Urban Insurrection Research Articles

Cracking buildings, cracking capitalism: antagonism, affect, and the importance of squatting for housing justice

In this paper I argue that squatting provides a concrete and theoretical location for dismantling binaries between successful and failed resistance. Focusing on the development of a political and affective consciousness and the inherent antagonism within squatting above the temporality of an individual squat or occupation helps to recentre the ‘urban political’ and understand the value and power of the urban commons. I combine radical democracy and affect theory to argue for the centrality of squatting in challenging urban capitalist hegemony. Not only does squatting transform consciousness, but the physically and emotionally supportive practices that it engenders helps to return the emotive as well as the political to the urban environment. I support this claim with reference to the successful 2015 Aylesbury occupation in London, which the occupiers approached with affective solidarity and a desire to reclaim space through antagonistic urban insurrection.

The Precinct of the Dead and Saints for the Nation: The Bolivian National Revolution and Gualberto Villarroel, 1943-1956

This article focuses on Major Gualberto Villarroel’s dictatorship in Bolivia (1943-1946), his murder, and the reanimation of his memory as a Bolivian national hero by the MNR party or Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement). This nationalist party forged out of the crucible of the Chaco War, between Bolivia and Paraguay during 1932-1935, was an important factor in Bolivian politics throughout the twentieth century and initially came to power through an urban insurrection in April 1952. The article specifically uses the case of Gualberto Villarroel to explore why some national heroes are missing from the La Paz cemetery, how the MNR chose to commemorate the Revolution of 1952 and Villarroel’s martyrdom for the MNR in 1946, and how the MNR used those events to colonize urban space, to shape collective memory, and to silence popular historical actors. The MNR’s choice in making Villarroel a martyr required a revision of historical reality.

Rebel Cities: Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution, by Mike Rapport

One of the major transitions in Europe during the early modern period was the transfer of large-scale popular unrest from the countryside to the city. The great peasant uprisings of the medieval period were increasingly overshadowed by the threat of urban insurrection, of which the storming of the Bastille in 1789 was the exemplar. As cities grew in size, states became vulnerable to the threat of urban insurrection and political revolution in their capitals or other major urban centres. Mike Rapport has chosen to explore three of the urban contexts which shaped the ‘Atlantic world’ in the late eighteenth century, Paris, London and New York, seeing them as at the frontier of a new politics in which rapidly growing city populations could threaten the political control of governments. The author’s principal concern is to demonstrate the way in which the topography and layout of individual cities facilitated protest; in particular, how ‘in all the political ferment of the later eighteenth century, the spaces and buildings in these cities both symbolically and physically became places of conflict’. He argues that ‘the cityscape itself became part of the experience of revolution and may even have helped to shape its cause’.

Theorizing the Politicizing City

ABSTRACTThis introductory symposium article develops a framework for an urban political reading and a theorization of urban uprisings. We argue that there is a need to foreground the notion of the urban political as central to the theoretical and practical demands of urban research today. First, we revisit critical urban theory in light of recent urban insurrections and point out a lack of sustained theoretical engagement with the political. Second, based on this critique, we argue for what we call a ‘re‐centring of the urban political' to rethink urban theory in ways that consider the city as a site of political encounter, interruption and experimentation, even when, or perhaps especially when, these ways fall outside institutional forms or lack the organizational form or legitimacy of social movements. Thus, we attempt to place politics at the heart of radical urban political theory and practice today in order to make sense of urban subjects, events and claims that elude established government practices and institutionalized structures.

Thesis 11 at 40 years

As the second longest serving editor of Dialectical Anthropology (after founder Stanley Diamond), I begin this reflection with some personal context on what Dialectical Anthropology means to me and hopefully also to my profession. Marxists often speak of a permanent ‘‘crisis of capitalism.’’ But I grew up in one of those rare moments when there did not appear to be a crisis: the golden age of capitalism, or the three decades after the second inter-imperialist war. Born in 1963, the penultimate year of the baby boom, my childhood involved endless gratitude for the prosperity, economic expansion, and fabulous wealth of American capitalism. We had the expectation that each year would be better than the last so that by the year 2000 scarcity would be conquered, cities would have moving sidewalks, and we would all only work a few hours a week. There were terrible upheavals out there, such as the killing of almost three million people to prevent national healthcare in Vietnam, and similar horrors and absurdities in dozens of other countries, as well there were urban insurrections in the USA. However, these events were somehow not the symptoms of a crisis, but punctuation marks in a golden sentence. What is so strange is that this was, in fact, the one period during the last 100 years when government officials, their intellectual helpmates and their big

Hope in Dystopian Times: In the Heart of the Valley of Love and the Limits of Cold War Racial Liberal Ocularcentrism

This essay situates Cynthia Kadohata’s 1992 novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love alongside the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission Report) to explore the afterlife and the counterlives of US Cold War racial politics. Scholars have argued that the Cold War was characterized by a marked interest from the emerging liberal state to address an ongoing racial crisis, most notably signaled by the 1960s urban riots. Rather than simply approach the Kerner Report as state policy that resolved urban crisis, this essay reads the report as a dystopian text that cultivated an antiracist mode of perception through an affect of fear that fixed acts of “seeing” race through bodily difference and urban space. Subsequently, I study how In the Heart ’s critical dystopia provides alternative modes of perception to engage with the vexed role of visibility as a regulative and emancipatory force. By positioning Kadohata’s critical dystopia against the logics of the Kerner Report, I rethink the genre to invigorate the politics of visuality and hope for retheorizing urban insurrection, cross-racial solidarity, and antiblack racism.

Virtues of Violence

This is a performance of statements/records/made up lies.We collected testimonies that spoke of some of the violences that we are facing—from Greece and Turkey—but these glimpses of frustration, bruising, broken dreams are evident everywhere, with different masks and excuses: “neoliberalism”/“extremism”/“unionism.” All have the common suggestion: that this is how we play the game.The mediated moral panic about urban insurrections demonstrates how insidious representations of violence are at once everyday and ideologically driven. This text of a performance lecture offers an intimate, embodied consideration of the problem of violence and its representations. The texts from each city (Athens and Istanbul) became scripts for presenting and representing the ways public and private, nation and terror, Self and Other are negotiated. We investigated the nature of violence in protests in both cities with the aim of presenting the findings through performance.

Folklore, Urban Insurrection, and the Killing of the Black Hero in the Turn of the Century South

Folklore, Urban Insurrection, and the Killing of the Black Hero in the Turn of the Century South

Building a housewife's paradise: gender, politics, and American grocery stores in the twentieth century

Supermarkets are a mundane feature in the landscape, but as Tracey Deutsch reveals, they represent a major transformation in the ways that Americans feed themselves. In her examination of the history of food distribution in the United States, Deutsch demonstrates the important roles that gender, business, class, and the state played in the evolution of American grocery stores. Deutsch's analysis reframes shopping as labor and embeds consumption in the structures of capitalism. The supermarket, that icon of postwar American life, emerged not from straightforward consumer demand for low prices, Deutsch argues, but through government regulations, women customers' demands, and retailers' concerns with financial success and control of the shop floor. From small neighborhood stores to huge corporate chains of supermarkets, Deutsch traces the charged story of the origins of contemporary food distribution, treating topics as varied as everyday food purchases, the sales tax, postwar celebrations and critiques of mass consumption, and 1960s and 1970s urban insurrections. Demonstrating connections between women's work and the history of capitalism, Deutsch locates the origins of supermarkets in the politics of twentieth-century consumption.

Women's Organisations and the Politics of Gender in Cuba's Urban Insurrection (1952-1958)

This article sheds new light on Cuba's urban insurrection to oust Fulgencio Batista by focusing on two all-women's anti-Batista groups. It charts the origins and developments of the groups, explores their conceptions about the importance of women's political action and examines the impact that participating in the insurrection had on group members. The article complicates long-standing assumptions about women's low levels of participation in the insurrection and the absence of demands for gender equity among those who did participate by noting that some older women militants had histories with the feminist movement of the 1930s, and that many younger women were forced by the circumstances of the insurrection to confront and challenge contemporary gender norms.

Taking the bait: Maoists and the democratic lure in Nepal

After leading a tumultuous revolutionary people's war for a decade, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has slithered into a peace process and is being egged on to put the revolution to the vote. Maoists themselves are sending mixed signals about whether or not they are going to take the democratic bait to save the “beautiful” democratic, peace process from the “beastly” people's war, urban insurrection and revolution. My contention is that unless the lie of the liberal political process is identified in its most democratic, free and fair forms and not just in its secret, conspiratorial underside, the Maoists might be lured into an unbalanced democratic game. The article argues that the Maoists were not just pushed into this political process by force of circumstance, as the best possible option, “given the international and national situation,” but it seems to follow from their flawed understanding that the present political process constitutes a progressive phase in the path to a New Democratic society. The Maoists are, of course, not abandoning the revolution as such but they are possibly metamorphosing from revolution-embodied to speaking in the name of the revolution – perhaps with the added risk of transforming the revolution itself to just a name.

'Song of Myself' and the class struggle in language

This article examines 'Song of Myself' as, in Whitman's own words, a " language experiment.' Whitman's poetry struck contemporaries like Charles Eliot Norton as a strange "compound' or mixture of high and low styles: of New England transcendentalism and "New York rowdyism.' In this article, I argue that such linguistic mixtures function not as the sign of "democratic' fusion or 'heteroglossia,' but of class antagonism. Whitman's strategy of juxtaposing elevated and common languages is the legacy of his involvement with the radical-democratic 'Locofoco' movement of the 1830s, political activity in which he attacked aristocratic pretension and rights of ownership. The article examines a series of linguistic-political clashes in 'Song of Myself': between the languages of Concord transcendentalism and carpentry, Augustan decorum and sensational fiction, opera and urban insurrection. Whitman's satiric intent is to deflate the high and elevate the low, but his position is made problematic by his position as a lower-middle-class autodidact: while he wants to ridicule elite culture he also needs its glow of distinction.

Insurgency theory and the conflict in Algeria: A theoretical analysis

In the early nineties it was widely feared that Algeria was on the verge of an Islamic revolution. These fears proved to be unfounded. This article seeks to explain the failure of the insurgency to topple the current government through the use of three models of successful insurgency movements: urban insurrection, peasant‐based guerrilla warfare and focoism. Analysis shows that the first two of these models cannot be applied to the situation in Algeria because of the nature of the Algerian topography, the lack of foreign sanctuaries for the insurgents and the authoritarian nature of the Algerian regime. The single success of the third model is a historical anomaly, unlikely to lead to the overthrow of the current Algerian government, but leading to a fourth and final model; urban terror. It is the clandestine nature of this fourth model which provides for the longevity of the current insurgency, yet because of its inability to meaningfully challenge the state, gain recruits, and maintain centralized control over the movement, the insurgency degenerates, perpetrating the seemingly senseless acts of violence currently occurring in Algeria today, the natural aftermath of a failed insurgency.

Anarchism and Illegality in Barcelona, 1931–7

A century ago Friedrich Engels reflected that if a European league for barricade-building was established, Barcelona would emerge in top position. The same deep rebellious traditions of the Catalan capital prompted the English hispanophile Gerald Brenan to describe Barcelona as ‘the most revolutionary city in Europe’. The 1930s confirmed this reputation: during the years assessed in this article barricades were thrown up in the working-class districts of Barcelona on at least eight different occasions. What is interesting, however, is that although the local authorities and business groups were understandably perturbed by the threat of social mobilisation, the proven capacity of the security forces to contain the challenge of the barricades meant that the danger of urban insurrection was not the greatest continuing worry of the ‘law-and-order’ lobby. Instead, the dominant concern of the self-proclaimed ‘lovers of order’ in Barcelona was the wave of armed illegality (atracaments) which rocked the city throughout the 1930s.1

Trade Cohesion, Class Unity, and Urban Insurrection: Artisanal Activism in the Paris Commune

Sociologists and historians generally agree that working-class protest in 19th-century France relied on the close-knit networks and corporate solidarity of artisanal trades. But urban uprisings invariably mobilized workers from a broad range of trades, a fact which some scholars have interpreted as evidence of growing class consciousness among French workers. This article shows that social organization within trade groups cannot account for insurgency in the Paris Commune: workers from close-knit occupational groups participated at lower rates than those in weakly organized trades. The reason was that Parisian workers were mobilized for insurgency through neighborhood networks, not through their membership in craft groups. The disappearance of trade boundaries during insurrections did not, therefore, reflect the emergence of class unity, but rather a shift from trade to neighborhood as the organizational framework for the mobilization of protest.

The "Rebellion of the Barrios": Urban Insurrection in Bourbon Quito

The "Rebellion of the Barrios": Urban Insurrection in Bourbon Quito

The “Rebellion of the Barrios”: Urban Insurrection in Bourbon Quito

IN 1765, one of the longest, largest, and most formidable urban insurrections of eighteenth-century Spanish America occurred in Quito. Throughout that year, the city was affected by a conflict which touched virtually every level of its society, shook the foundations of government, and eventually required a military expedition fully to restore royal authority. It was not the only challenge to government authority to occur in the Audiencia of Quito during the eighteenth century: there were other incidents of civil disorder of varying proportions and potency, mainly from among the large Indian population of the Ecuadorian highlands.' But in terms of its scale, duration, and the directness of the challenge that it presented to the colonial government, the insurrection of the capital city was without precedent or parallel. The Quito was, moreover, a significant episode in the history of late colonial Spanish America, for it was the first of the major insurrections provoked by the Caroline reforms of the later eighteenth century and one which, in some respects, prefigured the later rebellions of the Comuneros in New Granada and Tulpac Amaru in Peru. Yet, like much else in the history of Ecuador, the Quito has attracted relatively little attention from historians. In Ecuadorian historiography-where it has become known as the rebellion of the barrios and is regarded as an early avatar of independence-the events of 1765 have never been fully reconstructed, and analysis of their significance has been confined within a national framework.2 The only recent work has been that

Internal Strife and Unrest in Later Byzantium, XIth-XIIIth Centuries (A.D. 1025-1261). The Case of Urban and Provincial Insurrections (Causes and Effects)

<p> </p><p>Ἀλέξιος Γ. Κ. Σαββίδης</p><p> Ἐσωτερικὲς Διαμάχες καὶ Ἀνωμαλίες στὸ Ὕστερο Βυζάντιο, 11ος-13ος αἰ. (1025-1261 μ.Χ.). Ἡ Περίπτωση τῶν Ἀστικῶν καὶ Ἐπαρχιακῶν Κινημάτων (Αἴτια καὶ Ἀποτελέσματα) </p><p>Βασισμένη στὶς βυζαντινὲς πηγὲς τῆς ἐποχῆς (Κεκαυμένος, Θεοφύλακτος Ἀχρίδας, Νικήτας καὶ Μιχαὴλ Χωνιάτες, Γεώργιος Ἀκροπολίτης, Θεόδωρος Σκουταριώτης, Νικηφόρος Βλεμμύδης, κ.ἄ.) καθὼς καὶ σέ χρήσιμα πορίσματα νεότερων ἐρευνητῶν (Δ. Ξανάλατου, Δ. Ζακυθηνοῦ, G. Ostrogorsky, Α. Kazhdan, Ἰ. Καραγιαννόπουλου, M. Angold, Sp. Vryonis, Ἑλένης Γλύκατζη-Άρβελέρ, Καλλιόπης Μπουρδάρα, κ.ἄ.), ἡ παρούσα μελέτη ἐπιχειρεῖ σφαιρικὴ ἐξέταση τοῦ προβλήματος τῶν ἐσωτερικῶν ἀνωμαλιῶν ποὺ ἐπικράτησαν στὸ Βυζάντιο ἀπὸ τὸ θάνατο τοῦ Βασιλείου Β' Βουλγαροκτόνου ὥς τὴν ἀνακατάληψη τῆς Κωνσταντινούπολης ἀπὸ τὸν Μιχαὴλ Η' Παλαιολόγο. Ἡ ἐξέταση αὐτὴ γίνεται μέσα στὰ γνωστὰ πλαίσια τῆς ὕπαρξης μιᾶς μακρόχρονης ἐμφύλιας διαμάχης ἀνάμεσα στὴν ἀστική γραφειοκρατία καὶ τὴν ἐπαρχιακὴ στρατιωτικὴ ἀριστοκρατία, φαινόμενο ποὺ κυριάρχησε στὴν πολιτικὴ καὶ κοινωνικὴ ζωὴ τοῦ βυζαντινοῦ κράτους, ἰδιαίτερα κατὰ τὸν 11ο αἰ.</p><p>Τὸ βασικὸ θέμα τῆς μελέτης, δηλ. τὰ αἴτια καὶ ἀποτελέσματα ποὺ χαρακτήριζαν τὰ στασιαστικὰ καὶ τὰ αὐτονομιστικὰ κινήματα στὴν αὐτοκρατορία κατὰ τὴν ἐξεταζόμενη περίοδο (δηλ. ἐκεῖνα πού στρέφονταν κατά τῆς κεντρικής ἐξουσίας μὲ ἄμεσο στόχο τους τὴν ἀνατροπὴ τοῦ αὐτοκράτορα καὶ τὸ σφετερισμὸ τῆς ἐξουσίας, καὶ ἐκεῖνα<strong> </strong>κατὰ τὰ ὁποῖα<strong> </strong>οί κινηματίες αὐτοανακηρύσσονταν ανεξάρτητοι άπο τήν κεντρικὴ ἐξουσία, χωρὶς πάντως νὰ ἐπιδιώκουν τὸν ἐκθρονισμὸ τοῦ ἡγεμόνα καὶ τὴν ἀνατροπὴ τοῦ status quo στὴν αὐτοκρατορία), ἔχει πρόσφατα μελετηθεῖ ἀπὸ τὸ συγγραφέα στὴ διδακτορική του διατριβή, εἰδικότερα γιὰ τὴν περίοδο τῶν Ἀγγέλων, τῶν Λασκαριδῶν τῆς Νίκαιας καὶ τῶν Μεγαλοκομνηνῶν τῆς Τραπεζούντας.</p>Στὸ τέλος τῆς μελέτης παρατίθεται λεπτομερὴς συγκριτικὸς πίνακας τῶν κινημάτων τῆς περιόδου 1025-1261, ὅπου αναφέρονται οἱ κινηματίες (σὲ χρονολογική σύγκριση μὲ τὶς βασιλεῖες τῶν αὐτοκρατόρων), οἱ χρονολογίες τοῦ κάθε κινήματος, ὁ τόπος ἐκδήλωσής του, τὸ εἶδος του (π.χ. στασιαστικό, αυτονομιστικό, συνωμοτικό, κ.ἄ.), ἐνῶ παράλληλα ἀναφέρεται καὶ ἡ κοπὴ νομισμάτων (ὅπου καὶ ὅταν ἔγινε) ἐκ μέρους τῶν κινηματιῶν αὐτῶν.

Mobilisation without emancipation? Women's interests, state and revolution in Nicaragua

The fall of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in July 1979 could not have been achieved without the mass urban insurrections which brought the capital, Managua, and other key cities under the increasing control of the revolutionary forces. This was the culmination of a process of growing popular opposition characterised by the incorporation of a wide cross-section of the population into political activity.

Review of E. V. Chistiakova, Urban Insurrections in Russia in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century (30s and 40s)

The book by E. V. Chistiakova, who holds the degree of doctor of historical sciences and is professor at Lumumba University of the Friendship of the Peoples, is the first general study covering the very important insurrections during the first half of the seventeenth century in cities across the entire territory of Russia — in the center (Moscow), the southern part of the country (Voronezh, Kozlov, Kursk, Chelnavskii and Talitskii Ostrog, Elets, Livny, and a number of fortresses), in Pomor'e (Sol'Vychegodskaia, Ustiug Velikii, Viatka, and others), and in Siberia (Tomsk, Kuznetsk, Eniseiskii Ostrog, Narym, Verkhotur'e). The book examines the movement not only of the townspeople [posadskie liudi] but also of other urban population categories — craft service people [sluzhilye liudi po priboru], petty nobility, boyar sons, and also peasants, who either joined urban risings they supported or rose independently, in which case the townsfolk were their allies. For this reason Chistiakova concludes, following A. A. Novosel'skii and M. N. Tikhomirov, that the urban movements of the first half of the seventeenth century could more correctly be called popular movements. She draws this conclusion on the basis of broader factual data than her precursors. (1)