Jeff Maskovsky’s research while affiliated with The Graduate Center, CUNY and other places

I propose a dialogue between new abolitionist approaches and black feminist theory on the one hand and anticapitalist critical urban social theory on the other. This dialogue has great potential to advance approaches that unhide the death dealing logics that shape city‐making and also to identify and amplify the emancipatory potentialities and forms of cultural, social, economic, and political improvisation that can lead us to more positive futures.

This article explores the political consequences of four decades of consistent humiliation of the poor by the most authoritative voices in the land, and offers insights into ways that new movements are creating spaces for poor people’s political voices to surface and become relevant again. Our specific concern is the challenge that the current humiliation regime poses to those who seek to revive radical, disruptive and fractious anti‐poverty activism and politics. By humiliation regime, we mean a form of political violence that maltreats those classified popularly and politically as “the poor” by treating them as undeserving of citizenship, rights, public goods or resources, and, importantly, that seeks to delegitimate them as political actors. Our article demonstrates the historical importance of authoritative voices in inspiring political unrest involving poor and working people, charts the depoliticising effects of poverty politics and governance since the 1980s, and highlights the new political possibilities that are surfacing now not just to defeat the very dangerous political forms of Trumpism and the new white nationalism but that seek as well to create something that looks like justice, freedom and equality. We insist on the importance of loud and fractious poor people’s politics and call on scholars to direct attention to the incipient political potentialities of poor people today.

Gavin Smith’s (2014) Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics is a tour de force. It calls for anthropology to attend more carefully to the history of moves by the dominant capitalist blocs to enhance the conditions for their own reproduction and to the ways in which different subordinated and subaltern groups respond to these moves. This is, of course, a well-established line of inquiry. Yet, in Intellectuals, Smith breathes new life into an intellectual project that has been sidelined in recent years, as other preoccupations take hold in the discipline of anthropology and beyond. Smith rethinks what is meant by realist history, arming a new generation of insurgent scholars, readers, and activists, inside and outside the academy with a new set of intellectual priorities. The book thus exemplifies the best kind of politicized writing in anthropology and in other disciplines.

This article focuses on the emergence of a new pattern of black urban insurgency emerging in major US metropolitan areas such as Philadelphia. I locate this pattern in the context of a new securitization regime that I call “antisocial security.” Th is regime works by establishing a decentered system of high-tech forms of surveillance and monitory techniques. I highlight the dialectic between the extension of antisocial security apparatuses and techniques into new political and social domains on the one hand and the adoption of these same techniques by those contesting racialized exclusions from urban public space on the other. I end the article with a discussion of how we might adapt the commons concept to consider the centrality of race and racism to this new securitization regime.

This article explains Donald Trump’s brutal political effectiveness in terms of his white nationalist appeal. It locates the intellectual, popular, and policy imperatives of Trumpism in a new form of racial politics that I am calling white nationalist postracialism. This is a paradoxical politics of twenty-first-century white racial resentment whose proponents seek to do two contradictory things: to reclaim the nation for white Americans while also denying an ideological investment in white supremacy. The article shows how Trump’s excoriation of political correctness, his nostalgia for the post–WWII industrial economy, his use of hand gestures, and his public speaking about race work together to telegraph a white nationalist message to his followers without making them feel that he is, or they are, racist. I end the article by explaining why I think that Donald Trump’s embrace of many white nationalist ideological precepts—if not quite yet of white nationalism as a fully realized political project—makes good political sense in the twenty-first-century United States.

This chapter explores the limits and limitations of the concept of “the neoliberal city” for our understanding of contemporary urban governance. It begins with a brief historical account of the neoliberalization of the city. It then presents three ways of conceptualizing urban neoliberalism: as a global class project; as an articulation of “actually existing” metropolitan political and governmental forces and arrangements; and as an unstable metropolitan political and governmental project that seeks, but often fails, to achieve hegemonic status. The third part of this chapter reviews ethnographic case material that illustrates the necessity of using the concept of neoliberalism in a careful and nuanced manner when analyzing urban governance. The chapter concludes by discussing the limits and limitations of the neoliberal city paradigm, and argues that it is critical to theorize the neoliberal city without suggesting that its proponents have advanced their projects in stable, unitary or uncontested contexts, or that there is a singular, overarching view or account of what it is.

ABSTRACT In this review essay, I explore today's protest anthropology, the high‐stakes domain of professional and political practice in which anthropologists are not just aligned with protest movements, revolts, and uprisings but are also full‐fledged participants in them. Focusing on examples from the Occupy Movement, I discuss the promises and perils of taking a protest stance. I argue that, despite the risks, protest anthropology has the power to unsettle many of the current‐day knowledge‐producing practices in the discipline.

There is no doubt that neoliberalism is having profoundly harmful effects on the academy and the world at large, and that it constitutes a major ideological and material project to which the academic Left must respond. Many academics have done so by, for example, opposing the advent of consumerist, market-driven learning; the privatization, corporatization, and branding of the university; the decline in public spending on higher education; the speed-up of the academic assembly line; audit culture; outcomes assessment and other efficiency-oriented interventions; and the casualization of academic labor, to name several developments that can be usefully glossed as neoliberal.1 Yet targeting neoliberalism for critique raises some significant theoretical and political challenges. Where does neoliberalism begin and end? What, and where, are its limits? How has it influenced academia? How does it interact with other political projects that influence academia and public intellectualism today? To my mind, these questions have a direct bearing on how we conceptualize the current relation between academia and activism. If exciting new protest movements, such as Occupy the University, are to effectively challenge business-as-usual on college campuses, they will have to grapple with the ways that neoliberal economic imperatives have undermined the idea of the “free university.” They will also have to invent new programs that deepen democracy and that decommodify academic (and other) spaces.2 Yet we should be careful not to overstate the omnipotence of neoliberalism or to exclude from our attention other forms of power, authority, and government. Major power dynamics can be overlooked when the concept is used without a great deal of nuance.3 For example, recent public university budget cuts are but one expression of a new austerity that has swept across the United States (and Europe) in the aftermath of the 2007 economic meltdown. Although it is tempting to gloss these developments as part of a broader neoliberal assault on public education, including public universities, the austerity measures that states have adopted are a direct consequence of the Tea Party’s right-wing (not neoliberal) populism. This populism outflanked Obama’s centrist pragmatism in the wake of the failure of neoliberal economic orthodoxy to guarantee economic growth and social welfare in the long term. As this example suggests, neoliberalism’s limits, limitations, and failures create spaces for other political projects to succeed, affecting the academy in ways we should not disregard. In fact, acknowledging the variety of political and governing projects—from the libertarian to the neoconservative, to the social democratic, among others—that circulate inside and outside the academy seems crucial if we are to properly account for the broader landscape in which academics operate, and to which we may wish to respond politically. What seems necessary today in fact is much harder than contesting a generalized “neoliberalism.” Instead, we must grapple with an unstable and contradictory scene in which no one project is hegemonic. Three interconnected crises that influence academia-activist dynamics deserve our attention. First is the crisis of delegitimation affecting the academy, a crisis that reflects neoconservative politics as much as or more than neoliberalism. The demands of consumer-oriented teaching, the destructive effects of the academic “star” system, and the wider academic employment crisis are among many developments that limit academics’ capacity to participate in social justice work. Yet we must remember that these challenges emerged alongside the New Right’s attack on “ivory tower” elitism. Indeed, the New Right has been particularly effective at putting the academic Left on the defensive with its politically disabling portrayal of academics as overly privileged “tenured radicals” whose romance with the counterculture and overzealous pursuit of “illiberal” causes such as affirmative action, multiculturalism, and political correctness corrupts the academy and undermines the quality of higher education. So too has its use of think tanks and other nonacademic institutional contexts from which to launch attacks on the academy and challenge academic findings. We must acknowledge also recent right-wing attempts to intervene directly in tenure decisions, to record and publicize controversial lectures and public statements by academics whom they oppose, to organize and coordinate cross-campus student groups, and to endow chairs at esteemed institutions of higher education. Second is the crisis...