Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 2004. New York. Penguin Books. 448 pages. ISBN: 0143035592 (paper).

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Planet of slums

Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is not everywhere the same. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'.

Urban Outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality

Historians and social scientists analyzing the contemporary world unfortunately have too little contact and hence miss some of the ways that their interests overlap and the research of one field might benefit another. I am, therefore, extremely grateful that the Journal of Consumer Research has invited me to share with its readers an overview of my recent research on the political and social impact of the flourishing of mass consumption on twentieth-century America. What follows is a summary of my major arguments, enough to entice you, I hope, to read A Consumers' Republic (Cohen 2003), in which I elaborate on these themes. Although this essay is by necessity schematic, the book itself is filled with extensive historical evidence and is heavily illustrated with period images. In tracing the growing importance of mass consumption to the American economy, polity, culture, and social landscape from the 1920s to the present, I in many ways establish the historical context for your research into contemporary consumer behavior and markets. I hope you will …

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A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

The overarching theme of this book is that neoliberal policies were the main reason for the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Specifically, it is argued that pro-market reforms adversely shaped the preconditions of the disaster, as well as the government’s response. The volume contains contributors from a variety of disciplines including: sociology, political science, education, public policy, and media theory. Although each of the contributors approaches their topic from their own unique disciplinary perspective, each chapter remains within the boundaries of the overarching theme of the book. The twelve chapters are broken into four sections—(1) Governance, (2) Urbanity, (3) Planning, and (4) Inequality—and cover topics ranging from racial politics, inequality and the exclusion of disenfranchised groups, the impact of neoliberalism on communities, public housing, and gender issues, among others. Let me first touch upon what I view as the main positive aspect of the volume. There is no arguing that Hurricane Katrina was a devastating event that caused a significant loss of life and property. There is also no arguing that the government failed in disaster preparation, response, and recovery. From this standpoint, a volume such as this is welcome, since it is crucial to understand the factors that played a role in this failure. That said, I ultimately find the volume to be unsatisfying and incomplete. I will focus my comments on what I see as the book’s four most significant weaknesses.

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The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans

Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics

This essay examines the humanitarian design movement's efforts to address the crushing need, social precarity, and ecological frailty that define global megacities. The aims and character of the humanitarian design movement have been shaped by both the ethical demands of antiglobalization struggles and the rise of nongovernmental organizations as a principal means of social service-delivery in the Global South. The emergent humanitarian design movement offers a compelling critique of the failure of mainstream architectural and industrial design practices to address profound human suffering. Champions of humanitarian design, however, offer a technological fix (e.g., life straws, paper log houses, and hippo rollers) for problems rooted in imperial histories and neoliberal restructuring. In failing to address the dynamics of structural underdevelopment, do-good design performs the grassroots ideological work of neoliberalism by promoting market values and autoregulation. Within the humanitarian-corporate com...

The Urban Precariat, Neoliberalization, and the Soft Power of Humanitarian Design

This article examines contemporary discourses of race, gentrification, and demographic change in post-Katrina New Orleans. Although much public debate over gentrification has often centered on the displacement of black and brown communities, and the loss of neighborhood identity and cultural authenticity, this article emphasizes the underlying class interests and broader urban processes that drive rent-intensification. Without a critical analysis of political-economy and the complex roles that culture, race, and nostalgia play in place-making and real-estate valuation, we may well lose sight of how urban land development actually unfolds, and fail to devise effective public solutions that can guarantee adequate housing for all.

Gentrifying New Orleans: Thoughts on Race and the Movement of Capital

This article revisits an historic exchange between two black ex-communists, Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood, a debate that prefigured many of the central contradictions of the black-power era. Their exchange followed Cruse’s influential 1962 essay for Studies on the Left, ‘Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American’, which declared that the American Negro was a ‘subject of domestic colonialism’. Written against the prevailing liberal integrationist commitments of the civil-rights movement, his essay called for black economic and political independence, and inspired many of the younger activists who would give birth to the black-power movement. In a series of essays for the Bay Area black radical journal Soulbook, Haywood criticised Cruse’s mishandling of class politics among blacks, and his retreat from anti-capitalism. This forgotten episode is important on its own terms, for what it says about the character and limitations of left-political thinking during the sixties, and equally for understanding and contesting those commonsensical notions of African-American public life in our times which too often remain rooted in the vanished social context and political realities of the twentieth-century racial ghetto.

Cedric Johnson

Papers

The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans

Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics

The Urban Precariat, Neoliberalization, and the Soft Power of Humanitarian Design

Gentrifying New Orleans: Thoughts on Race and the Movement of Capital

Between Revolution and the Racial Ghetto