Hygienisation,Gentrification, and Urban Displacement in Brazil

This article engages recent debates over gentrification and urban displacement in the global South. While researchers increasingly suggest that gentrification is becoming widespread in “Southern” cities, others argue that such analyses overlook important differences in empirical context and privilege EuroAmerican theoretical frameworks. To respond to this debate, in this article, we outline the concept of higienização (hygienisation), arguing that it captures important contextual factors missed by gentrification. Hygienisation is a Brazilian term that describes a particular form of urban displacement, and is directly informed by legacies of colonialism, racial and class stigma, informality, and state violence. Our objective is to show how “Southern” concepts like hygienisation help urban researchers gain better insight into processes of urban displacement, while also responding to recent calls to decentre and provincialise urban theory.     

The Limits of Mastery: Slaveholders,Slaves, and Baptist Church Discipline

Existing scholarship describes early southern evangelical churches as racially radical institutions that, as the eighteenth century surrendered to the nineteenth, capitulated to slavery, implementing accommodations intended to make them more attractive to respectable, slaveholding churchgoers. This essay argues that that transition was never as complete as suggested. Based on a set of 65 Baptist church minutes from congregations located in 4 different southern states, it shows how evangelical churches continued to exercise a degree of authority over slave-owning members and their treatment of bondpeople from the late eighteenth century through the end of slavery itself.     

THE AMBIGUITIES AND LIMITS OF FISCAL STRAIN INDICATORS

Several attempts have been made to develop indicators of the fiscal strain conditions of cities. These indicators are meant to represent the existence of conditions which will strain tax bases and produce outmigration from cities with high strain. The indicators which have been developed, however, are not valid representations of what they claim to be. This essay presents the reasons for this assessment, and suggests an alternative approach to assessing fiscal strain.     

The MSA sequence of Diepkloof and the history of southern African Late Pleistocene populations

This paper presents the first multidisciplinary synthesis of the Middle Stone Age sequence of Diepkloof Rock Shelter (South Africa). We explore the main cultural changes that characterized southern African hunter–gatherer societies from OIS 5 to the beginning of OIS 3. We discuss the tempo of these changes, test the current interpretative hypotheses and explore an empirical model to explain the early appearance of symbolic marking within the Pleistocene hunter–gather societies of southern Africa.     

Duties to the Dead and the Conditions of Social Peace

This essay focuses on the purported duty—defended by Walter Benjamin but widely assumed in much political theory and practice—of the living to redeem the suffering of those who died as a consequence of oppression, exploitation, and political violence. I consider the cogency and ethical value of this duty from the perspective of a politics grounded in the equal life-value of human beings. For both metaphysical and ethical reasons I conclude that this duty does not obtain, first because the dead cannot experience redemption, and secondly because it is politically counterproductive: it personalizes a pathological form of political resistance which may easily incite further violence and thus perpetuate human suffering and oppression.