by Asef Bayat, 2000
A major consequence of the new global restructuring in the developing
countries has been the double process of integration,
on the one hand, and social exclusion and
informalization, on the other. These processes, meanwhile, have meant
further growth
of a marginalized and deinstitutionalized subaltern
in Third World cities. How do the urban grassroots respond to their
marginalization
and exclusion? What form of politics, if any at
all, do they espouse? Critically navigating through the prevailing
perspectives
including the culture of poverty, survival
strategy, urban social movements and everyday resistance, the article
suggests
that the new global restructuring is reproducing
subjectivities (marginalized and deinstitutionalized groups such as the
unemployed,
casual labor, street subsistence workers, street
children and the like), social space and thus a terrain of political
struggles
that current theoretical perspectives cannot on
their own account for. The article proposes an alternative outlook, a
`quiet
encroachment of the ordinary', that might be useful
to examine the activism of the urban subaltern in the Third World
cities
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