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作者

Ananya Roy , Willie J. Wright

来源

URBAN GEOGRAPHY,Vol.41,Issue6,P.920-935

语言

英文

关键字

(anti)Blackness,urban praxis,post-colonialism,Baltimore,historical difference

作者单位

摘要

On 2–3 October 2018, an interdisciplinary group of scholars and community organizers were invited to participate in “(anti)Blackness in the American Metropolis,” 2-day workshop in Baltimore, Maryland. Each shared research on the effects of anti-Blackness policies and practices in U.S. cities and place-based organizing tactics designed to address and refute them. The event sought to merge a gap in the study of urban black communities exiting between Black Studies and Geography. The event culminated in a keynote address by Dr. Ananya Roy on the political potential of forging intellectual and communal relationships across the Global South. This interview, conducted in the aftermath of the workshop, extends Dr. Roy’s address. Here, she discusses her personal and political growth, her recent intellectual interface with the Black Radical Tradition, as well as her rationale for participating in this inaugural workshop. KEYWORDS: (anti)Blacknessurban praxispost-colonialismBaltimorehistorical difference Introduction This interview engages the work of Ananya Roy, Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and Inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. In it we center Dr. Roy’s theoretical contributions to urban geography and urban studies, her transnational political commitments, and the trajectory of her future research. Dr. Roy was selected to keynote the two-day symposium, “(Anti)Blackness in the American Metropolis,” hosted November 2–3, 2018 in Baltimore, Maryland. In centering (but also bracketing) (anti)Blackness in the symposium, we aimed to follow McKittrick’s (2014) probe, “How then do we think and write and share as decolonial scholars and foster a commitment to acknowledging violence and undoing its persistent frame, rather than simply analytically reprising violence?” (p. 18). Moreover, we sought to position questions of the urban alongside explorations of Black geographies of self-reliance (see Reese, 2019), an interpolative enterprise that is seldom attempted in urban studies. Baltimore: an urban workshop Baltimore, Maryland was chosen for the site of this convention for a number of reasons. First, it was the location of one of America’s most recent urban rebellions. After the state-sanctioned murder of Freddie Gray by the Baltimore Police Department, residents of the city unleashed their frustration against the rampant police brutality assailing Black working-class residents. These feelings were compounded by decades of economic inequality, the disparate placement and impacts of environmental toxicity, and a crumbling educational infrastructure. Residents of Freddie Gray’s neighborhood, Sandtown-Winchester, have a life expectancy that is 20 years lower than residents of Baltimore’s affluent Roland Park neighborhood (Ponsot, 2015). Cartographic depictions of Baltimore’s apartheid geography clearly distinguish what Morgan State University public health scholar, Lawrence Brown, has called a “Black butterfly” from a “white L” (Brown, 2016, p. 1). Using maps from the Baltimore Development Corporation and the Baltimore Bike Master Plan, Brown has shown how generations of structural racism (de jure and de facto) have resulted in “structured advantages” and “structured disadvantages” for residents of this highly segregated city (Brown, 2016, p. 1). Despite the heightened attention the rebellion brought to the city’s derelict police force and its public health problems (e.g., high instances of lead poisoning), little has been done to improve the city’s public infrastructures or its crime-ridden police department. In addition to being a majority Black city with a recent history of rebellion, Baltimore is also a city with a rich tradition of community organizing (Fee et al., 1993; McDougall, 1993). Prominent radical organizations in the city today include the grassroots thinktank, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, a local worker-owned cooperative, café and radical bookstore called Red Emma’s, the alternative news organization The Real News Network, and United Workers. We also chose Baltimore in the hopes of addressing blindspots in the programming of professional meetings within geography. We wanted to curate a space that would be different, in a physical, political, and affective sense from mainstream forums for intellectual exchange. When we initially planned the gathering, Yousuf was an Assistant Professor at Goucher College. His placement in Baltimore was influential in facilitating our contact with local organizers, scholars, vendors and venues. Rather than issuing a call for papers around chosen themes, scholars and community organizers were hand-selected for specific panels. Topics covered included “(Dis)placement and (Dis)possession,” “Traversing, Laboring and Surviving in the City,” “The Carceral Continuum and Returning Urban Citizens,” “Global Capitalism, Local Cooperatives,” “Municipal Movements and Public Policy,” and “Urban Political Ecology.” The hope was to bring into conversation a cross-section of research and praxis on Black geographies and to demonstrate that some of the foremost work done in this regard has come from beyond the discipline of geography, and at times, from beyond the university itself (Conway & Stevenson, 2011; Pietila, 2010; Rodriguez, 2016; Summers, 2019; Wang, 2018; Wright, 2019). Furthermore, we sought to avoid the disruptive and disrespectful exchanges prevalent in academic spaces where performative displays of knowledge often obstructs collaborative thinking and problem-solving. Challenging the dominant masculinist competition over ideas, the two-day gathering was a conversation among comrades – a humble effort at generating a better understanding of the urban policies and processes that challenge Black communal development, all-the-while, highlighting the efforts of civic and political organizations working to create equitable urban spaces. Global networks of (anti)Blackness The symposium theme of (anti)Blackness governs each of our field experiences and those of residents in our respective field sites. We each conduct work in and on cities throughout the Global South (e.g., Jackson, Salvador, and Durban) with political histories that are deeply impacted by global examples of anti-Blackness and local rebellions (Gilmore, 1993; Marx, 1998; Wilson, 2019). Our research explores how the exploitation of Black communities actually contributes to the economic and psychic health of civil society. By civil society we mean both the socio-cultural institutional spaces where a protracted “war of position” might be fought (Gramsci, 1985; Wilderson, 2003) and the socio-spatial community, as it is discussed by Lefebvre (1991). Our research interrogates the ways Blackness surfaces as a component central to but devoid of the inherent benefits of this society. As South African shack dweller and community leader S’bu Zikode argues, “Voting did not work for us. The political parties did not work for us. Civil society did not work for us … We have no choice but to take our own place in the cities and in the political life of the country” (Ballard, 2015, p. 214). For generations, Detroiters have withstood and resisted the direct impacts of anti-Black austerity measures (e.g., blockbusting, mob violence, de jure housing discrimination). The racial capitalist extraction of Black Detroiters from experiencing the largesse of civil society was perhaps most prominent during the city’s auto boom and wartime eras, times during which Black families were redlined out of the suburban housing market (Sugrue, 1996) and Black workers were restricted from factory work and the unions responsible for protecting workers’ rights (Meier & Rudwick, 1979). The installation of emergency management procedures in a number of majority Black cities, water shut offs in Detroit, the poisoning of Flint’s water supply, and the racialized revitalization of Detroit’s city core from a place of ruin (see Apel, 2015) to a space of (white) life are symptoms of this trend of anti-Black austerity urbanism. Jacksonians have also suffered racialized economic extractions much to the benefit of white Mississippians. The Civil Rights Movement in Jackson, at its apex, was a movement for human rights and equal access to city and state services denied Black southerners. The denial of the civil rights (e.g., via voting) and human rights (e.g., via lynching) of Black Mississippians were anti-Black austerity measures designed to elevate civil society as a political-economic, juri-political, and socio-spatial place of white families. Past attempts at austerity have carried over into the present as Republican legislators have gestured toward using legislative measures (see Senate Bill 2162, 2016) to usurp the city of Jackson’s services and holdings. Had it been passed, the legislation euphemistically known as the “airport takeover bill” would have fiscally handicapped the city and politically hampered the progressive Lumumba government – limiting the mayor to one appointee on a nine-member airport commission (Dreher, 2016). Our desire to engage urban (anti)Black realities in this workshop also drew from the centrality of (anti)Blackness to past and present political developments around the world. Even in cities where Blackness is discursively celebrated (e.g., via cultural production), anti-Blackness continues to structure society. In Brazil, for example, national discourses of racial tolerance and harmony define the country despite persistent, multi-faceted forms of anti-Black violence (Bledsoe, 2015). Even in moments of nominally progressive governance – such as the 13 years (2003–2016) in which the Workers’ Party was in power – the possibilities of capitalist and state reproduction hinged on the destruction of Black populations and their lived spaces (Bledsoe, 2019a). Whereas past administrations tacitly participated in perpetuating anti-Blackness, the country’s current right-wing government legitimates itself via the overt demonization of Black communities and a promise to further police them (Bledsoe, 2019b). Thus, even when dominant discourses insist on the absence of anti-Blackness, Black struggle remains necessary to create spaces that concretely affirm Black life (Bledsoe, 2017). Given that global political trends draw on anti-Black logics and practices and that Black communities continue to organize for alternate realities, the urgency of holding an event in a city so visibly steeped in struggle was undeniable. The Baltimore uprising of 2015 was the latest iteration of a longer sequence of global urban revolt stretching back to the 1960s and beyond (Al-Bulushi, 2015). These moments of dignified rage are often caricatured as “riots” by less generous scholars or those who are actively complicit in the structures of anti-Blackness. Time and again, these revolts have opened space for radical thought and reflection. The 1965 Watts uprising profoundly shaped the ideas developed in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, just as uprisings in the Parisian banlieues in 2005 would prove foundational for The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection (Al-Bulushi, 2012). Understanding urban revolts as the “street tasks” required to complement our “intellectual tasks” (Wynter, 1994, p. 69), we must also situate them as expressions of embodied knowledge too often dismissed in formal academic spaces. Indeed, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore has remarked Indeed, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore remarked at the 2018 Conference of the American Association of Geographers, most Marxists are not white; that is, most of the world's anti-capitalists and anti-capitalist critiques have not come from the West, most Marxists are not white; that is, most of the worlds’ anti-capitalists and anti-capitalist critiques have not come from the West. With this in mind, our notions of the political must adapt and evolve as we grapple with Black communities throughout the Global South, where those living in the interstices and the underside (McKittrick & Woods, 2007) of urban space are positioned uncomfortably between precarious inclusion in, or surplus exclusion from, the circuits of global capital (Al-Bulushi, 2017; Bledsoe & Wright, 2019a; Roy, 2018). Although the symposium in Baltimore was organized to specifically address (anti)Blackness in the American metropolis, the engagement was informed by Black internationalism (Blain, 2018), transnational politics, and an acknowledgment of “the anti-Blackness of global capital” (Bledsoe & Wright, 2019a, p. 8). Given that Dr. Roy hails from India and has been profoundly shaped by the Black geographies of Oakland and Los Angeles, she was an ideal choice to keynote the conference. As her prolific written work demonstrates, and as her most recent role as the inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy exemplifies, she has pushed the boundaries of urban studies by placing questions of identity and “historical difference” – race and anti-Blackness prominent among them – at the center of her analysis. What is more, her commitment to praxis in both research and institution-building parallels our own commitment to thinking alongside the movements we have researched, whether they be progressive municipal governments in Jackson, shack dwellers in Durban, or quilombos in Salvador. We are excited to see how far afield more global forms of collective thought on Black geographies may take the discipline of geography. As we explore these possibilities, we are most fortunate to grapple with the ideas of scholars like Ananya Roy who have labored tirelessly to pry open the doors of the university to create spaces for dissident thought within and beyond its halls. It is to her reflections that we now appropriately turn. 1. Thank you for agreeing to this interview. And thank you, again, for delivering the keynote address at “(anti)Blackness in the American Metropolis”. We organized that gathering because we wanted to intersect and explore scholarship in urban geography and Black Studies, broadly speaking. The conference addressed Black urban communities in the present conjuncture of anti-Blackness, state-sanctioned violence, “austerity urbanism,” and the much longer histories of disinvestment. We also found that the most interesting overlap between these two fields occurs within the space of movements themselves, where academic disciplines and the artificial boundaries they produce rarely surface. So we hoped to create a conversation that would draw on the knowledge of movement organizers and scholars. We’d like to ask you about why you chose to participate in the symposium and what were the key insights you took away from the gathering. Thank you for the invitation to participate in, and speak at, the “(anti)Blackness in the American Metropolis” symposium. I am grateful for the work that the three of you put into conceptualizing this symposium and for all that I learned from the presentations and discussions at the symposium. It was apparent to me, from the very first description I saw, that this was not going to be the usual urban studies conference. As argued by Adam and Willie in the Society and Space article (Bledsoe & Wright, 2019a), which appeared shortly before the symposium was held, the logic of the symposium foregrounded racial capitalism, specifically anti-blackness as “a necessary precondition for the perpetuation of capitalism.” This is urgently needed in urban studies, a point I address later in this conversation. But it was also amply evident from the symposium’s program that the theorization of racial capitalism was going to be generated by movement-based scholars as well as university-based scholars. This is rare at our academic conferences. Needless to say, I was not disappointed in the symposium. This was one of the best conferences I have attended precisely because it fulfilled the two promises I just outlined. The symposium demonstrated how and why black study (I am referring here to Robin D.G. Kelley’s essay, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” 2016) is a necessary precondition for the rigorous theorization of our present historical conjuncture and for its urban transformations and processes. Second, it brought together seamlessly academic research and radical social movements. I do not use the term seamlessly to suggest that the speakers in the various symposium sessions were united in a single consensus on any of the themes under discussion. I use the term to suggest that the contradictions, dilemmas, and questions that were raised could not be easily classified as “academic” or “movement.” The seamlessness was in the creation of a shared space of what Kelley would call “black struggle,” which I interpret as struggle against dominant institutions of racial capitalism, including the university. The symposium left me with hope that this type of shared space of black struggle can be generative of a political life for urban studies. Later in this conversation, I return to this theme and provocation of the political life of urban studies, But let me also take a moment to reflect on a phrase that you use in your thoughtful introduction: the endeavor of foregrounding “research and praxis … from beyond the university itself.” There is all around us today a reckoning with the role of powerful knowledge-producing institutions – universities, museums, foundations – that perpetuate and interrupt the symbolic and epistemic logics of racial capitalism. The work of transforming the university rests on all our shoulders, especially of repairing and refusing the many forms of colonial harm that academic power continues to enact on communities that are on the frontlines of struggle in cities such as Baltimore and Los Angeles. However, alongside such institutional transformation, we need to undertake forms of learning that center research and praxis produced by movements, organizations, and communities that have not received academic recognition. The symposium was immensely important for many reasons, and especially because, it made such forms of learning possible. 2. On the first night of the symposium you shared aspects of your own geographical and educational background that we found informative and inspiring. If you would, share a little about your upbringing and how you came to study at Mills College in Oakland, California. Also, could you speak to how your residence in the Bay Area has impacted the trajectory of your scholarship and the nature of your political commitments? My interest in urban studies has been shaped by the cities I have had the privilege to call home, notably Kolkata and Oakland, and now Los Angeles. My decision to study at Mills College, a small, liberal-arts, women’s college in Oakland, was driven by two rebellions: one against systems of higher education in India and the other against middle-class Indian norms of academic success. Mills College, after all, was not a well-known university and it was as far as one could get from Kolkata. But it was there, in classes taught by an urban sociologist, Ted Thomas, that I learned to reflect on Kolkata and other cities like it. These cities, let’s call them Southern cities, did not show up in the canon which we studied. Ted knew this and repeatedly called out this silence, curious to learn about a city to which he would never travel. In my essay, “Who’s Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?,” I write about these classroom encounters thus: “Above all, each week in those seminars at Mills College, I––a new immigrant to the US (an identity I did not acknowledge until many years later)––would be asked by Thomas to explain how my native city of Calcutta related to the theories we were studying. If I were to view the scene today, I would perhaps cynically comment on the neo-Orientalism of such an invitation. But Thomas himself came from a remote corner of Canada, and I later realized that he was trying to reconcile the canon for which he was a gatekeeper with the strange urbanity of the Canadian interior. Calcutta was no more exotic than the plains of Alberta; we were both trying to make theory from the margins” (Roy, 2016b, p. 200). It was only much later that I realized that the canon in which I had been schooled, which is more or less still the canon of urban studies, could not explain Kolkata or the city in which Mills College resided: Oakland. Indeed, as I was to note in Territories of Poverty, Oakland was a marked absence in the annals of urban studies, its complex history of racial segregation and black power barely acknowledged and theorized. For me, the work, with Emma Shaw Crane and Stuart Schrader, on the “double front of pacification” in Oakland in the 1960s was an effort to educate myself about the city and to rethink what constitutes its archives (See Roy and Crane, 2015). It is also part of an ongoing intervention in urban studies to take up a postcolonial approach to the American metropolis. Thinking from Oakland, McElroy and Werth (2019) have recently argued that while the Southern turn in urban studies has demonstrated the limits of seeming universal concepts such as gentrification, the reification of such concepts continues in the analysis of cities in the West. Such theorizations, they note, obscure historical difference and produce “deracinated dispossessions, or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance” (McElroy and Werth, 2019, p. 878). Quite frankly, similar evasions and erasures are at work in the stories and histories that constitute the authoritative knowledge of Los Angeles. Schooled in urban studies, I came to Los Angeles convinced that I knew the city well. There has been so much thinking about, and from, Los Angeles. But what has been instructive is to realize that there are systematic silences in this archive of knowledge. If we are to understand Los Angeles not as a postmodern city but rather as a postcolonial city, then what must we undertake as research? For me, many of the answers to this question emerge from beyond the university. This is the research and praxis that radical social movements have been immersed in for a long time in Los Angeles, be it the exposition of racial banishment or of spatial apartheid or of the stalker state. 3. Based on your three decades of experience working in the field of urban studies, how has the field changed since you first entered it? What are some of the most exciting current directions of inquiry and praxis in urban studies? And where do you think the field still needs to do the most work in order to improve the lives of everyday people across the world? I had the opportunity to reflect on this in a keynote talk at the “Comparative Urbanism” organized by the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University last year. That conference was, for me, a visible manifestation of what may be understood to be the Southern turn in urban studies. In broad brushstrokes, that turn can be characterized as a challenge to the EuroAmerican provincialism of what often masquerades as universal urban theory. Several of us have called out the conceits of universal urban theory and called for “new geographies of theory” or a “reworlding” of the discipline (Roy, 2009, p. 2011). But as I stated at that conference, I am deeply concerned that despite the Southern turn, the epistemological and methodological foundations of urban studies remain untouched by postcolonial thought. Or feminism. Or critical race studies. Or queer geographies. These seem to remain on the margins of dominant paradigms of urban theory and are still pleading their case for relevance. They are understood as provincializing, as localizing, rather than as a reworlding. The citationary structures of urban studies might have moved just a bit but that does not mean that our epistemologies and methodologies have as well. In a recent essay titled “The Shadow of Her Wings: Respectability Politics and the Self-Narration of Geography” (Roy, 2020), which is a commentary on Natalie Oswin’s keynote talk at AAG 2019, “An/other Geography,” I argue that postcolonial scholars have become “citationary alibis,” included and cited but ultimately folded into the self-narration of geography. I designate these gestures of inclusion and integration, including the many calls for “engaged pluralism” as a “respectability politics” that depoliticizes critique. Put another way, I am concerned that theoretical frameworks that explain historical difference continue to be read and recognized as specialized fields of inquiry, such as black geographies, Latinx geographies, feminist theory, and queer theory. This shapes what I call the political life of urban studies. If this is a historical moment of renewed racialized dispossession and urban displacement, then it is also a moment of fierce social contestation and political mobilization. But what is the relationship between urban studies and these movements and organizations? A rather tenuous one, I think. Mainstream urban studies has a lot to say that is relevant to these movements and organizations but the infrastructures of solidarity and alliance seem to be missing. The fields of inquiry that are quarantined as specialized and localized are precisely those that can create a political life for urban studies. Yet, they remain on the margins. What would it mean to center these fields of inquiry in urban studies? What is the political life this would engender? I think it would enable urban studies scholarship to speak with a much louder voice on the urgent struggles around abolition, decolonization, and reparation. I think it would make possible robust frameworks of climate justice and social justice that take full account of the long histories of colonialism and imperialism. And I think it would make the mandate of transforming the university central to urban studies. At the Institute on Inequality and Democracy, my comrade, Hannah Appel, economic anthropologist and co-founder of the Debt Collective, has been deeply involved in grassroots organizing to abolish student debt as well as other forms of debt. The indebtedness of our students and the broader circuity of education capital should be a concern for all urban studies scholars, skilled as we are in the analysis of neoliberalization and austerity urbanism. Such organizing should not be on the margins of our academic work; it should be the main act. 4. You are the inaugural Director of the Institute of Inequality and Democracy. How did that Institute come to fruition? What is its mission, and what excites you about the Institute? What do you believe are your responsibilities as the first Director of the Institute, and could you also share a bit about the Institute’s recent gathering, “Housing Justice in Unequal Cities,” which one of us was fortunate to be able to attend? The Institute on Inequality and Democracy emerges from a strategic planning process at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, prior to my arrival there, that prioritized the formation of a research institute concerned with social justice. As the inaugural director of the institute, I have had considerable autonomy in determining what this might mean. In collaboration with my colleagues and in alliance with radical social movements in Los Angeles, especially those committed to abolitionism, we have defined our work as the production of research and pedagogy to challenge the urban color-lines of our time. Thinking across global North and global South, the Institute develops conceptual frameworks of dispossession and displacement and builds modes of scholarship that are concerned with the redistribution of wealth and power. Its three main research themes: Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, Debt and Predatory Financialization, and Policing and Incarceration, are underpinned by our commitment to a key methodology, which we call Decolonizing the University. I use the term “decolonizing” with all the caution it deserves. I take very seriously the crucial intervention by Tuck and Yang (2012) reminding us that “decolonization is not a metaphor” and that it is not to be conflated with social justice initiatives or even abolitionism. Our commitment to the horizon of decolonization is an explicit effort to resituate the public university, and its land-grant privileges, on stolen land. It is also my commitment as an urban planning scholar to resituate my discipline and profession within structures of white power and white innocence. In seeking to practice decolonization, we take our lead from anti-colonial struggles at key global nodes such as Brazil and South Africa, where questions of the transformation of knowledge and the transformation of universities have been central to the decolonial imperative. We also draw inspiration from Harney and Moten (2013) manifesto on fugitive planning and Black study. That vision of the undercommons has had a decisive influence on the Institute on Inequality and Democracy and we try very hard to consider what it might mean to have a criminal relationship with the settler-colonial university. At the very least, this means mobilizing the many resources we have to support the frontlines of decolonization. Earlier this year, we held a conference in Los Angeles titled “Housing Justice in Unequal Cities,” which launched a four-year global research network supported by the National Science Foundation. As was the case with your symposium, we seek to create a terrain of scholarship shared by academic research and social movements. Our particular interest is in building housing justice as a field of inquiry. This means reframing the housing question from the vantage point of housing justice struggles, such as tenant unions. And it also means taking seriously the new meanings of land, property, rights, personhood being generated by these movements. The network is committed to a transnational approach to housing justice, connecting housing scholarship in the United States with the African Center for Cities in Cape Town, the Indian Institute of Human Settlements, the Mortgaged Lives Project in Spain, and the Observatory on Evictions at the University of São Paulo. For me, one of the most exciting aspects of this endeavor has been the opportunity to consider the research methodologies that might constitute a shared terrain of scholarship across academic research and social movements. What are rigorous methodologies that allow us to study racialized dispossession and urban displacement and how do such methodologies build power for movements and campaigns? We had the opportunity to take up such questions this summer in a radical summer school that I co-taught with Raquel Rolnik. Bringing together university-based and movement-based scholars from many parts of the world, we tackled methodologies that ranged from counter-mapping to audits from below to popular plans to people’s diaries to participatory memory work to speculation watchlists. The group is now producing a resource guide on methodologies for housing justice and I encourage you to watch for it! 5. In your current work you are explicitly connecting postcolonial theory and urban studies with that of the Black Radical Tradition. Why did you come to make these linkages, and at this moment in your career? Furthermore, who has been most influential in your elaboration of this synthesis? My interest in the Black Radical Tradition is an auto-critique. As noted earlier, I worry that postcolonial urbanism has ossified as the study of cities in the global South. That was never my intention or that of the various postcolonial scholars staging critical interventions in urban studies. I find the Black Radical Tradition to be an important part of the reworlding of our disciplines, including urban studies. A key part of this reworlding is a rehistoricization and reconceptualization of the West, specifically of the histories and futures that are narrated and consolidated in urban studies. Without collapsing different traditions of thought into one another, I would dare to say that, at least for me, the Black Radical Tradition is postcolonial critique and that many of its concerns, for example, regarding liberal and Marxist historiography, resonate with the postcolonial thought with which I have grown up, i.e. subaltern studies. Black Marxism is central to such resonances and connections (see Robinson, 1983). And so is Dubois’s Black Reconstruction(Dubois, 1935 [2007]). A foundational influence for me is Paul Gilroy and Black Atlantic remains central to how I conceptualize and teach postcolonial urbanism (Gilroy, 1993). Put another way, if I have argued that postcolonial thought, notably the work of Said, Spivak, Chakrabarty, should not be taken up in urban theory as (merely) cultural studies, that these interlocutors make possible a serious accounting of historical difference in the analysis of urban political economy, then similarly I would argue that the analysis of capitalism as a world-system requires a close reading of the key texts of the Black Radical Tradition. 6. During the panel, “Municipal Movements and Public Policy,” Noel Didla discussed her experience as a Dalit woman who is living and working in Jackson, Mississippi – a city steeped in a Black/white racial antagonism. She stated that teaching students at Jackson State University (a Historically Black College and University) about the political, racial, and cultural geographies of the region in addition to her commitment to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement taught her how to be an ally to Black struggles. She also stressed the importance of not conflating the caste hierarchy through which her identity has been shaped with the racial structure here in the United States. What were your thoughts on her comments? Were there aspects of her comments that resonated with you as a South Asian woman engaging Black Radical Thought and geographies in Los Angeles and previously in Oakland? I found Noel Didla’s presentation to be moving and haunting. It raised difficult questions about allyship as well as about comparative and transnational understandings of racial capitalism. She is absolutely correct in noting that the category of caste does not carry over into the United States (despite Michelle Alexander’s provocative use of the term “racial caste system” in The New Jim Crow (Alexander, 2010). Similarly, I would argue that American understandings of race do not carry over into India. In my intellectual and political commitments, I do not search for these types of equivalence. Rather, I want to think about, as does Didla, how each place on the map necessitates a particular type of engagement, how it demands of us an ethics of accountability. These issues also raise complex questions about positionality. In the United States, I am interpellated in what Spivak (1993) has called “the teaching machine” as a woman of color. Indeed, I identify as such. My students repeatedly identify me as such, especially amidst structures of academic hierarchy that are often “unbearably white,” a phrase I am borrowing from Derickson (2017). Such positioning foregrounds my experience as an immigrant to the United States but it also elides the various forms of power and privilege that I have commanded in Kolkata. In my academic writings, especially in my first book, City Requiem, Kolkata, I carefully unpack such power and privilege, demonstrating how my middle-class-ness shaped the relationships through which I constructed ethnographic research. Such themes are also prominent in a book coauthored with former colleagues at Berkeley, Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World, where we insist on confronting the limits of authentic representation. And yet, I endure as a woman of color in urban studies. And yet, I teach as a woman of color, a rare figuration in the senior ranks of urban planning. Such lived contradictions are an essential part of terrains of struggle. No resolution or reconciliation is possible. 7. As a follow-up to the previous question, what do you consider as the challenges and benefits of transnational political alliances? In particular, given that your work (theoretically and practically) draws from post-colonial and post-slavery contexts, how do you elaborate the intersections of experiences within these conditions without conflating them? This is a vitally important question. In my research, I try to follow social movements (for example, the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign in “Dis/Possessive Collectivism”) that are building and expanding transnational political alliances (see Roy, 2017). I don’t think these alliances are amenable to an enumeration of challenges and benefits. They represent particular orientations (postcolonial, black liberation etc.) to the transnational logics of global capital. While I just eschewed equivalence (at least across the category of caste in India and the category of race in the United States), these movements pinpoint and deploy equivalence across national borders. As the Black Panther movement linked ghetto and colony, so today’s movements link Skid Row and favela, township, and reservation. They think across, and act upon, apartheid and colonialism in South Africa, Palestine, the United States. As Adam and Willie, as well as Perry (2013), Vargas (2010), and other scholars have shown, a critical understanding of blackness is often central to such global imaginations and practices. But also important are particular institutional forms, e.g., assemblies and unions, and how these take shape both within local contexts and across national borders. In other words, the corporation is not the only transnational entity in our world. But I also do not want to suggest that transnational political alliances are easily made and maintained. The current debate in the United States about Black reparations is an example of the tremendous friction that (trans)nationalism can generate. Sandy Darity, one of the most prominent academic voices making the case for reparations, has framed this as a matter of reparations for harms imposed through slavery and post-slavery but only for “American Descendants of Slaves.” While the Black Radical Tradition reminds us that the histories and structures of anti-Blackness cannot be so neatly confined to national borders and family lineages, Darity and the ADOS Movement insist on the specificity of national experience. If we take seriously a transnational approach to the question of reparations for slavery, as does Ana Lucia Araujo (2017), then what are the alliances and solidarities that are possible and necessary?). 8. In your earlier publications, you have argued for a convergence between urban studies and “theory from the south.” Your most recent contributions follow up on this idea by emphasizing that “the south” should be thought of as a relational space rather than an absolute one (Roy, 2016a). With this in mind, and considering your ongoing work to produce a theoretical synthesis between postcolonial studies and Black studies, we would like to ask you about two specific geographies: the Global South and the Deep South. What urban imaginaries are made possible when we think of these relational spaces together? What urban imaginaries might come to the fore if we consider the Deep South as a Global South space (e.g., New Orleans, Miami, Minneapolis, Houston, etc.)? Among many others, we have in mind the work of Clyde Woods, who argued that “If we are to build a society where working-class knowledge and participatory democracy are truly treasured, we must understand that the South is the center of African American culture, not its periphery” (2017) I don’t think I have asked for a “convergence” between urban studies and “theory from the South.” Instead, following Spivak, I have critiqued the purported worldliness of urban studies and called for a reworlding of the discipline (Roy & Ong, 2011). One way of undertaking such reworlding is by thinking from the South. As must be obvious by now, that effort is not meant to populate urban studies with exotic stories about slums in Kolkata or militias in Beirut. Instead, following the Comaroff and Comaroff (2012), I see the global South as a relationality. This in turn means that we have to expend considerable theoretical effort on elaborating the colonial and neo-colonial relationalities at work in our world of cities, including the very complex question of South-South exploitations and hegemonies. It also means that we have to rethink the ways in which the cities of the North Atlantic are understood and positioned in these global relationalities. Following Gregory (2004), who in turn is thinking with Edward Said, I see this as interrogating and shifting “the stories that the West tells itself about itself” (p. 4). Put bluntly, for me, the project of thinking from the South is pointless unless we are able to reposition the cities of the North Atlantic in global histories of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. With this in mind, my most recent theoretical intervention, introduced at the “Comparative Urbanism” conference held in Atlanta last year, is about the “city as postcolony.” And as you perceptively note in your question, the work of Clyde Woods is central to such an effort. McKittrick (2013) asks us to consider the plantation as a “conceptual palimpsest” (p. 5). Woods (2017) brilliantly uncovers these plantation logics and plantation regimes. For me, this type of relationality, is the South, whether the Deep South or Global South. I think this is evident in the recent work of Heynen (2016) on abolitionist ecology. It is also evident, in Chocolate Cities, where Hunter and Robinson (2018) present the South as a mobile cultural geography, one that is perhaps akin to Woods’s blues epistemology. For them the South is an analytical category for a “new view” and “new map of Black experiences and urban change in America.” I look forward to more work in urban studies that connects these critical imaginations across Souths. One especially generative way of thinking about this is via Byrd’s (2014) essay, “A Return to the South.” Byrd (2014) urges us to think about the American South as “a microcosm of global and subaltern Souths shaped by diasporas, mapped by border crossings, and transformed through the networks and flows of racial capitalism and imperialism as much as informed by the rigidity of racial codes, exclusions, and violences” (p. 609). Especially important is the argument that the South/many Souths “do imaginative work for the nation-state as sites of remembrance, trauma, absence, and survival.” I am increasingly interested in these “shadow souths, phantom souths, fugitive souths” (Byrd, 2014, p. 611). This is not the conception of the South that is being reified in an urban studies seeking to globalize its scope and mission but I hope it will be soon. 9. In a recent article you point out the limits of the “sanctuary cities” movement during the time of Trump and populist authoritarianism (Roy, 2019). You convincingly unveil the narrative of liberal inclusion that undergirds much of the sanctuary cities discourse and practice – i.e., if we allow ICE into our cities, then immigrants won’t trust the police enough to report on the “real” criminals in their midst. You point out that the sanctuary movement fails to challenge the sovereign production of spaces of exception and differentiated vulnerability, facilitating rather than challenging the expansion of police power. Instead, you believe the migrant movement must embrace the abolitionist politics of the Movement for Black Lives, an alternative program that is better equipped to grapple with both Trumpism and the liberalism whose contradictions arguably give birth to populist authoritarianism. Much of radical urban geography has often placed its hopes in what Harvey identifies as a struggle over democratizing and redistributing the surplus (Harvey, 2008). In what ways can the conversation exemplified in your recent work between Black Studies – a field premised on the impossibility of inclusion and a corresponding political flight from sovereignty – and Urban Studies, push the bounds of socialist, redistributive urban geographies towards a more radical abolitionist urban politics? This article was a first step in engaging with the pressing question of sanctuary jurisdictions and cities of refuge in what I call the age of Trumpism. Now, with colleagues at UCLA, I have the opportunity to convene a Sawyer Seminar on the theme of Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism. Sawyer Seminars are temporary research centers funded by the Mellon Foundation to “provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments.” At the UCLA Sawyer Seminar, we intend to think across Europe and the United States to examine sanctuary policies and practices at the scale of cities. Situated at the present historical moment of resurgent white nationalism and xenophobia, our project is intended to cast a light on migration regimes and state power as well as on the forms of local and transnational activism that create spaces of refuge. With a critical lens around histories of colonial dispossession and racial capitalism, we are ultimately concerned with the place of racial others – the border-crosser, the asylum-seeker, the refugee – in the liberal democracies of the West. What are the terms of inclusion, integration, community, and hospitality through which protection is extended to such racial others and what are the enduring limits of such protection? How does a critical understanding of Western humanism make possible frameworks of redress, justice, and democracy that take account of colonialism and imperialism? Colonial relationalities and juxtapositions are a key methodology for this Sanctuary Spaces endeavor. We hope to think with border studies and indigenous studies about movement, migration, and settlement. We hope to think with concepts of Black fugitivity and the Black Mediterranean to consider geographies of (anti)Blackness as well those of Black life. We hope to connect contemporary frames of sanctuary with histories of marronage (a special thanks to Adam for his work on maroon communities). I hope that such an approach will allow for understandings of what you so beautifully phrase as “the sovereign production of spaces of exception and differentiated vulnerability.” I should note that the first version of this Society and Space essay ended with an engagement with questions of redistribution, notably Harvey’s (2017) critique of Springer’s anarchist vision, as well as with Ferguson’s (2015) arguments about a new politics of distribution. Ferguson (2015) frames the dilemma thus: “We are caught between a Marxism that denigrates and devalues distribution (in favor of production and labor) and an anarchism that denigrates and devalues the state and bureaucracy (in favor of spontaneity and the local)” (p. 99). Harvey (2017) resolves the dilemma in favor of the state but describes the state as a “ramshackle set of institutions” (p. 247). I argued that abolition democracy, as envisioned by Dubois for example, gives us a very different understanding of the state, of redistribution, and of course, of race and rights, of freedom and personhood. In short, I am interested in a politics of redistribution that is routed through abolition democracy. But the colonial relationalities and juxtapositions that we hope to foreground in the Sanctuary Spaces Sawyer Seminar require us to think expansively and transnationally about abolition democracy. They ensure what, following Byrd, we can think of as “a return to the South,” to a world of many Souths. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. ReferencesReferences Al-Bulushi, Y. (2012). Learning from urban revolt: From Watts to the Banlieues. City , 16(1–2), 34–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2012.662368  [Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar] Al-Bulushi, Y. (2015). 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