Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality

by Loïc Wacquant, 2007

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience

of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during

the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality.

This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical

or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as

they are fed by the ongoing fragmentation of the wage labour relationship, the

functional disconnection of dispossessed neighbourhoods from the national and

global economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing

city. Based on a methodical comparison between the black American ghetto

and the French working-class banlieue at century’s turn, this article spotlights

three distinctive spatial properties of ‘advanced marginality’ – territorial fixation

and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of ‘place’, and the loss

of a hinterland – and draws out their implications for the formation of the

‘precariat’ in postindustrial societies.

Learning from urban revolt

by Yousuf Al-Bulushi, 2012

This paper brings into conversation two texts that were written 40 years apart—Society of the Spectacle in 1967 and The Coming Insurrection in 2007—and yet share great lines of continuity. Both texts are situated within their economic, cultural and political conjunctures in order to ground their theoretical contributions. The paper emphasizes the important influence that urban rebellions in Watts and the Parisian banlieues had upon both texts, and in so doing, highlights the over-looked debt these theoretical projects owe to marginalized and racialized populations in struggle. Henri Lefebvre’s theory of autogestion is developed as a mediator between the two books, and as a way to engage their theories through the eyes of a more obviously spatial and Marxist thinker.

Decolonization in the Heart of Empire: Some Fanonian Echoes in France Today

 by Stefan Kipfer, Antipode, 2011 (Click here to download this paper in pdf.)

This paper offers a translation of key texts by the contemporary Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR) and its key intellectuals: Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja. Following Khiari, post-colonial situations are best understood as recompositions: territorially mediated re-articulations of colonial pasts with other social relations. To respond to the complexities of this post-colonial recomposition, MIR propose an ambitious politics of “autonomy” and “mixity”. “Autonomy” (externally in relationship to the state and organized politics and internally for feminist groups) is seen as an indispensable precondition for a socio-politically mixed, and potentially universalizing, political formation politics. More counter-colonial than post-colonial in orientation (Hallward), MIR attempt to give direction to three decades of revolt emanating from France's racialized popular neighbourhoods, including the uprising of 2005. I argue that MIR's interventions take up themes from the analyses by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire to make countercolonial critique “live” in France today.

Grassroots Political Militants: Banlieusards and Politics

By Emilio Quadrelli, Mute Magazine, 2007

French cities burst back into flames after President Sarkozy’s election on a ‘clean the scum off the streets with a high-pressure hose’ ticket. It won't be the last time, as long as the factors necessitating the mass revolt of November 2005 remain in place, in France and elsewhere. This text, based on Emilio Quadrelli's interviews in the Paris banlieues during and after the 2005 events, overthrows the whole spectrum of slurs against the racialised, pathologised racaille. The myth of an all-boy riot is trashed by female combatant leaders, and leftist commonplaces incur special scorn, above all those about the inarticulate cry for help of the ‘socially excluded’