Planetary urbanization and totality

Abstract

This paper begins with the accusation of “totalization” that has been directed at Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s concept of “planetary urbanization.” In so doing, it first critiques the meanings typically attributed to “totality” and “totalization” by Brenner and Schmid as well as their critics, and then explicates the concepts of totality and totalization developed in the tradition of Hegelian Marxism, especially in the works of Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, and Fredric Jameson. Following a review of some influential invocations of Hegelian or Marxist conceptions of totality in anti-colonial and socialist–feminist politics, the paper concludes by arguing that participants in the contentious planetary urbanization debate can best address their substantive concerns by working through instead of disavowing the concept of totality—especially the version of it proposed by Lefebvre, involving state and capital, “the urban” and the everyday.

Keywords

Urbanization totality anti-colonialism socialist feminism marxism

“The totality is the untrue.”

[“Das Ganze ist das Unwahre”.]

Theodor Adorno (1974/1951: 50), Minima Moralia §29.

“This reality is not, it becomes.”

[“Diese Wirklichkeit ist nicht, sie wird”.]

Georg Lukács (1971/1922: 203), History and Class Consciousness.

Reactions to Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s recent appropriation of Henri Lefebvre’s (2003/1970) now legendary conception of “planetary urbanization” have been sharply polarized. On the one hand, one sees a most enthusiastic variety of engagements, from scholars around the world, who have taken up Brenner and Schmid’s provocation to theorize the political stakes of urbanization beyond the borders of traditional urban studies in highly productive ways (see, for a selection, the edited volume: Brenner, 2014). On the other hand, one witnesses a series of thoroughly skeptical and even dismissive responses, also from several methodological and political standpoints. Among the various objections raised against Brenner and Schmid’s concept of planetary urbanization, the one concerning its “totalizing” quality appears to be particularly widespread, especially among their radical critics committed to feminist and postcolonial perspectives (Buckley and Strauss, 2016; Derickson, 2015; McLean, 2017; Peake, 2016). I have encountered routinely this complaint about “totalization” not only in the published literature, but also by way of more informal academic intercourse. For example, when I read the latest manifesto on planetary urbanization by Brenner and Schmid (2015)¹ in a reading group of planners and geographers at the University of Toronto last winter, it became evident to me that a majority of us were harboring a mix of negative feeling and bad faith towards our chosen text, being put off by the “grand claims” and the “universal standpoint” of the “meta-narrative” in question. This popular though not unanimous disposition in our rather small group reconfirms more or less the divided reception of the planetary urbanization concept I’ve noted at several recent academic conferences, workshops and in publications. Sure enough, there are other salient criticisms of this magnetic concept, but these too—I would suggest—are not wholly unrelated to the all too often misunderstood problem of totality that has repeatedly been invoked in relation to Brenner and Schmid. So I wish to speculate here on what might be at stake in totalization and its discontents in the debates on planetary urbanization, by working through some aspects of the concept of totality and the nature of totalizing thought—as they may eventually relate to a critical understanding of urbanization, especially in an historical context of unevenly and contradictorily globalizing capitalism, to which patriarchy and neo/colonialism are integral.

What do Brenner and Schmid say about totality, totalization, and totalizing theory? The answer to this question is not as straightforward as one might think listening to the allegations of their overtly anti-totalizing interlocutors. So let’s hear from Brenner and Schmid first and then come to a closer examination of totality and totalization. Even cursory readers of Brenner and Schmid are by now familiar with their uncompromising critique of mainstream urban theory’s fetishism of an ill-conceived notion of the “city”—referring to a universal form if not “ideal type” of human settlement. Indeed, their writing goes very much against the grain of the “mainstream of contemporary urban discourses on global urbanism”, which they claim has “embraced a strong, even triumphalist, reassertion of a traditional, universal, totalizing and largely empiricist concept of ‘the city’” (155). One is permitted to presume on the evidence of such sentences recurring in their epistemological manifesto that Brenner and Schmid are not very fond of “universal” or “totalizing” discourse. To be sure, they regularly can be seen to mimic much the same “anti-totalizing” reflexes of their critics—when it comes to the notorious “mainstream” of urban theory, characterized above all by “the most influential contemporary meta-narrative of the global urban condition” called “the notion of the ‘urban age’,” the diverse purveyors of which include for them the urban gurus Ricky Burdett and Dejan Sudjic, the bureaucrats of UN-Habitat and even the Marxist critic Mike Davis (155). So, while objecting to the “universalizing thrust of urban age discourse” (158), are they not arguing against “meta-narratives” too, after the same “anti-totalizing” fashion of their critics?

In their latest manifesto for a “new epistemology of the urban,” Brenner and Schmid are abundantly clear about what a worthy concept of the urban must studiously avoid being: “empiricist,” “universalizing,” “homogenizing,” and “totalizing.” For these precisely are the attributes of the dreadful “notion of the ‘urban age’” that they urge us to avoid like the plague, because the real world of urbanization is now “variegated, polarized, multiscalar, and relatively uncoordinated”—and can be “no longer neatly subsumed within a singular … framework” (153). Yet, instead of “confronting the radically transformed conditions for urban theory and research,” the “most influential” versions of contemporary urban theory proclaim, according to Brenner and Schmid, a “metanarrative of the global urban condition,” one nourished by the “doxic common sense” of “the most banal” spatial demographics and premised on improperly abstracted notions of “spatial unit” or “settlement type” (154–156). In so doing, the seemingly ubiquitous “urban age discourse”—which is “repeated incessantly, mantra like, in scholarly papers, research reports and grant proposals, as well as in the public sphere of urban, environmental and architectural journalism”—“drastically homogenizes the variegated patterns and pathways of urbanization that have been emerging in recent decades across the world economy” (156). Even the work on “megacities,” though attentive to some particular features of the urban condition in poorer countries, suffers in Brenner and Schmid’s eyes from the “universalizing thrust of urban age discourse,” which is further evident for them in the “universalizing, totalizing and often naturalistic epistemological outlook that subsumes all dimensions of the urban process” in discussions of “global urbanism” (158). Given such principled opposition to “totality,” “totalization,” and “totalizing thought” betrayed by Brenner and Schmid, one wonders what they and their no less adamantly “anti-totalizing” critics are really arguing about, especially regarding epistemology and discursive form.

This last issue—the distinction between the “anti-totalizing” standpoints avowed both by Brenner and Schmid and by their postcolonial, feminist, and other left-radical critics—is perhaps better approached by first asking how the advocates of the planetary urbanization concept mark their political distance from some of the most commonplace contemporary academic and policy discourse on cities. Those who promulgate the latter typically may not engage in radical conceptual debate—on totality or other theoretical issues—but the best known among them are distinguished nonetheless by virtue of their influence in the public sphere and on actually existing urban policy. What are their main exhibits in present day urban discourse and policy debate? Brenner and Schmid identify as one prime example the tendency they call “urban triumphalism,” a popular perspective on “cities as the engines of innovation, civilization, prosperity and democracy” (156)—one with an abiding fixation on the relationship between cities and economic growth that distances its preoccupations from the central concern of progressive urban studies: social justice and the city. They see in such “technoscientific urbanism” an “outpouring of new approaches that mobilize the tools of natural science, mathematics and ‘big data’ analysis” (156), which intervene in urban problems with a technocratic “ideology that aims to depoliticize urban life” (157). Related and indebted to these techno-triumphalist tendencies for them is also the “main thrust” of “debates on urban sustainability”; for here too, Brenner and Schmid discern a “vision of cities as bounded, technologically controlled islands of economic rationality” (157). So while quite correctly pinpointing and objecting to the excessive economism and technocracy of the popular urban discourses of the day—creative cities, smart cities, sustainable cities—Brenner and Schmid attribute the problematic dominance of these ideas in the public domain primarily to the conceptual conceit of the “urban age discourse”: its definition of the city, in questionable empirical, universal, and “totalizing” fashion, as a clearly bounded type of human settlement, which they propose to outsmart with their own concept of planetary urbanization plucked out of Lefebvre’s work.

Politically, I can only wholeheartedly agree with Brenner and Schmid’s opposition to the decidedly neoliberal thrust of the creative-smart-sustainable triumvirate in urban discourse—although a more comprehensive critique of the popularity of “creative,” “smart,” and “sustainable” ideologies in the urban field ought also to address their alignment with the hegemonic economic (capital) and political (state) interests presently invested in the urbanization process. For these powerful urban discourses draw their power from links to dominant political–economic interests fully as much as from the theoretical happenstance of an errant conceptual choice. Brenner and Schmid’s critique of mainstream urban studies is more squarely on target, however, when it comes to gauging the distance between the concept of planetary urbanization and a couple of spectacular attacks lobbed at it from the terrains of economic geography (Scott and Storper, 2015) and political economy (Walker, 2015). Both of these critiques in effect claim that we don’t need new neologisms like “planetary urbanization,” while confidently asserting that actually existing urban theory is basically as good as it need be. This view has been promptly and firmly denounced in turn by leading representatives of postcolonial urbanism and feminist urban geography, who have singled out the Eurocentrism and the marginalization of gender in what passes for such accomplished urban theory (Peake, 2016; Roy, 2015). But the enemies of the enemies of Brenner and Schmid, so to speak, are not necessarily their friends, and some of the most passionate differences to be witnessed in contemporary urban theory seem to lie between the proponents of planetary urbanization and their postcolonial and feminist critics (Peake, 2015).

Compared to the tone of Brenner and Schmid’s treatment of the “urban age” discourse and its “creative,” “smart,” and “sustainable” spin-offs—about which they understandably have hardly a positive thing to stay—their engagement with postcolonial urban theory is noticeably more respectful and constructive. In fact, “postcolonial urban studies,” though regarded as not yet a “fully fledged urban epistemology or a new research paradigm” (160), appear in Brenner and Schmid’s manifesto as the alternative theoretical perspective most worthy of their collegial attention. They see it above all as a welcome critique of the hegemony of Euro-American scholarship in urban theory, ranging from “the early 20th-century Chicago School of urban sociology to the Los Angeles School of urban geography and the global city theories of the late 20th century” (160). Moreover, “insofar as they call into question any model of urban theory that claims universal validity, the reconceptualizations proposed in this tradition also offer a theoretically reflexive counterpoint to the ideological totalizations of urban age discourse” (160). So planetary urbanization and postcolonial urban studies are seen as epistemological bedfellows by Brenner and Schmid, who fully support the anti-universalist and “broadly nominalist approach to producing ‘new geographies of theorizing’” (160) advocated by Jennifer Robinson (2016) and Ananya Roy (2009). For Brenner and Schmid too “endorse a nominalist approach that permits an open-ended interplay between critique …, epistemological experimentation … and concrete research” (161), thus sharing significant methodological ground with postcolonial approaches to urban theory. Yet, in spite of their shared commitments, especially to “nominalism” and “epistemological reflexivity and conceptual reinvention” (161), Brenner and Schmid sharply specify their differences as well, underling that “several of the[ir] theses … stand in some measure of tension with certain methodological tendencies within postcolonial urban studies” (161). That decisive tension, as their manifesto shows, is to be seen most clearly in relation to the concept of totality—a concept that lies at the core of Lefebvre’s oeuvre on capital, state, space, and everyday life, from which the founding hypothesis of planetary urbanization—“complete urbanization”—is directly derived.

The key line of demarcation between Brenner and Schmid’s concept of planetary urbanization and the strand of postcolonial urban studies they discern in Robinson and Roy runs through their contrasting approaches to the issue of difference. As is well known, this kind of postcolonial perspective not only emphasizes differences between cities, but also argues that Northern theory is incapable of addressing the specificities of the Southern urban condition. Hence the most agreeable need for different theoretical perspectives on urbanization authentically informed by and produced in the South, to properly account for the specific situations of Southern cities that cannot adequately be captured by generalizing urban theory made in the North, even if such theory happens to be anti-neoliberal or, for that matter, feminist, anti-racist, and so on. But Brenner and Schmid are not entirely convinced by the consequences of this “methodological injunction to reveal the distinctiveness of particular places within the ‘global South’, often in rhetorical contrast to a putatively overgeneralized ‘northern’ model, such as that of the global or neoliberal city” (161). And they also seem less than persuaded by “many of those accounts” that “present thick descriptions—for instance, of everyday life and subaltern struggle—as self-evident counterpoints to apparent totalizations of Euro-American frameworks” (161). Although such accounts are said to provide a necessary “counterpoint to mainstream global urban ideologies,” Brenner and Schmid point out that they also “contain certain intellectual hazards, not the least of which is the risk of prematurely retreating from essential conceptual tools, such as those of geopolitical economy, state theory, and regulation theory, as outdated vestiges of ‘northern’ epistemologies” (161). But the decisive theoretical difference between the proponents of the planetary urbanization concept and postcolonial urban studies intent on provincializing Europe is expressed, with reference to a key theoretical reflection on difference and urbanization by Schmid (2015), in these words: “The idea of specificity is logically intelligible only in relation to an encompassing notion of generality against which it is defined; it is thus best understood as a relational, dialectical concept, one that presupposes a broader totality, rather than as a demarcation of ontological singularity” (161). Put differently: “The recognition of context dependency—the need to ‘provincialize’ urban theory—thus stands in tension with an equally persistent need to understand the historically evolving totality” (164).

So it would seem that Brenner and Schmid, such impassioned “anti-totalizers” in the face of the “urban age” ideologues, after all turn out to be “relational” and “dialectical” advocates of “totality” when confronted with the nominalist pursuit of “ontological singularity” by postcolonial fellow travellers renowned for their own “anti-totalizing” credentials. In a nutshell, their message is clear: no “specificity” without “generality”. Or: everything must be understood in its context, or “context of context” (161), which is but another term for what (Hegelian as much as Althusserian) Marxist philosophy—in its own commitment to understand things “relationally,” “dialectically,” “structurally,” “historically” or “holistically”—calls totality. Brenner and Schmid, in spite of their overt “anti-totalizing” rhetoric in the presence of the “urban age” discourse, prove to be quite Marxist if not Hegelian in especially this methodological and epistemological sense, most of all when asserting the primacy of something like a “capitalist world system” (161) as the ultimate horizon within which urban and other differences are to be located and understood. Only with reference to such a “system,” they contend, can “contextual specificity” be properly grasped, as something “enmeshed within, and mediated through, broader configurations” that of course entail “interconnected forms of exploitation, dispossession and socio-environmental destruction” (161). This “context of context” of “uneven spatial development and geopolitical power”—which is “not merely a background condition for urban development but represents a constitutive formation” (161)—can be called “capitalist” or something more complexly overdetermined or mediated, depending on one’s commitment to any number of anti-colonial, feminist or other radical perspectives, but the key to Brenner and Schmid’s critical distance from the notion of difference proposed by leading brands of postcolonial urban studies lies in their assertion of a holistic view of some system, which is well known in the philosophical lexicon shared by Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser, and Lefebvre as totality.

Given the indubitably Lefebvrean and Marxian heritage of the concept of planetary urbanization proposed by Brenner and Schmid as well as its explicitly epistemological ambition, it should not be out of place in this context to recall the famous opening of Lukács’s essay “The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg” in History and Class Consciousness (1922):

“It is not the primacy of economic motives in history that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundation of a wholly new science… . Proletarian science is revolutionary not just by virtue of its revolutionary ideas which it opposes to bourgeois society, but above all because of its method. The primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science.” (Lukács, 1971/1922: 27)

In the first essay of the same book, Lukács asks: “What is Orthodox Marxism?”

“Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto—without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.” (Lukács, 1971/1922: 1)

Especially when it comes to matters of epistemology (subject) and ontology (object), Marxism for Lukács is fundamentally a method, a method called dialectics, the core category of which is totality. Following the memorable expression by Fredric Jameson (1979: 9) of “the one absolute and we may even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought”—“always historicize!”—I can attempt to render Lukács’s essential point about the fundamental methodological injunction of Marxism, at the risk of trivialization, in more contemporary and commonplace language: think holistically!

The irony of totalizing thought today is that it makes eminent sense as common sense—as holistic thinking. Who in their right mind would think ill of holistic thinking? It even has a warm, spiritual feel to it, so long as that spirit has nothing to do with Hegel. But the moment one hears instead the words “totalizing thought” à la Jameson, Lukács or Marx, one somehow thinks spontaneously of Stalin’s gulags and Hitler’s concentrations camps, and their umbilical link to Hegel’s absolute spirit. Indeed, the very sound of “totality” in the overdeveloped capitalist world (which penetrates into the Global South as well) offends like bad breath: cultured parents do what they can to eradicate the latter from their kids, while graduates of the postmodern moment expunge the former from the discourse of their academic kith and kin. Such divergent fates of holistic thinking and totalizing thought have not much to do with the theoretical meaning of totality as such; they have more to do with the status of totality as a “floating signifier” in the ideological battles of the Cold War, where Marxism was coded by western discourse as totalitarian and rendered politically indistinct from fascism. It was within this discursive universe that pitched battles—largely useless, in the Anglo-American context—were staged between wild caricatures of Marxism (as Stalinism lurking under the Eurocentric sheepskin of proletarian pseudoscience) and postmodernism (as a libertarian orgy of epistemological relativism attended by the multitude of “others”). It was in this conjuncture too, under the general dispensation of liberal-democratic pluralism masquerading as postmodern-deconstructive difference, that totalizing thought came to be identified with totalitarian ideology, and the term totality became taboo—if not an insult.

We seem to be still not quite over the ideological hangover from those delirious days of Jean Baudrillard discovering Southern California and vice versa, if I may count as today’s evidence the indiscriminate use of the adjective “totalizing” by Brenner and Schmid and their critics when they really mean reductive, essentialist, over-generalizing, reified, fetishized, unmediated or non-dialectical—i.e. quite the opposite of totalizing thought, if we noticed how this concept is variously deployed by all of the substantial thinkers in the tradition of what Perry Anderson (1976) calls Western Marxism, including Lefebvre and Jameson. It is not possible here to dwell on the detail of that actively forgotten intellectual and political history as Martin Jay (1984) has done in Marxism and Totality or Jameson (1971) in Marxism and Form, although I do note below how the concept of totality was appropriated by some exemplary thinkers in the anti-colonial and feminist traditions. But for now to avoid at least the most pointless misunderstandings, three immediate clarifications concerning the vilified but vital concepts of totality and totalization are in order. First, as Jean-Paul Sartre (1976/1960: 45) insists in Critique of Dialectical Reason, “we must make a clear distinction between the notions of totality and totalization.” According to his celebrated formulation:

“A totality is defined as a being which, while radically distinct from the sum of its parts, is present in its entirety, in one form or another, in each of these parts, and which relates to itself either through its relation to one or more of its parts or through its relation to the relations between all or some of them.” (Sartre, 1976/1960: 45; cf. Althusser and Balibar, 1970/1968: 91–118)

Totalization, then, is the name for the process—subjective and objective, historical and social—of the production of a totality, i.e. the way in which a totality becomes a totality. Much like Heraclitus’s river into which one can’t step twice, the totalizable totality does not sit still: it flows, moves, and shifts shape according to its many determinations. Sartre’s grand inquiry into how it “relates to itself” also makes it clear that totality is never identical with itself, i.e. totality, as Lefebvre also often asserted from a similar dialectical perspective, is never fixed. The making of a totality by means of a multiplicity of mediations is therefore always also the making of another totality. As Sartre continues:

“If dialectical Reason exists, then, from the ontological point of view, it can only be a developing totalization, occurring where totalization occurs, and, from the epistemological point of view, it can only be the accessibility of that totalization to a knowledge which is itself, in principle, totalizing in its procedures.” (Sartre, 1976/1960: 47).

Second: if we approach totality and totalization with due respect to their objective and subjective mediations, as do Sartre and others in the Western Marxian tradition and beyond, then it ought to be evident that totality and totalitarianism are not at all the same thing, except in the crudest anti-Communist imaginary of the Cold War and its (witting and unwitting) progenies in (right-wing and left-wing) academic discourse; nor is totality ever a positive blueprint for utopia to be achieved, but only the frame of reference for totalizing thought, which is the theoretical attempt to apprehend in praxis, from our own subject positions and objective locations, the historical course, present state, and possible futures of the world. Third: from a radical political standpoint such as Marxism, the purpose of totalization—apprehending in praxis actually existing and evolving totality—is not to fetishize the oppressive ways of the world, but to negate them.

The anxiety about utopia (as Communism, fascism) at the core of liberal-pluralist thought forms the basis of the most widespread ideological resistance to the concept of totality and totalizing thought (Jameson, 1991). But the other side of the same ideological coin, no less active against what Lukács (1971/1922: 174, 196) called “aspiration towards totality”, is the complementary anxiety about dystopia—which tends to see in various invocations of totality what Michel Foucault (1970/1966), following Nietzsche’s obituary for God, called the “death of Man.” In the language of Anglo-American sociology, totality represents to the libertarian mindset an unbearable excess of “structural functionalism”—too much determinism, too little agency, for liberal-humanist subjects of the enterprising free world to handle. It is no coincidence that the anti-humanist conception of “structural totality” proposed by Althusser in avowedly Spinozist fashion has been the most virulently attacked version of totality in the Marxist tradition (Althusser and Balibar, 1970/1968; Thomas, 2002)—from both outside and within Marxism, most iconoclastically by Edward Palmer Thompson (1978) in Poverty of Theory. But the latter polemic was issued in the name of a socialist-humanist conception of totality, not against totality as such. In any case, the concept of totality is nothing if not the mediation of object by subject and subject by object, that is, “the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process,” wherein for Lukács (1971/1922: 3, 186) “history is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man.” So the typical accusations of determinism, functionalism, and throwing the poor subject under the bus of the structure are misplaced, particularly in the case of dialectical approaches to the concept of totality pioneered by such thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Lukács, Sartre and Lefebvre in the Marxian tradition. Jameson (1991: 405–406) offers in this regard a characteristically dialectical explanation of the anxieties about utopia/dystopia and concomitant hostility to totality that have been most palpable, especially since the diffusion of postmodern sensibilities, by attributing “the waning of our sense of history, and more particularly our resistance to globalizing or totalizing concepts like that of the mode of production,” to the “colonization and absorption by the commodity form” of the social totality of “late capitalism.” For him, “where everything is henceforth systemic the very notion of a system seems to lose its reason for being, returning only by way of a ‘return of the repressed’ in the more nightmarish forms of the ‘total system’ fantasized by Weber or Foucault or the 1984 people.” “But”, as Jameson writes,

“a mode of production is not a ‘total system’ in that forbidding sense; it includes a variety of counterforces and new tendencies within itself, of ‘residual’ as well as ‘emergent’ forces, which it must attempt to manage or control (Gramsci’s concept of hegemony). Were those heterogeneous forces not endowed with an effectivity of their own, the hegemonic project would be unnecessary. Thus, differences are presupposed by the model, something that would be sharply distinguished from another feature which complicates this one, namely, that capitalism also produces differences or differentiation as a function of its own internal logic.” (Jameson, 1991: 405–406).

Next to these basic considerations on the possibility and necessity of totalizing thought, it remains to be noted that the concept of totality has not been the concern merely of Western Marxism. Well before postcolonialism, the revolutionary anti-colonial tradition not only mobilized dialectical thought but also made original contributions to it, as Susan Buck-Morss’s (2009) outstanding research on the long unacknowledged influence of the Haitian Revolution on the pivotal master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s (1977/1807) Phenomenology of Spirit demonstrates. The radical anti-colonial lesson she draws from this Haiti and Hegel story does not, however, lead in the pluralist and nominalist direction of “alternative modernities” following the dominant if not latest postcolonial fashion. Invoking Walter Benjamin’s (Löwy, 2005/2001) theses on the concept of history, Buck-Morss affirms here rather a commitment to the totality called “universal history,” and indeed the need

“for rescuing the idea of universal human history from the uses to which white domination has put it. If the historical fact about freedom can be ripped out of the narratives told by the victors and salvaged for our own time, then the project of universal freedom does not need to be discarded but, rather, redeemed and reconstituted on a different basis” (Buck-Morss, 2009: 74–75).

It is hardly an historical accident that the legendary chronicler of the Haitian Revolution and anti-colonial revolutionary C. L. R. James was also a keen student of dialectics and the author of Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (1948), once described by him as his “most important work” (cited in Kerr-Ritchie, 2007: 290). The dialectical tradition also proved central to Aime Césaire’s mix of anti-colonialism and communism and the revolutionary humanism of Frantz Fanon (1963/1961: 148–205), especially to his understanding of capitalism, imperialism and colonialism as a totality to be sublated in the course of decolonization, which informs the prescient warning issued in his chapter on “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” in The Wretched of the Earth—on the futility of “national liberation” without anti-imperialist and socialist revolution.

Admittedly, I am drawing my dialectical anti-colonial examples mostly from a time before Hegel and Marx were displaced by Martin Heidegger as the key philosophical inspiration for “provincializing Europe” in the name of postcolonialism—apparently the prime agenda of present-day postcolonial urban studies as well, if the seemingly sacred and over-sized space dedicated to Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) in this discourse is any indication (Derickson, 2015; Roy, 2015; for poignant critiques of Chakrabarty and his brand of “left-Heideggerianism” beyond the scope of this paper, cf. Harootunian, 2015; Kaiwar, 2014; Waite, 2008). Yet, a wonderful anecdote recounted by Buck-Morss—via an encounter between Nick Nesbitt (scholar of Antillean literature and critical theory) and Fanon’s one-time teacher Césaire—gives us a sense of the enduring political and methodological importance of “not only Hegel’s Haiti, but Haiti’s Hegel, that is, the Afro-Caribbean reception of Hegel that claims him as their own”:

“Nesbitt has traced this legacy through the work of Aimé Césaire, whose influential concept of negritude, referring to the African diaspora’s self-understanding based on ‘a common experience of subjugation and enslavement’, considers the slave’s self-liberation in the Haitian Revolution as ‘emblematic’. Césaire recalled to Nesbitt personally his youthful excitement in discovering [Jean] Hyppolite’s new translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology (1941). ‘When the French translation of the Phenomenology first came out, I showed it to Senghor, and said to him ‘Listen to what Hegel says, Léopold: to arrive at the Universal, one must immerse himself in the Particular!’” (Buck-Morss, 2009: 17–18)

Arriving at the universal by way of the particular—this is unsurprisingly and precisely also the trajectory of the praxis of totalization at the heart of Sartre’s prodigious contribution to the dialectical tradition. In fact, he developed the term totalization in Critique of Dialectical Reason very much in opposition to the futility of reified attempts to contemplate totality from some impossible Archimedean point of view, and in order to theorize how social groups undertaking forms of collective praxis may progressively negate the actually existing world and turn it into something else. Sartrean totalization or praxis, that is to say, proceeds from the particulars of a subjective–objective situation, in the manner of Donna Haraway’s (1998) “situated knowledges” or Lukács’s “proletarian standpoint”—and in the form of a political project extended in time, space and social relations that is intent on apprehending and transforming totality. Jameson (1991: 333) usefully summarizes this key Sartrean formulation as follows: “Totalizing … is, strictly speaking, that process whereby, actively impelled by the project, an agent negates the specific object or item and reincorporates it into the larger project-in-course.” In Sartre’s (1976/1960: 53, 830) own words, “the totalization differs from the totality in that the latter is totalized while the former totalizes itself”; or even more clearly, with a nod to Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach, totalization is “the constantly developing (en cours) process of understanding and making history.”

Some of the most productive and imaginative reflections on totality are indeed to be found in certain—i.e. not all—strands of radical feminism emerging in the 1970s. For a pressing political challenge for this generation of especially socialist and materialist feminists consisted in theorizing the articulation between capitalism and patriarchy within a holistic perspective of social relations, one that would ideally encourage questions concerning race, sexuality and other kinds of unequal power relations also to assume center stage in those critical inquiries. Kathi Weeks’s (1998) Constituting Feminist Subjects offers a lucid and most even-handed survey of the sometimes highly contentious debates surrounding such path-breaking efforts, which initially focused on the nature of the relationship between class (capitalism) and gender (patriarchy). The “dual systems model” of Heidi Hartmann (1981) and the “unified systems theory” of Iris Young (1981) provided the main contrasting initial approaches to the capitalism-patriarchy nexus in this conjuncture in the US, while feminists in other countries were also more or less simultaneously and fruitfully engaged in similar questions dealing with social totality from broadly feminist–socialist perspectives, with due respect to their own diverse geographical locations and political affiliations—including Margaret Benston (1969), Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (1972), Silvia Federici (1975), Leopoldina Fortunati (1995/1981), Maria Mies (1986), Frigga Haug (1987/1983), Zillah Eisenstein (1979), Lise Vogel (2013/1983), Dorothy Smith (2004, 1987), Himani Bannerji (1995) and the Combahee River Collective, which issued one of the first manifestos (in 1977) presenting a view of social totality in terms that might today be (mis)recognized as an innovation of “intersectionality”:

“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” (The Combahee River Collective, cited in Eisenstein, 1979: 362).

Following the dual and unified systems approaches to totality proposed by Hartmann and Young comes a radical feminist perspective creatively indebted to Lukács—which also owes its formidable theoretical resources to Dorothy Smith (1987), Nancy Hartsock (1983), Sandra Harding (2004, 1986), Alison M Jagger (1983), Patricia Hill Collins (2009/1990), Donna Haraway (1988), and others. Whereas systems theories approached social totality more by way of structure and function, feminist standpoint theory distinguished itself by anchoring its perspective fully in subjective experience as much as desire for revolutionary social change, thus coming much closer to the avowedly dialectical conceptions of totality invoked here. With Harding, Hartsock and Jagger in particular, the radical current known as standpoint feminism drew directly from the form of Lukács’s (1971/1922: 159, 149) argument in History and Class Consciousness, where he sought to show that “the historical knowledge of the proletariat begins with knowledge of the present, with the self-knowledge of its own social situation”; or, given the relentless commodification of labor-power and the generalization of the same commodity form throughout capitalist society, why “the self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society.” The formal relation established by Lukács here enables, under specific (pre)conditions of social and political organization, a movement from the epistemological location of a social group to the possibility of its own objective knowledge of the social totality—which resembles the paths chartered by Hartsock et al. (Weeks 1998) from the “partial perspective” of “embodied knowledge” towards reliable and transformative collective political awareness of the world, which the postmodern panopticon, however, discourages us from calling “objective.”

Jameson (2009/1998: 215), the leading student and heir of Lukács in contemporary theory, has enthusiastically observed that “the most authentic descendency of Lukács’s thinking is to be found, not among the Marxists, but within a certain feminism, where the unique conceptual move of History and Class Consciousness has been appropriated for a whole new program, now renamed (after Lukács’s own usage) standpoint theory.” And Weeks’s (1998) chapter devoted to this and related stories in Inventing Feminist Subjects is also appropriately titled “Aspiration to Totality.” So it is possible now to update Jameson’s observation with what I take to be two more recent exemplars of Lukács’s “unfinished project”: Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (2003) acclaimed Feminism Without Borders, which makes a strikingly Lukáscian argument for the epistemic privilege enjoyed by women of color in the highly precarious yet strictly disciplined and underpaid as well as unpaid labor regimes operating around the world, in figuring out the co-constitution of class, race, and gender mediations in the making of the global social totality generally characterized as neoliberal; and Glenn Coulthard’s (2014) award-winning Red Skin, White Masks, which, although with no explicit mention of Lukács, likewise presents a persuasive case for the exceptional capacities of indigenous activists in settler-colonial Canada to make sense of the colonial as well as class aspects of the parasitic, extractive, speculative, and destructive features of contemporary global capital. More examples may be offered in this vein, such as Timothy Brennan’s (2013) essay “Edward Said as a Lukáscian Critic”, George Ciccariello-Maher’s (2017) delightfully provocative Decolonizing Dialectics and of course Sartre (2001/1964) himself as the most energetic anti-colonial writer among the leading intellectuals of Western Marxism, but it is better to end this excursus on totality and totalization here with one political point, which is that these varieties of totalizing projects in Marxist, anti-colonial, and radical feminist registers are not to be misread as so many instances of epistemological relativism. On the contrary, as Sartre (1991/1985, 1976/1960) well understood, the praxis of totalizing works precisely as an antidote to nominalism—which our lingering postmodern and persistent liberal-pluralist sensibilities hardly register as a symptom or problem. As Jameson suggests, moreover, the purpose of such diverse feminist, anti-colonial, and Marxist perspectives on a given social totality should be

“to make an inventory of the variable structures of ‘constraint’ lived by various marginal, oppressed or dominated groups—the so-called ‘new social movements’ fully as much as the working class—with this difference, that each form of privation is acknowledged as producing its own specific ‘epistemology’, its own specific view from below, and its own specific and distinctive truth claim. It is a project that will sound like ‘relativism’ or ‘pluralism’ only if the identity of the absent common object of such ‘theorization’ from multiple ‘standpoints’ is overlooked—what one therefore does not exactly have the right to call (but let it stand as contradictory shorthand) ‘late capitalism’.” (Jameson, 2009/1998: 221).

Against the backdrop of such thoughts on totality and the Marxist, anti-colonial and feminist projects of totalization, the differences—both real and imagined—between Brenner and Schmid and their postcolonial and feminist critics may be viewed in a constructive light. To begin with, it should be clear by now that Brenner and Schmid’s overt disavowals of totalizing thought are to be taken with a serious grain of salt; and that they should be read as theorists fundamentally committed to the dialectical method, much like the original source of their concept of planetary urbanization: Lefebvre. I’d suggest something similar about their critics as well. For although much of the feminist as well as postcolonial critique of planetary urbanization is perfunctorily peppered with “anti-totalizing” sound-bites, the political substance of it seems to be saying something else: namely, to the extent the concept of planetary urbanization by commission or omission excludes anti-colonial and feminist standpoints, that Brenner and Schmid are not sufficiently holistic, i.e. totalizing. What is truly and legitimately demanded from them therefore is not less totality, but more—a decidedly more holistic account of the role of “production of space” (Lefebvre, 1991/1974) in the current global socio-spatial totality, within which anti-colonial and feminist concerns will be at home fully as much as class-oriented ones. To arrive at this perspective on the debate on planetary urbanization, it would be essential to eschew the clichéd postmodern view of totality as tantamount to totalitarianism and not erroneously equate totalizing thought with reductive, over-generalizing, and indeed un-holistic thinking. For the recognition that the concept of totality in the aforementioned Marxist, anti-colonial and socialist-feminist strands of critical theory includes by definition dialectical notions of contradiction, difference, mediation, and articulation is most helpful to theorize how capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism co-determine the complex whole of society—which it is the task of revolutionary politics to interpret and change.

The great potential in the concept of planetary urbanization flows at least in part from the still unrealized promise of Lefebvre’s radical oeuvre on space—from The Production of Space as an unfinished project. On the one hand, he explicated the role played by the production of space in not only the survival of capitalism, but also in the making of other possible worlds. In this path-breaking endeavor, Lefebvre exploded the terrain of Marxist political engagement beyond the proverbial factory floor to social space more broadly, especially the domains of the state (“autogestion”), the urban (“the right to the city”) and the everyday (“Marxism is a critique of everyday life”), even offering in the process some suggestive anti-colonial (especially in the volumes on De l’État) and proto-feminist (especially in the volumes on everyday life) insights (Goonewardena, 2011; Goonewardena et al., 2008; Haug, 2003). On the other hand, neither Lefebvre nor the majority of his students fully developed some of those flashes of insight, partly on account of his and their own Eurocentric itineraries and inadequate conceptions of class. There’s more to be done, certainly, to deliver on Lefebvre’s promises on space, time, and revolution, indeed, by taking Lefebvre beyond Lefebvre. Most instructive to me in this regard has been the work of Stefan Kipfer, who has scrupulously studied Lefebvre’s anti-colonial credentials and demonstrated how in post/colonial conditions his work has to be complemented by the accomplishments of more pioneering critics of colonization and its legacies, ranging from Fanon to Césaire to Himani Bannerji (Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2013; Kipfer et al., 2013; Kipfer, 2007). Likewise, Kristin Ross’s (1995) Fast Cars, Clean Bodies—a coruscating study of post-war modernization of France in tandem with the decolonization of the French empire—offers the most astute appropriation and extension of Lefebvre from a standpoint that is at once feminist and anti-colonial, by drawing innovatively on his concepts of everyday life, space, and state. These are but two examples from an evidently larger group of writers who have reflected on and taken Lefebvre in diverse directions beyond unmediated notions of class, such as Frigga Haug (2003), Doreen Massey (1994), Mary McLeod (1997), Fernando Coronil (1997), Goonewardena and Kipfer (2007, 2005), Kipfer and Goonewardena (2007), Lukasz Stanek (2015a, 2015b), and others. Nonetheless, as feminist and postcolonial critics have insisted that there is an inexcusable deficit of such efforts in critical urban theory—“it is unclear” to Linda Peake (2015: 1) “whether feminism has arrived” there—the question that emerges for Brenner, Schmid, and their readers in the present context is this: how can contemporary inquiries into planetary urbanization, with and beyond Lefebvre, do justice to radical feminist and anti-colonial political agendas?

To go beyond Lefebvre, it may be worthwhile to go back to him as well—particularly to his socio-spatial theorization of totality. For if a genuinely constructive dialogue between students of planetary urbanization and their critics is possible, then that conversation will have somehow to work through rather than avoid the concept of totality—to which Lefebvre made an original contribution by spatializing it without fetishizing space or scale. To wit: he opened up a new critical-theoretical space by reformatting the conventional base-superstructure model of Marxism into a novel conception of totality as a mediated articulation of three levels of social reality: the global or universal level of state and capital logics; the level of everyday life containing contestations between alienated routine and utopian yearning; and the level of the urban, which mediates between the global and the everyday (Goonewardena, 2011; Kipfer, 2009). Yet this conception of totality—possibly Lefebvre’s most original general contribution to critical theory—appears more like an already familiar backdrop than the explicit frame of reference in Brenner and Schmid’s (2015) most cited article, leaving open the possibility of it being read as “totalizing” in precisely the most inept sense of the word. A more mediated and substantive rendition of Lefebvre’s conception of totality as the foundational theoretical horizon for planetary urbanization, however, would make this discourse more receptive to various subjects, especially at the level of everyday life—which has been a particularly fruitful one for feminist projects among Lefebvre’s three levels of social reality, as exemplified by Canadian Marxist-feminist and pioneering standpoint theorist Dorothy Smith’s (1987) classic The Everyday World as Problematic, an iconoclastic contribution to Marxist-feminism with hardly a reference to Western Marxism. But Marxist-feminist interventions have also transformed what Lefebvre called the global or general-abstract level of capital and state, not least by radically reformulating our conceptions of social relations of production and reproduction during the course of the aforementioned debates on “dual systems,” “unified systems,” and standpoint theory. Their contributions to the concept of totality, as Italian feminist Sara Farris explains with respect to Social Reproduction Feminism in a recent interview with Greek Marxist critic George Souvlis, are still far from finished:

“By focusing on the largely gendered nature of social-reproductive labour Social Reproduction Feminism also aims to analyse one of the weaknesses of Marxist feminism, that is, its tendency to frame class exploitation and gendered oppression as separate one from the other. The challenge for Social Reproduction Feminism instead is to understand gendered oppression neither in isolation from class exploitation, nor from race, sexuality and other constitutive social relations. This is not an easy task, as our very modes of thinking about the social are fragmented, or intersectional, as it were. That is why, I think, intersectionality has become such an important paradigm for feminism. It is because it conceives of different experiences of oppression and exploitation as coming from different and separate systems and tries to recombine the fragments of oppression without denying their singularity. I think Social Reproduction Feminism seeks to include and to go beyond intersectionality by saying both that we need to understand capitalism as the very specific socio-economic system in which those forms of oppression are generated and nourished, and that there are not ‘separate’ systems of oppression or exploitation under capitalism that can be understood in isolation one from the other.” (Farris, 2017)

We can also see a similarly totalizing approach advanced across a broader array of feminist and other radical political concerns in the aptly titled Pour un féminisme de la totalité (Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée et al., 2017), a multi-themed volume including contributions from such critics as Tithi Bhattacharya, Johanna Brenner, Angela Davis and Federici among other mostly non-Anglophone writers—which unabashedly advocates a radical feminist engagement with the much-maligned concept of totality as a step beyond intersectionality. One may add further references to this kind of literature that appears to be bourgeoning in the face of present political challenges—Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression edited by Tithi Battacharya (2017) or Lise Vogel’s (2013) Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory—but the lesson to be drawn here lies in the demarcation of the theoretical space generated by the concept of totality for a rewarding dialogue between Marxism, feminism, and other radical perspectives with a transformative stake in the contemporary global social order. With reference to the process of urbanization integral to the latter, Lefebvre’s conception of the dialectically mediated articulation of levels of social reality offers a necessary if not sufficient resource to open up Brenner and Schmid’s (2015) planetary urbanization theses to their critics’ questions—the exploration of which will have much to draw from old as well as new feminist and anti-colonial engagements with totality.

It is safe to say that Peake’s (2015: 2–3) chilling perspective of planetary urbanization as a “theory that purports to tell us that the urban is now the planetary condition”—to the exclusion of “the agrarian question, the rural, the countryside, the wilderness, all their histories, all their geographies, all that life”—is typical among a host of Brenner and Schmid’s critics, along with allegations of them neglecting difference and ignoring everyday life. But this is by no means the only possible verdict on Brenner and Schmid, not merely because the textual evidence (cited by Goonewardena, 2014, for example, among other contributors to Brenner, 2014) weighs heavily against such misperceptions of their writings—which appear to have been read with alarming amnesia in much of the planetary urbanization debate, ignoring virtually everything but extracted sentences from the latest one or two articles penned by these two (non-identical) writers, whose respective engagements with Lefebvre-inspired urban theory and activism span more than two decades, including Schmid’s (2005) street-level politicization in the context of everyday life urban struggles in Zürich in the late 1990s that eventually yielded a scholarly monograph on Lefebvre and Brenner’s (2017) prolific oeuvre on the urban question, scale, and state; not to mention their special attention to differential urbanization as an essential element of a triad including concentrated and extended urbanization, echoing Lefebvre’s own dialectical theorization of absolute, abstract and differential space in The Production of Space and implosion–explosion in The Urban Revolution. A different reading of Brenner and Schmid is possible also and above all because phenomena of universal scope or tendency—such as urbanization, capitalism or for that matter patriarchy—are not automatically exhaustive and do not therefore exclude everything else in the world. They exist in relations of articulation, mediation, contradiction or “difference” with other phenomena of more or less generality; and it is the indispensible virtue of the concept of totality and the politics of totalization to clarify in theory and practice the nature and prospects of such relations—both objective and subjective. The apparently commonplace view that urbanization, just because it is deemed to be planetary, excludes our attention from such indubitably important matters as patriarchy and colonization is mistaken and represents a debilitating point of departure for advancing the conversation on planetary urbanization from any number of radical perspectives. The concept of totality outlined here with reference to specific strands of Marxism, feminism, and anti-colonialism, and especially as theorized by Lefebvre, is intended as a more promising way forward.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Martin Danyluk, Dylan Simone, and Anna-Esther Younes for helpful thoughts on an earlier version of this paper, and to the paid as well as unpaid labor of everyone associated with the editorial process, especially Ketki Sharma and Alex Vasudevan.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

Kanishka Goonewardena was trained as an architect in Sri Lanka and now teaches urban design and critical theory at the University of Toronto. He is co-editor of Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (New York: Rutledge, 2008) and the author of various essays on space, ideology, aesthetics, nationalism, and colonialism. His current research deals with the historical geography of the concept of imperialism.

References

Adorno

(1974/1951) Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Tr. E F N Jephcott. London: New Left Books.

Althusser

Balibar

(1970/1968) Reading Capital. Tr. B Brewster. London: Verso.

Anderson

(1976) Considerations on Western Marxism. London: Verso.

Bannerji

(1995) Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism. Toronto: Women’s Press.

Battacharya

(2017) Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto.

Benston

(1969) The political economy of women’s liberation. Monthly Review 21(4): 13–27.

Boggio Éwanjé-Épée F, Magliani-Belkacem S, Merteuil M and Monferrand F (eds) (2017) Pour un féminisme de la totalité. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam.

Brennan

(2013) Edward Said as a Lukácsian critic: modernism and empire. College Literature 40(4): 14–32.

Brenner

(2017) Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays. Basel: Birkhäuser.

10.

Brenner N (ed) (2014) Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis.

11.

Brenner

Schmid

(2015) Towards a new epistemology of the urban? City 19(2–3): 151–182.

12.

Buck-Morss

(2009) Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

13.

Buckley

Strauss

(2016) With, against and beyond Lefebvre: planetary urbanization and epistemic plurality. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(4): 617–636.

14.

Chakrabarty

(2000) Provincializing Europe: Post-Colonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

15.

Ciccariello-Maher

(2017) Decolonizing Dialectics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

16.

Coronil

(1997) The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

17.

Coulthard G (2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

18.

Dalla

Costa M

James

(1972) The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press.

19.

Derickson

(2015) Urban geography 1: locating urban theory in the ‘urban age’. Progress in Human Geography 39(5): 647–657.

20.

Eisenstein Z (ed.) (1979) Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

21.

Fanon

(1963/1961) The Wretched of the Earth. Tr. C Farrington, Preface J-P Sartre. New York: Grove Press.

22.

Farris

(2017) Marxism, feminism and femonationalism: an interview with Sara Farris [by George Souvlis], Salvage, July 13. Available at: http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/marxism-religion-and-femonationalism-an-interview-with-sara-farris (accessed 31 August 2017).

23.

Federici

(1975) Wages Against Housework. Bristol: Falling Wall Press.

24.

Fortunati

(1995/1981) The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital. Tr. H Creek, Ed. J Fleming. New York: Autonomedia.

25.

Foucault

(1970/1966) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage.

26.

Goonewardena

(2014) The country and the city in the urban revolution. In: Brenner N (ed) Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, pp.218–231.

27.

Goonewardena

(2011) “Henri Lefebvre.” In: Ritzer G and Stepnisky J (eds) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists. Volume 2: Contemporary Social Theorists. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp.44–64.

28.

Goonewardena K, Kipfer S, Milgrom R, et al., (eds) (2008) Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre. New York: Routledge.

29.

Goonewardena

Kipfer

(2007) Postcolonial urbicide: new imperialism, global cities and the damned of the earth. New Formations 59: 23–33.

30.

Goonewardena

Kipfer

(2005) Spaces of difference: reflections from Toronto on multiculturalism, bourgeois urbanism and the possibility of radical urban politics. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(3): 670–678.

31.

Haraway

(1998) Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of the partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599.

32.

Harding S (ed) (2004) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies. New York: Routledge.

33.

Harding

(1986) The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

34.

Harootunian

(2015) Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capital. New York: Columbia University Press.

35.

Hartman

(1981) The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism: towards a more progressive union. In: Sargent L (ed) Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, pp.1–41.

36.

Hartsock

(1983) Money, Sex and Power. New York: Longman.

37.

Haug

(2003) Alltagsforschung. In: Haug F (ed) Historisches-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Feminismus. Hamburg: Argument Verlag, pp.6–14.

38.

Haug

(1987/1983) Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory. Tr. E Carter London: Verso.

39.

Hegel

GWF

(1977/1807) Phenomenology of Spirit. Tr. A V Miller, Foreword J N Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

40.

Hill

Collins P

(2009/1990) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.

41.

Jameson

(2009/1998) “History and Class Consciousness as an unfinished project.” In: Valences of the Dialectic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 201–222.

42.

Jameson

(1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

43.

Jameson

(1979) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

44.

Jameson

(1971) Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

45.

Jagger

(1983) Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Brighton: The Harvester Press.

46.

Jay

(1984) Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press.

47.

Kaiwar

(2014) The Postcolonial Orient: The Politics of Difference and the Project of Provincializing Europe. Leiden: Brill.

48.

Kerr-Ritchie

(2007) On C L R James and Marxist theory. The Journal of African American History 92(2): 289–292.

49.

Kipfer

(2009) Why the urban question still matters: reflections on rescaling and the promise of the urban. In: Keil R and Mahon R (eds) Leviathan Undone? Towards a Political Economy of Scale. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, pp.67–83.

50.

Kipfer

(2007) Fanon and space: colonization, urbanization and liberation from the colonial to the global city. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25(4): 701–726.

51.

Kipfer

Goonewardena

(2013) Urban marxism and the postcolonial question: Henri Lefebvre and ‘colonization’. Historical Materialism 21(2): 1–41.

52.

Kipfer

Goonewardena

(2007) Colonization and the new imperialism: On the meaning of urbicide today. Theory and Event 10(2). Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/218089 (accessed 1 January 2018)

53.

Kipfer

Saberi

Wieditz

(2013) Henri Lefebvre: debates and controversies. Progress in Human Geography 37(1): 115–134.

54.

Lefebvre

(2003/1970) The Urban Revolution. Tr. R Bononno, Foreword N Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

55.

Lefebvre

(1991/1974) The Production of Space. Tr. D Nicholson-Smith, Afterword D Harvey. Oxford: Blackwell.

56.

Löwy

(2005/2001) Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”. Tr. C Turner. London: Verso.

57.

Lukács

(1971/1922) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Tr. R Livingston. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

58.

McLeod

(1997) Henri Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life: an introduction. In: Burke D and Harris S (eds) Architecture of the Everyday. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press.

59.

Massey

(1994) Space, Place, Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.

60.

McLean

(2017) In praise of chaotic pathways: a feminist response to planetary urbanization. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 36(3): 547–555

61.

Mies

(1986) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. London: Zed Books.

62.

Mohanty

(2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

63.

Peake

(2016) The twenty-first century quest for feminism and the global urban. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40(1): 219–227.

64.

Peake

(2015) On feminism and feminist allies in knowledge production in urban geography. Urban Geography 37(6): 830–838.

65.

Robinson J (2016) Comparative urbanism: new geographies and cultures of theorizing the urban. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40(1): 187–199.

66.

Ross

(1995) Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

67.

Roy

(2015) Who’s afraid of postcolonial theory? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40(1): 200–209.

68.

Roy

(2009) The 21st century metropolis: New geographies of theory. Regional Studies 43(6): 819–830.

69.

Sartre

(2001/1964) Colonialism and Neocolonialism. Tr. A Haddour, S Brewer and T McWilliams, Preface R J C Young, Intro. A Haddour. New York: Routledge.

70.

Sartre

(1991/1985) Critique of Dialectical Reason. Vol 2. Tr. Q Hoare. London: Verso.

71.

Sartre

(1976/1960) Critique of Dialectical Reason. Vol 1, Tr. A Sheridan-Smith. London: Verso.

72.

Schmid

(2015) Specificity and urbanization—a theoretical outlook. In: Studio Basel ETH (ed) The Inevitable Specificity of Cities. Basel: Lars Müller, pp. 287–307.

73.

Schmid

(2005) Stadt, Raum Und Gesellschaft: Henri Lefebvre Und Die Theorie Der Produktion Des Raumes. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

74.

Scott

Storper

(2015) The nature of cities: the scope and limits of urban theory. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(1): 1–16.

75.

Smith

(2004) Women’s perspective as a radical critique of sociology. In: Harding S (ed) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies. London: Routledge, pp. 21–34.

76.

Smith

(1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northwestern University Press.

77.

Stanek

(2015a) Architects from socialist countries in Ghana (1957–1967): modern architecture and mondialisation. Society of Architectural Historians Journal 74(4): 416–442.

78.

Stanek

, (2015b) Mobilities of architecture in the late Cold War: from socialist Poland to Kuwait, and back. International Journal of Islamic Architecture 4(2): 365–398.

79.

Thomas

(2002) Philosophical strategies: Althusser and Spinoza. Historical Materialism 10(3): 71–113.

80.

Thompson

(1978) Poverty of Theory: An Orrery of Errors. London: Merlin Press.

81.

Vogel

(2013/1983) Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory. Intro. S Ferguson and D McNally. Leiden: Brill.

82.

Waite

(2008) Lefebvre without Heidegger: ‘Left-Heideggerianism’ qua contradictio in adiecto. In: Goonewardena K, Kipfer S, Milgrom R, and C Schmid (eds) Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre. New York: Routledge, pp.94–114.

83.

Walker

(2015) Building a better theory of the urban: a response to ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’ City 19(2&3): 183–191.

84.

Weeks

(1998) Inventing Feminist Subjects. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

85.

Young

(1981) Beyond the unhappy marriage: a critique of dual systems theory. In: Sargent L (ed) Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, pp.43–69.