Abstract
In September 2012, Ananya Roy and Emma Shaw Crane hosted the conference “Territories of Poverty” at the University of California, Berkeley. Three sessions were held during the 1.5-day meeting, which resulted in the publication of Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South 3 years later as part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series of the University of Georgia Press. Both the conduct of the conference and the publication of the contributions are placed in the context of a new world order that has gradually emerged in the 21st century. On one hand, the Global North has descended into economic crisis and recession, and on the other hand, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have risen rapidly in the Global South and become economic front-runners. This is in contrast with the previous context, in which the North was synonymous with the wealthy and the developed, whereas the South stood for the “territory” of poverty and the developing or underdeveloped world. It is precisely against this new order that poverty and related issues are rethought, re-conceptualized, and reinterpreted by Ananya Roy and Emma Shaw Crane along with the other contributors.
Territories of Poverty contains 18 contributions plus a Preface, an Introduction, and a Conclusion. The contributions are organized into three sections: “programs of government,” “the ethics of encounter,” and “geographies of penalty and risk,” each, respectively, corresponding to one session of the conference. Two types of contributions are included in the book: 12 chapters written by scholars, and six short essays called “representations” written by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. The content design is somewhat unusual, but it helps different generations of scholars think about the varied ways of producing, managing, and governing poverty. The authors of the representations, whom Ananya Roy identified as “millennials,” not only helped organize the conference but also contributed their own thoughts and perspectives to the theory and questions of poverty as their conversation with and feedback to the scholars’ points of view. Thus, young blood contributed to the debate of poverty.
Several questions came to mind as I read the book. Why was the concept of “territories” rather than a more traditional concept of “places” applied? Where is poverty and how it is generated? What are the relationships and differences between the problem of poverty and the current category of the North and the South? How is power manifested spatially in the form of poverty? How do government functions and programs problematize poverty as they seek to resolve it? How large is the gap between the theory of poverty and the practice of “act[ing] on” poverty (p. 344), considering the possibility of eliminating or alleviating it? The book addresses three aspects of these questions.
The first aspect consists in a conceptual shift from “place of poverty” to “territory of poverty.” As Ananya Roy, one of the editors, notes in the Introduction, this book “is concerned with how the problematic of poverty is closely linked to the question of territory” (p. 3). She borrows the definition of territory, as “political technology,” from Elden and Foucault. Poverty in such a territorial perspective is understood and rendered by the contributors in various ways. According to Michael B. Katz, territories of poverty are often invisible. Akhil Gupta links poverty and security as he attempts to territorialize poverty. For Vincanne Adams, the emphasis is on disaster and disaster-induced poverty. Following Roy’s introduction, Bill Maurer argues that territories of poverty are new types of problem-spaces for poverty professionals. Ju Hui Judy Han turns to the time dimension of the territory, including past and futurity. She regards futurity a key constitutive element of territories of poverty. To a certain degree, Loïc Wacquant also insists on time, on the multilevel structural process by which urban marginality, what he terms “urban relegation,” is produced. The “relations of poverty, territory, and power in the postindustrial city” (p. 248) are illustrated within the study of this marginality. Some of these perspectives influence or resonate with Roy’s introduction as she focuses on government programs and on the relationship between government and security when studying territories of poverty.
The second challenge is to conceptualize poverty beyond the North and the South. As shown by the subtitle “rethinking north and south,” another key concern of this collection is about the “new” geography of poverty. The editors and contributors challenge the “well-worn topographic designations of poverty” (p. 9) that simply split the earth into the North and the South, delimit the anthropological borders of poverty, and then endeavor to propose “new and heterogeneous cartographies of power and poverty.” Considering that there are always “others” if there is an “us,” rather than deconstructing this divide, this collection’s contribution to existent scholarship is perhaps the notion of “territories of thought” (p. 16). Having “territories of thought” in mind, the South becomes a concept-metaphor, a relation, and a form of reterritorialization, rather than a stable geographical location. Similarly, poverty is problematized within the history of governments and in the context of global poverty. With such a distinct perspective, the issue of poverty is no longer manifested in the form of place but in flows of cash, goods, services, and people. Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore’s chapter, for example, not only demonstrates the fluidity of territories of poverty but also demonstrates how conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, an emerging South “invention” for antipoverty, operate transnationally for social assistance. Similarly, Bill Maurer’s contribution demonstrates the role of mobile money services, as part of the phenomenon of poverty capital (Roy, 2010), for assisting and benefiting the poor.
The third contribution is an emphasis on poverty beyond its definition as a social problem. Several chapters (by Ju Hui Judy Han, Loïc Wacquant, Ananya Roy, Stuart Schrader, and Emma Shaw Crane) provide a range of examples that show how poverty is a global problem/phenomenon. However, the editors and the contributors go further to view poverty as an ethical discourse. By shifting this analytical lens, the ethics of encounters between the poor and the “middle class” who act upon the poor others are put forward. Again, this shift resonates with Emma Shaw Crane’s conclusion: territories of poverty are not “about poor people” but “about the politics of poverty.” Erica Kohl-Arenas’ contribution, for example, addresses the issue of zones of encounters by exploring the ineffective engagement of consensus-based politics, an idea raised by President Obama, in poverty alleviation through philanthropic investments. Vincanne Adams’ case also challenges the notion that poverty is solvable by the for-profit private sector. Consensus-based philanthropy and the private sector are ineffective and exemplify the dilemmas highlighted in Roy et al.’s (2016) new book for the critical study of poverty and for encountering poverty.
Territories of Poverty is no doubt a seminal work among recent studies on poverty and inequality. The contributions raise interesting perspectives from multiple disciplines and from scholars of different generations and regions. Such a variety of perspectives is rare in the study of poverty. The aim of editing this collections, assumed from the ways in which the editors organize the conference and edit the contributions, is never to present a universal solution to alleviate poverty but to encourage new ways of thinking about poverty or, in Roy’s words, “to remake theories of poverty” (p. 1). In addition to poverty theories, other important issues are addressed in the collection, such as the knowledge of poverty and poverty action. Using critical analysis that challenges accepted narratives and understandings, this book unquestionably provides alternative views, aspects, and perspectives in the construction of our knowledge of poverty. It also presents abundant cases describing how a variety of actors act upon poverty to mitigate it, to help the poor “others” and to promote self-help (successfully or not). Overall, the collection unfolds new possibilities of seeing, discussing, analyzing, and addressing poverty.