and “undoing” gender and what counts as human, and her link between the articulation of gender and the human on the one hand and, on the other, a politics of new possibilities. Taking her argument “elsewhere”—unravelling what is performed as “wild” and what counts as “nature”—and using as evidence the art of Eoin Cox, the actions of journeyers, extracts from their diaries and from Messages for the Wild delivered to the Scottish Parliament, I suggest that the idea of a working wild points towards more socially just political possibilities than a politics of nature defined through a binary.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 30, Number 1. February 2014

Front and back cover caption, volume 30 issue 1 Front cover POO WARS Mandisa Feni of Site C, Khayelitsha sits on a portable toilet on the steps the provincial legislature. She is one of the many poo protesters who, in June 2013, dragged containers of human waste from the shanty towns on the urban margins to the provincial legislature in Cape Town's city centre. By collecting this shit from the urban periphery and dumping it at the centre of provincial political power, the protesters powerfully enacted their refusal to accept the portable toilets that the authorities had provided for people living in these informal settlements. Rather than accepting what they regarded as second‐class ‘portaloos’ for second‐class citizens, they demanded modern, permanent, porcelain toilets, just like those in middle class homes in Cape Town. Similar to the case of the Great Stink of London of 1858, the politically powerful could not ignore the stench aroound Parliament. In his editorial in this issue, Steven Robins argues that a lack of in‐house, ‘modern’ toilets in shanty towns continues to plague its inhabitants, who have taken to imaginative protest in various ways. His study on the politics of shit in Cape Town represents a form of public anthropology on a largely private activity. This politics of human waste is not popular in the mainstream media and is considered to be irrational and unruly by the wider public. But, as developments in Cape Town show, when human waste becomes matter out of place, it can also become a potent substance when deployed in popular protest. Back cover FACE VALUES Villagers in Kanga, northern Mafia Island, Tanzania, watch a screening of part of the BBC/RAI series Face values (1978) in 1985. The film (at that time on a reel‐to‐reel system) was projected onto the white‐washed wall of the village dispensary. Prince Charles, shown here on screen, was Patron of the RAI at the time and had studied anthropology at Cambridge. He encouraged the making of this series and acted as the interviewer of the five anthropologists involved. It was argued by the RAI that the presence of royalty would ensure a large TV audience for the series in the UK, and indeed, this seemed to be the case judging by the BBC's audience figures. However, the series was much criticized both by the newsprint media critics and by anthropologists. In this issue, in the second part of her article, Pat Caplan considers why the making of ‘educational’ material for a mass audience about people and societies in other parts of the world is problematic and probably rather unlikely to achieve the aims set out by the Prince: ‘If more people could have the advantage of information and knowledge about other people's behaviour, customs, religion and so forth, then perhaps some of the prejudice against immigrants in UK could be slowly reduced’. It also considers how local people have viewed this film material and how and why their reactions have changed over time.     

Reconstructing an urban and regional political economy: on the state,politics, scale,and explanation

This paper begins from the premise that a number of now fashionable institutionally focused accounts of urban and regional political economy often begin at a point that is analytically flawed (or at least partial) in that the institutional ensembles themselves—whether analyzed as an urban `regime', regional `thickness' or a local `regulatory mode'—are automatically assumed to be a pre-given part of the explanation. However, the authors contend that for a deeper analysis of urban and regional political economy to be advanced, these institutions themselves need to be explained. In order to proceed with such an explanation three key factors require more serious consideration. These are: (1) the need to outline one's chosen research object of enquiry, and all that this entails in terms of research methodology, theory selection, and an uncovering of the `constitutive properties' of causation; (2) a greater readiness to analytically interrogate the relational interplay between economic development, political governance and scale; and (3) an obligation to pay due respect to the politics of representation and active processes of state restructuring and political strategizing through and around which economic development is itself constituted. In order to explore these themes, the authors draw, variously, on a methodological (re-) reading of the regulation approach, recent theoretical innovations on the `politics of scale', Jessop's state-theoretical writings and his recently developed neo-Gramscian methodology for analyzing urban economic governance, alongside Jenson's political sociological approach towards the `politics of representation'. Where appropriate, they explore, briefly, ways in which these theoretical themes may be deployed in empirical research, by considering certain restructurings in and of the political economy of Britain during recent decades.     

By Any Means Necessary: Urban Regeneration and the “State of Exception” in Glasgow's Commonwealth Games 2014

When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega‐event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the “state of exception”. Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the site of the Athletes' Village for Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games, we expose CPOs as a classed tool mobilised to violently displace working class neighbourhoods. In doing so, we show how a fictionalised mantra of “necessity” combines neoliberal growth logics with their obscene underside—a stigmatisation logic that demonises poor urban neighbourhoods. CPOs can be used progressively, for example to abrogate the power of slum landlords for social democratic ends, yet with the increasing urbanisation of capital they more often target marginalised neighbourhoods in the pursuit of land and property valorisation. The growing use of CPOs as an exceptional measure in urbanisation, we argue, requires urgent attention in urban political struggles and policy practice.     

Blinded like a state? Urban sanitation,improvement and high modernism in contemporary Myanmar

This article explores urban sanitation in the city of Mandalay, upper Myanmar, as an entry point to better understand the issue of improvement in the country in the current era of political change. Based upon qualitative data gathered in Mandalay between 2015 and 2018, the article focuses on the state's ways of seeing urban improvement after 2016, when the National League for Democracy government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi took office. The article builds upon James Scott's work on statecraft to frame the analysis, and it uses this framework to argue that a localized form of authoritarian high modernism is emerging and shaping urban improvement in Mandalay today. The case is noteworthy as high modernism in Mandalay is not associated with attempts to render the city more legible; on the contrary improvement seems to be carried out by a state unwilling, or unable, to see and thus being blinded. The article develops this argument to make a twofold contribution, to discussions on statecraft and the “failure of development” in contemporary Myanmar from the perspective of political geography; and to debates on states' ways of seeing and the practice of improvement in postcolonial contexts.     

Is planning still political? The politicization of high-speed rail in Spain (1986–2016)

Post-political debate has stimulated a vigorous research agenda about the role of politics in regional and urban planning. It warns of a depoliticization process leading to the emergence of a consensual social order and the retreat of the properly political as disruptive and transformative practice. We propose a reframing of post-political debate through an empirically grounded conceptualization of the political sequence (politicization, depoliticization, and re-politicization) and by incorporating consensus as part of the political, thereby refusing the existence of a differentiated properly political moment. We develop this conceptualization by analyzing the politicization process of high-speed rail in Spain, which resulted in the implementation of one of the most extensive networks in the world. Based on a foundational political myth constructed around the first project implemented, a consensual politicization process has progressively taken place around high-speed rail in Spain. This political consensus contrasts with opposition to the high-speed rail project in the Basque Country. In both cases, high-speed rail is eminently political. The politicization of high-speed rail in Spain shows that, far from becoming a depoliticized practice, regional and urban planning remains eminently political, involving both consensus and conflict.     

Race,Waste, and Space: Brownfield Redevelopment and Environmental Justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard

This paper advances the concept of “waste formations” as a way of thinking together processes of race, space, and waste in brownfield redevelopment projects. Defined as formerly industrial and contaminated properties, in the 1990s brownfields emerged as the grounds for new forms of urbanization and an emerging environmental remediation industry. Through their redevelopment, the twentieth century's urban wastelands—environmentally degraded, economically divested, and often racially marked—have become sites of investment, resignification, and value formation. The concept of waste formations provides a critical framework on the ways these socio‐ecological transformations rework twentieth century urban inequalities—in particular, the articulation of waste and toxic waste—and the ways they produce new geographies of environmental injustice through the displacement of toxic waste to newly waste‐able spaces. This paper develops an analytic of waste formations and applies it to the process of brownfield redevelopment at the Hunters Point Shipyard in southeast San Francisco.     

CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD”: THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN TIME IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

This paper seeks to chart a concept of historical experience that French Romantic writers first developed to describe their own relationship to historical time: the notion of the “transitional period.” At first, the term related strictly to the evolving periodic conception of history, one that required breaks, spaces, or zones of indeterminacy to bracket off periods imagined as organic wholes. These transitions, necessary devices in the new grammar of history, also began to attract interest on their own, conceived either as chaotic but creative times of transformation, or, more often, as slack periods of decadence that possessed no proper style but exhibited hybrid traits. Their real interest, however, lies in their reflexive application to the nineteenth century itself, by writers and historians such as Alfred de Musset, Chateaubriand, Michelet, and Renan, who in their effort to define their own period envisioned the “transitional period” as a passage between more coherent and stable historical formations. This prospective self‐definition of the “age of history” from a future standpoint is very revealing; it shows not just the tension between its organic way of apprehending the past and its own self‐perception, but it also opens a window on a new and paradoxical experience of time, one in which change is ceaseless and an end in itself. The paper also presents a critique of the way the term “modernity” has functioned, from Baudelaire's initial use to the present, to occlude the experience of transition that the Romantics highlighted. By imposing on the nineteenth‐century sense of the transitory a heroic period designation, the term “modernity” denies precisely the reality it describes, and sublimates a widespread temporal malaise into its contrary. The paper concludes that the peculiarly “modern” mania for naming one's period is a function of transitional time, and that the concept coined by the Romantics still governs our contemporary experience.     

Hope in the Face of Temporal Devastation

This article evaluates Jonathan Lear's account of radical hope in light of the phenomenon of social acceleration. According to Lear's philosophical exegesis of the life of the Crow Nation's last chief, Plenty Coups, radical hope is hope based on the conviction that the world's goodness transcends but includes the goodness of human culture. Such hope enables a culture to persevere in the face of its own collapse through political humility, by which a culture draws on the resources of other cultures in order to revive itself. Social acceleration—which results in the warping of our sense of time as tensed between past, present, and future—demands a more primordial form of radical hope, based on the affirmation of the world's own temporalities as simultaneously resisting and sustaining our own cultural temporalities. This in turn involves a more self-critical form of political humility.     

POSSIBILITIES IN “A THOROUGHLY HISTORICAL WORLD”: MISSING HAYDEN WHITE'S MISSED CONNECTIONS

This article assesses Herman Paul's intellectual biography of Hayden White, the most important figure in the philosophy of history of the past half century. Offering a clear overview of White's career and contribution, Paul's account proceeds chronologically from the 1950s to the present, distinguishing the phases of White's career, but convincingly pinpointing an abiding core of concerns around an existentialist and liberationist humanism. In that light, White sought to show the way beyond historiographical realism to more innovative approaches—ideally to serve progressive politics. Paul notes, however, that White failed to connect with most mainstream historians, and Paul's account is not sufficiently probing and critical to explore the gulf. Indeed, following White, Paul is too prone to take White's particular liberationist agenda as the only alternative to a conservative, passive realism—and thereby to gloss over alternative ways of conceiving the postrealist cultural space. Moreover, Paul fails to note White's tendency sometimes to imply that mainstream history claims more than it does, and sometimes to denigrate prejudicially what it in fact does, or could do. Although much of White's challenge could have been especially salutary, he tended toward mischaracterizations that fostered polarization in the historical discipline and reinforced prejudicial understandings of historiography in the wider culture. Paul's overview provides a useful, and in many ways exemplary, introduction to White's legacy, but it is too deferential to provide a convincing overall critical assessment.     

An Informational Right to the City? Code,Content, Control,and the Urbanization of Information

Henri Lefebvre talked of the “right to the city” alongside a right to information. As the urban environment becomes increasingly layered by abstract digital representation, Lefebvre's broader theory warrants application to the digital age. Through considering what is entailed by the urbanization of information, this paper examines the problems and implications of any “informational right to the city”. In directing Tony Benn's five questions of power towards Google, arguably the world's most powerful mediator of information, this paper exposes processes that occur when geographic information is mediated by powerful digital monopolies. We argue that Google currently occupies a dominant share of any informational right to the city. In the spirit of Benn's final question—“How do we get rid of you?”—the paper seeks to apply post‐political theory in exploring a path to the possibility of more just information geographies.     

Simone Weil's Political Theology

This article suggests that Simone Weil's political theology is characterized by the idea of labor and the event of laboring. I begin by arguing that her thinking is shaped by a materialist reading of Christianity that employs Marx's concepts — labor, capital and alienation — to examine the political implications of three theological ideas, fall, slavery and sin. Next, I suggest that although laboring should be understood as a creative endeavor, Weil argues that it is always conditioned and constrained by a force she terms social matter. This constraint produces what Marx called alienation and Weil will refer to as enslavement (and even sin). Finally, I contend that Weil's idea of labor — and its call for a minimization of constraint — provides a counter-force to social matter. I conclude by suggesting that Weil's labor provides a different way of conceptualizing not just the political subject, but political theology itself.     

“Alles ist Blatt”. Über Reichweite und Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Sprache und Darstellungsmodelle Goethes

The essay will elaborate on the following aspects of the selected topic: 1) Goethe's scepticism of language: An apprehension of the almost unbridgeable gap between language and the world of objects constitutes the starting point in his approach to language. — 2) The paradoxical nature of the objective world: The paradoxical character of the realm of natural science is a second starting point: Goethe first attempts the logically ‘impossible’, namely to capture simultaneously that which at a higher level is identical and at the empirical level visibly distinct, that which is both static and changing, the uniformity of the kingdom of nature and its multiplicity; he proceeds to undertake a translation of this into a mode of representation accessible to the mind's eye. — 3) Goethe's scientific models of representation: Goethe's models, which graduate from variation of synonym through the exploitation of multifarious fields of imagery to the free juxtaposition of different text-forms each providing its own perspective, serve to resolve the problems outlined in 1 and 2. Form is cognition, its value being not principally aesthetic but heuristic. 4) The scope and influence of Goethe's language: The product of Goethe's scientific efforts is a standard transparent language, both vivid and explanatory, capable of concisely delineating exceedingly complex circumstances and interactions. Even in some spheres of science its influence extended to the beginning of the twentieth century, facilitating the dialogue between disciplines. — 5) The limitations of this language: One of the clear limitations of this language shows itself to be its close adhension to visual perception: its dread both of abstraction, with its disregard of objective fields of reference, and of the formalised language of mathematics. — 6) The shadow of abstraction: Since the eighteenth century the world has lived in the increasingly dark shadow of an abstraction, which has assumed new dimensions in the laboratory-like world of today. — 7) Distance to Goethe: From a present-day persepective Goethe's science appears as distant legend.     

The “Iron Cage” and the “Shell as Hard as Steel”: Parsons,Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Gehäuse that modern capitalism has created, a concept that Talcott Parsons famously rendered as the “iron cage.” This article examines the status of Parsons's canonical translation; the putative sources of its imagery (in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress); and the more complex idea that Weber himself sought to evoke with the “shell as hard as steel”: a reconstitution of the human subject under bureaucratic capitalism in which “steel” becomes emblematic of modernity. Steel, unlike the “element” iron, is a product of human fabrication. It is both hard and potentially flexible. Further, whereas a cage confines human agents, but leaves their powers otherwise intact, a “shell” suggests that modern capitalism has created a new kind of being. After examining objections to this interpretation, I argue that whatever the problems with Parsons's “iron cage” as a rendition of Weber's own metaphor, it has become a “traveling idea,” a fertile coinagein its own right, an intriguing example of how the translator's imagination can impose itself influentially on the text and its readers.     

Alienated and politicized? Young planners’ confrontation with entrepreneurial and authoritarian state intervention in urban development in Turkey

Planning in Turkey is dominated by powerful market interests and authoritarian state regulation, resulting in a conflictual socio-political environment. Caught in the crossfire between interventionist urban policies and a planning education system that is oriented towards the public good, planners have come to feel alienated from their work. This paper considers how young planners respond to these challenges, drawing upon questionnaires and semi-structured in-depth interviews with planners with fewer than 10 years of experience. Their confrontation with entrepreneurial and authoritarian state interventions in urban development alienates them from their ideals, leading them to explore new ways of dealing with increasing political authority and economic neoliberalism. The participants of the study came up with a number of diverse responses related to this process. Disappointed with the practice of their profession ‘lost planners' begin searching for alternative pathways outside their practice towards a more meaningful society. In contrast, ‘profiteer planners' focus on getting more business and play a conformist and opportunistic role in the existing planning practice; while ‘struggling planners' develop alternative ways to pursue the public good by participating in urban movements. In short, they cope with alienation through politicization, solidarity and the identification of new means of engaging with society.     

Toward a Received History of the Holocaust

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of “relativist” and “positivist” history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of “middle-voicedness” may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's “deep memory” and historical narrative. For finally, it may be the very idea of “deep memory” and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed “deep memory” of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that “What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history.” That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter (or not enter) the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, “How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?” Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events? In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call “received history”—a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings—both his telling and mine—on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind—my “vicarious past.”