A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time. Группа авторов

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A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time - Группа авторов

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      In the face of such devastation, we turn to the chapters in this volume to explore the social reproduction of everyday urban life. Building on feminist urban theories and social reproduction feminisms, the chapters shed light on different aspects of the relationship between the urban and social reproduction, within different contexts but always through socio-political action. In what follows, we outline how the book’s contributors address not only this relationship but also their irrevocable relation to questions of urban feminist knowledge production. We recognize themes that speak directly both to the production of the urban in relation to infrastructures, labours, and subjectivities, and the politics of this production, which engage the challenges of decolonizing feminist urban knowledge production and methodologies.

      Making the Urban Through Feminist Knowledge Production

       Infrastructures

      Before turning to these contributions, we briefly consider Mbembe’s conceptualization of ‘superfluity’ and Simone’s conceptualization of ‘people as infrastructure’ in order both to interrupt hegemonic ontologies of the urban and to situate the contribution of these chapters in an ontologically reflexive context of knowledge production. The work of Mbembe and Simone show us the limits of metropole capitalism’s teleological social ontology, reminding us how the social ontology of the urban of former colonies is formed differently and how, within this latter social ontology of the urban, people become infrastructure (see also Roy 2009).

      In considering the spatialization of an African metropolitan modernity as an historically specific urban form, Achille Mbembe offers the concept of ‘superfluity’, referring to both ‘the dialectics of indispensability and expendability of both labour and life, people and things’ and ‘the obfuscation of any exchange or use value that labor might have, and to the emptying of any meaning that might be attached to the act of measurement or quantification itself insofar as numerical representation is as much a fact as it is a form of fantasy’ (Mbembe 2004, pp. 374–375). In this way, superfluity can facilitate a socio-spatial investigation within the interstices of political, economic, biopolitical, and psychic approaches to the urban. Drawing on Simmel, Mbembe argues that ‘the ultimate form of superfluity is the one that derives from the transitoriness of things’ (Mbembe 2004, p. 399).

      Focusing on expressive urban cultural practices in the wake of ‘natural’ disasters in Haiti and Puerto Rico, Nathalia Santos Ocasio and Beverley Mullings (Chapter 2) examine the conditions of possibility of people as infrastructure through a generative theoretical conversation between social reproduction, Simmel, and Simone. They ask their readers to consider how a society is possible in disaster- and debt-stricken contexts of austerity capitalism when the urban infrastructures of everyday life are devastated. In the course of their analytical deliberation, they first turn to Simmel’s conceptualization of forms of sociation as the unceasing emergences and interactions that produce the unity of society within which its members live. One such form of sociability, according to Santos Ocasio and Mullings, might be found in expressive cultural practices, in particular music. Performed as a part of social reproductive labour that ensures, amongst other things, the reproduction of intergenerational linkages between the Caribbean and its African inheritances, expressive cultural practices provide the conditions of possibility of people as infrastructure by making sure sociability itself is imaginable and enacted in the aftermath of disasters. Santos Ocasio and Mullings evoke the importance of deeply ancestral forms of music, dance, and gathering, in the form of intergenerational memory and knowledge sharing practices. Therefore, as opposed to taking social reproduction as the work that makes all other work possible, they point to a series of practices of social reproduction which are not tethered to the economic but express their own logics, drives, and histories, therefore turning their attention to sociation as a zero point of sociability.

      Thinking of people as infrastructure in conjunction with social reproduction is the theoretical focus of James Angel (Chapter 5). He draws on Ruddick et al’s. (2018) imperative of orienting analytical attention to the social ontology of the urban, lest we run the danger of forgetting people, struggle, difference, and history in our accounts of the production of the urban, ending with an autonomous epistemological

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