Book review: Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South

Commentary I: From places to territories of poverty?

I am delighted to have been invited to contribute to the AAG panel and Book Review Symposium on Territories of Poverty. Since its early stages I have been following the project with great interest, and served as a discussant for the conference held in Fall 2012. One of the many innovative aspects of the project is how Ananya Roy and Emma Shaw Crane involved undergraduate students intellectually as well as organizationally. I found the student commentaries fascinating and illuminating, and wished they were longer. Since I had been the discussant on Michael Katz’s paper at the conference, I was especially struck by how Luis Flores engaged Katz’s chapter in the book. Drawing on his deep knowledge of what’s happening in Calexico, Flores provides a brief yet powerful glimpse into how poverty is being produced and deepened through relations of indebtedness in the name of people becoming entrepreneurs of themselves. His closing paragraph bears repeating:

Critical poverty scholarship should engage with the legitimization of poverty prescriptions and the social arrangements their credibility depends on, while always striving to understand these ideas in relation to ‘concrete work,’ often in enabling profits or quelling social unrest. Necessary in this task are both the historian’s purposeful shovel and ethnographer’s critical field notes, not for unearthing buried ideas, but for mapping the dynamic ways in which they live through deliberate and eventful rearrangements in the present. (p. 82)

In her introduction, Roy lays out with great clarity the threefold agenda of poverty scholarship in the book:

An analytical shift from places of poverty to territories of poverty: how poverty is governed as a problem, and above all produced and normalized as a territory. Following Painter (2010) and Elden (2013), ‘territory’ figures here in neo-Foucauldian terms as political technologies of rule, ‘a state space that is always becoming’, and ‘a promise that the state cannot fulfill’. It marks out, Roy suggests, the limits – or aporia – of the government of poverty;

Let me turn now to bringing this agenda into conversation with the ‘Gray Areas’ chapter. Gray Areas refers to a Ford Foundation program of intervention in six metropolitan regions in the United States in the early 1960s, designed as a solution to juvenile delinquency, social disorder, and racial transition. It served as a progenitor of Great Society programs, and resonated with Robert McNamara’s Project 100,000 aimed at incorporating into the army young black men rejected from the military draft. These two programs need to be held simultaneously in view, the authors argue, because they exemplify interconnections between the wars at home and abroad. What also becomes clear is how these programs operated as liberal band-aids plastered on entangled, conflict-ridden, convulsive historical geographies of racial oppression, colonialism, and Cold War militarism in multiple, spatially-extended but also interconnected arenas.

Although the limits of such poverty programs are hardly surprising, the authors provide an instructive account of how they played out in practice. Especially compelling are the transformations of Gray Areas in the laboratory city of Oakland, CA. Roy, Schrader, and Shaw Crane trace the shift from the earlier phases in which progressive black leaders ousted the conservative white mayor of Oakland to establish their leadership of the program – and how they in turn were overtaken by militant activists challenging middle-class board members. Activists bypassed city government to form a separate, autonomous organization that became an incubator for the Black Panther Party – until Ronald Reagan vetoed funding in 1971. The authors go on to spell out more fully the relationship between Great Society programs, their precursors like Gray Areas, Cold War visions of modernization, and the war in Vietnam. I would add here that the Cuban Revolution and the Alliance for Progress were also important nodes in thickening webs of security, counter-insurgency, and poverty/development initiatives in the post-Second World War period.

In the context of the panel discussion, the question I posed to the authors turned primarily around the sharp distinction that Ananya Roy draws in her introduction between places and territories of poverty (p. 3), and Emma Shaw Crane reiterates in her chapter (p. 347). I asked what concept of place (and space) they are rejecting, and whether a relational conception of the production of space and place along the lines of Lefebvre and Massey is necessarily at odds with their conception of territories of poverty. It seemed to me that the richness of the ‘Gray Areas’ chapter derived in part from such a conception. More generally, I was interested in the question of what is gained and lost by positing place vs. territory in either/or terms.

In her response, Emma Shaw Crane explained that they were reacting to reductive understandings of place that pervade much of the poverty literature. She also emphasized, though, that the conception of territories of poverty provides analytical leverage that a relational conception of space and place does not – attention to the ethics of encounter; the affects of this work; the temporalities of poverty; poverty knowledge; and middle class actors. The purpose of the book, she argued, is to displace the lens from poor people to middle class activists in such a way as to help politicize them.

Undoubtedly the concept of ‘territories of poverty’ does different analytical and political work from a relational conception of the production of space and place. The question remains, however, as to whether or not they are mutually exclusive.