Marginality, ethnicity and penality in the neo-liberal city: an analytic cartography

Abstract

This article draws an analytic map of the research programme pursued across my three books Urban Outcasts (2008), Punishing the Poor (2009) and Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (in press). In this trilogy, I disentangle the triangular nexus of class fragmentation, ethnic division and state-crafting in the polarizing city at century's turn to explain the political production, socio-spatial distribution and punitive management of marginality through the wedding of disciplinary social policy and neutralizing criminal justice. I signpost how I deployed key notions from Pierre Bourdieu (social space, bureaucratic field, symbolic power) to clarify categories left hazy (such as the ghetto) and to forge new concepts (territorial stigmatization and advanced marginality, punitive containment and liberal paternalism, hyper-incarceration and negative sociodicy) as tools for the comparative sociology of the unfinished genesis of the post-industrial precariat, the penal regulation of poverty in the age of diffusing social insecurity, and the building of the neo-liberal Leviathan.