Abstract
Introduction
Simon Fraser University, Canada
The politics and spatialities of poverty have long been a focus of research across the social sciences. Critical scholars, including geographers, have contributed greatly to these analyses. Yet, as Vicky Lawson, Sarah Elwood, and the other contributors to Relational Poverty Politics: Forms, Struggles, and Possibilities argue, there remain important ways in which we can understand and intervene in the experience of and production of knowledge about poverty. The book is one of a number of outcomes of the Relational Poverty Network (RPN). The RPN links an international group of scholars, activists, and policy-makers to collaboratively rethink poverty and “poor others” in terms of relations between poverty and privilege and, thus, to reformat standard ways of researching and conceptualizing poverty (http://depts.washington.edu/relpov/).
Relational Poverty Politics is a valuable record of one moment within this continuing international and interdisciplinary discussion. It details the relational conceptual framework developed by the RPN and provides a number of examples—from Argentina, India, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, Singapore, and the United States—of how this framework enhances our understanding of the politics of poverty. It also pays serious attention to the work and aspirations of social movements struggling against poverty and inequality in a range of contexts. Thus, the work of conceptualization and the struggle for change are demonstrated to be intertwined and mutually constitutive throughout the book’s chapters. The production of alternative knowledge about who is poor, what ‘being poor’ means, and what actions are needed to address poverty must be conducted across traditional boundaries between academia, politics, and policy-making, in other words. Moreover, the book can be read as a reflection of the politics of alliance-building, capacity-building, and knowledge production to which Lawson and Elwood and the RPN’s participants have committed. It is a collection of diverse voices speaking from, about, and with a global range of people and places named as “poor.”
This symposium brings Lawson and Elwood into conversation with four interlocutors—Juan Herrera, Eugene McCann, Mae Miller, and Ananya Roy—whose interests intersect with the concerns of the book and who have, to varying degrees, engaged with the RPN over the years. The interventions therefore highlight the strengths of the collection but, as one would expect in an ongoing critical discussion, they also raise a number of questions inspired by the chapters that might direct future work. The editors’ generous response is the first step on this continuing engagement. In a sense, then, the symposium, like book itself, represents an invitation for a still wider array of critical scholars with interests in the politics and spatialities of poverty to engage with the notion of relational poverty politics.
A relational poverty politics of love and care
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
All books have a life way before the finished written product. This edited volume is a testament of the long-term relationships, love, and care that it entails to make book-length engagements. In 2017, I was immensely blessed to attend the second RPN Summer Institute in which I joined a group of scholars from all over the United States and Latin America. The workshop was a result of a National Science Foundation grant that gave fruit to this edited volume. At the Institute, we met together for an entire week in which we workshopped works in progress, received invaluable mentorship, and shared meals in community. This workshop was put together by the editors of Relational Poverty Politics—the remarkable Vicky Lawson and Sarah Elwood. I had only briefly met both at the previous meeting of the American Association of Geographers, so we were pretty much strangers. Despite not knowing each other closely, these two intellectual giants put so much care and passion into organizing and running an immensely productive Summer Institute. I came out of the Institute a transformed scholar. Not only did I have a plan for revising my workshopped chapter, I also came home with a fully reconceptualized plan for my book manuscript, and ideas for two new journal articles. In addition to this, I gained new sets of relationships that I will cherish for the rest of my life. I ended the Institute with a sense of purpose, a sense of validation about the importance of being a critical and decolonial scholar, committed to social justice. I am incredibly indebted to both Sarah Elwood and Vicky Lawson and the other participants of the RPN Summer Institute.
So when I read Relational Poverty Politics, I could see all the generosity, the sheer beauty of their mentorship, and commitment to social justice translated into written form. I could also see the robust set of connections, transnational and intersectional thinking that was central to the Summer Institute. The intellectual project that the book sets forth endeavors to think poverty in a relational fashion and this requires making connections across difference and geography. The book forges these links by bringing together a diverse set of scholars, intellectual traditions, and social movement actors.
As a reader, I gravitated to making connections on a deeply personal level. I could literally see myself in the book. Let me explain. You see I grew up poor. I was also undocumented until the age of 13. And I am a brown queer man living in a settler colonial state that upholds white supremacy so that non-white forms of being will always be precarious at best. I give you this autobiographical sketch because the book is fundamentally urging us to think about how multiple identities shape the conditions of possibility for human beings. Furthermore, these identity categories play a significant role in how individuals navigate poverty and enact a poverty politics. By setting up an expansive terrain through which to understand the mechanics of poverty, and by expanding the identity categories that define poverty politics, this collection pushes the boundaries of traditional poverty studies.
Most studies think about poverty in abstract terms or center on specific geographical regions and historical periods. This book, however, urges readers to think across diverse spatialities and straddles distinctive theoretical frameworks for understanding poverty politics. To do so, it infuses traditional poverty scholarship with the critical work of Ethnic Studies scholars, the Black Radical Tradition, and intellectuals from the global South. The book adds to a scholarly movement that is shifting the geography of reason. This scholarly tradition understands that thinking from specific geographies matters in how we conceptualize human experiences and social inequalities. Furthermore, the book seriously considers how theoretical traditions have rendered unthinkable certain forms of poverty and impoverishment.
One of my favorite pieces is authored by Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, entitled “Illegality, Poverty and Higher Education.” I have the pleasure of knowing Negrón-Gonzales and I can attest to how her work extends beyond just being a mere researcher. Her work is informed by decades of supporting the struggle of undocumented students. She marches along the people that she works with. She is no drive-by ethnographer. Negrón-Gonzales, like other contributors to this edited edition, does the important work of walking the talk. Of showing up for the people they work with. Forging mentorship relationships and support networks are practices that are often over-looked if we just focus on the written product. In her article, Negrón-Gonzales details the struggles of undocumented community college students in the Central Valley of California. The emphasis on the Central Valley is important because it is a region so often overlooked. Her attention to the lives of community college students also reveals her endeavor to center some of the most marginalized undocumented students. She asks: “What happens when we think of poverty not simply as a context, but as a force that centrally configures who undocumented students are, how they navigate the terrain of education, and how they think about their futures.” Her chapter challenges us to think about immigrant illegality as mutually constituted with poverty. Her findings reveal that educational opportunities are configured through and constrained by racially stratified labor markets, intergenerational poverty, and structural inequality. Poverty contours the experiences of undocumented students like the lives of undocumented laborers so often studied in poverty studies.
I was reading Negrón-Gonzales’s chapter when one of my undocumented students came to see me in office hours. He saw the title and I explained what the chapter was about. He stayed quiet as I talked and I could see the sense of recognition in his eyes. We talked afterward about how being undocumented means living in poverty and economic precarity, which we don’t always think about when we study immigrant illegality, and work to support undocumented communities. It is these kinds of moments of connection, self-reflection, and intergenerational engagement that this edited volume enables.
Another important contribution of this edited volume is how it thinks about poverty through an intersectional lens that encompasses differences of race, sexual orientation, geography, gender, class, etc. One of my favorite chapters, for example, written by Jeff Maskovsky and entitled “Staying Alive,” focuses on AIDS activism as a form of relational poverty politics in the United States. His study analyzes the Philadelphia chapter of the militant AIDS activist group ACT UP and the organization’s struggles to provide housing for homeless people living with HIV and AIDS. As a social movement scholar, I was moved by Maskovsky’s analysis of the major transition in ACT UP’s membership. AIDS activism is usually analyzed through the classic frameworks of social movement scholarship that treat movements in terms of life cycles, with a moment of birth, climax, and subsequent death. In most accounts of AIDS activism, this movement reached its climax in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a result of improvements in HIV medication by the mid-1990s, scholarly and popular attention to AIDS activism significantly decreased. Maskovsky shows us that this story of AIDS activism’s rise and fall is not an adequate analysis. Although involvement in radical AIDS activist groups such as ACT UP certainly decreased after the mid-1990s, as is evidenced by the declining size and number of active ACT UP chapters across the US, participation by low-income African Americans increased dramatically during this period of purported movement decline. In other words, HIV infections and cases of people living with AIDS decreased for whites but increased for people of color, especially African Americans. Focusing too narrowly on movement decline thus risks relegating low-income African Americans to the margins of AIDS activist history. I loved this reframing of AIDS activism, and Maskovsky’s focus on analyzing the rocky path that members walked as they created a welcoming and safe space for a growing African American membership. It also shows us that having a singular measure of how we analyze poverty and poverty politics has the potential of overlooking significant struggles and experiences.
Like the rest of the chapters of this edited volume, these two pieces encourage us to broaden the register by which we analyze poverty and poverty politics. Expanding this register opens up the possibility of understanding the limits of traditional ways of knowing. It also allows us to better understand how human difference is experienced as it intersects with poverty. By examining these politics in a relational fashion, it is possible to see similarities between regions of the world so often thought as mutually exclusive. Much of the book, for example, shifts attention from the global North to global South, pointing toward the obvious differences that take shape in both contexts. However, by juxtaposing chapters focused on disparate geographical regions, the book allows readers to see the many parallels between geographies usually not thought of together.
I also see another important intervention in the collection of essays, regarding resilience and resistance. We know that people throughout the world mobilize to fight against conditions of poverty. As the late Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) described, people who suffer multiple forms of oppression are equipped with incredible skills and ways of being in the world that she called “La Facultad” or “The Faculty.” As Anzaldúa wrote, La Facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface. She argued that those that are most marginalized and those that experience racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression have a better-developed sense of this special ability. The essays in this volume reveal that just as oppression affects people differently, there are also multiple ways of challenging and disrupting unequal power relations. As scholars invested in social justice, we must expand how we analyze resistance to social suffering. This edited volume offers a robust analytical and theoretical framework that sees beyond the surface phenomenon of traditional forms of analysis. It develops a politics of love and social justice that bridges multiple academic fields of study. This politics brings forth a scholarly analysis that will serve as a primer for academics and a broader audience committed to social transformation and more egalitarian futures.
A counterpolitics of poverty, within and beyond the academy
Simon Fraser University, Canada
In an increasing number of cities, alleys and other public spaces that are usually considered to be marginal, uninspiring, without value, dead, or dangerous by the majority of the population are now the focus of increased attention. Politicians, planners, architects, designers, business interests, and groups who promote enlivening and beatifying the city organize events like mural festivals and “pop-up” dance parties, or lobby for the wholesale redevelopment of spaces they define as dying, if not dead, and in need of urgent surgery. These events and the marks they leave on cities—literal long-lasting inscriptions, in the case of murals or redevelopments; less visible but no less meaningful influences, in the case of “pop-up” events—are spatial foundations for, and reflections of, various interests. Most obviously, they dovetail with development interests in neighborhoods targeted for gentrification and, as such, they are part of a politics that seeks to inscribe certain narrow definitions of value and appropriateness—appropriate aesthetics for certain places, appropriate activities in certain places, appropriate people in certain places—into policy, everyday life, and into the urban built environment.
Yet, while the politics of shaping social life, policy, politics, and places in the image of relatively narrow definitions of economic viability, appropriateness, and “order” are inscribed and reinscribed over time, life is lived in stigmatized and marginalized spaces. These spaces are not dead, in other words. They often have problematic, dangerous aspects, but they are also respites and resources for low-income and socially stigmatized people. Such spaces are economic assets for many, from binners to those who rely on low-cost groceries, to people who access free or low-cost food, etc. For the most marginalized and stigmatized, alleys, parks, and so on are also places to take drugs, to have sex, to socialize, and, simply, to
This particular politics of public space involves a type of relational poverty politics, then. For Vicky Lawson, Sarah Elwood, and the contributors to their excellent collection, relational poverty politics emphasizes that “poverty and privilege … [are] mutually constituted” and that poverty is a “relationship and a site of conflict, crisis, and contestation” (6). Relational accounts, they continue, focus on “discourses that separate impoverished people and places as ‘other’ from a normative group, that name and categorize them as poor, and that signify this poor other as deficient, criminal, backward, and/or lazy” (7). The book’s conceptualization of poverty is intersectional and international, then. The authors’ project in this book self-consciously extends beyond economism to search globally for instances of relational poverty politics that “unthink” contemporary hegemonic framings of what counts as value, for example, and that emphasize the “counterpolitics of those named as poor … [that are] rebelliously creative, offering openings toward transgressive politics” (14). This is only part of the project exemplified in the book, however. The other agenda, woven through its chapters, is to continue a critical “unthinking” and remaking of academic approaches to poverty studies. The book stems from a multiyear project called the Relational Poverty Network which has brought together numerous scholars from across the globe to envision and practice transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary poverty research that both draws upon and produces “multidirectional theory building that incorporates marginalized voices” (https://depts.washington.edu/relpov/).
These two agendas are exemplified in the 11 core chapters that constitute Relational Poverty Politics and the editors’ introduction and conclusion. The chapters present case studies from South and Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and North America. They include examinations of relational poverty politics as it is manifest in questions of welfare rights, immigration, educational access, AIDS activism, land tenure and dispossession, alternative economies, political violence, and alliance-building, and in efforts to think and represent alternative visions of value and worth on the ground. The overarching story of these chapters is not one of uniform progress toward a radical or progressive remaking of poverty, however. The chapters show the difficulties of developing and operationalizing a new “unthinkable” politics of poverty. Therefore, the book is, as the editors suggest in their introduction and conclusion, an agenda for further thinking and action. It is a starting point that will, no doubt, inspire a great deal more work.
Clearly, I enjoyed reading and learning from Relational Poverty Politics. It is an articulate and compelling expression of the RPN project, which has clearly been a massive and important undertaking. One can only admire Vicky Lawson and Sarah Elwood for undertaking it and bringing it to fruition. They, their authors, and the book itself should be celebrated. Among academics, of course, there can surely be no greater compliment than to raise further questions. In the remainder of this review, I will explore three sets of questions the book raised for me.
The first set of questions returns to the spatiality of poverty politics with which I began my discussion. As the editors note in their conclusion, their approach to poverty politics can “bring to light [and take seriously] complex personhoods, ideas, and politically creative practices expressed by subjects historically framed as nonpersons and [by] their allies” (224). The fact that these subjects live their lives in particular spaces and produce those spaces every day, whether in urban alleys or in myriad other spaces, raises the question of the role of space and spatiality in the conceptualization of relational poverty outlined in the book. The editors note that the book shows how poor people’s counterpolitics “often take place in spaces deemed irrelevant such as homes, low-income neighborhoods, theaters, dumpsters, alleys, and streets” and, as my Vancouver example suggests, I think the role of space, place, site, and scale are crucial to analyzing and developing alternative poverty politics. Certainly, the book’s various chapters highlight numerous spatialities at play in their case studies, but I was left reflecting on whether and how space might be active in shaping poverty politics? How is space more than just the site or location of this politics? In what ways is space at stake in the various chapters? What role does space play in attempts to address poverty differently, for example through territorial separation of the rich and the poor or, alternatively, by creating situations where different people are forced together? How, in turn, might that productive role be different at various scales? On the other hand, what might there be to say about how a recasting of poverty politics as relational might help us evaluate, critique, and rework our conceptualization of the spatial?
A second, related, theme in the book highlights how individuals, communities, and movements attempt to build alternative knowledge about poverty and to express that knowledge in counterhegemonic ways. As Lawson and Elwood put it, following Antonádia Borges’ argument in her chapter, poverty politics is about people’s struggles “to be alive on their own terms and to produce knowledge that challenges the limits of [hegemonic] thought and action” (15). Politics is very much about persuasive storytelling and the development of coalitions around particular framings of problems and solutions. These stories can be in a range of forms—from statistics, to powerful moving narratives, to performance and other cultural productions (as in Dia Da Costa and Richa Nagar’s chapter on theater in India and Borges’ discussion of definitions of home and belonging in South Africa). They can also take the form of problem-definitions and seductive, persuasive narratives and visuals produced and disseminated by agents of the state. (To return to my opening example, alleys can be problematized as dangerous and dying and their planned futures can be represented as alive and welcoming, even, or perhaps especially, if their transformation involves the exclusion of low-income people.) Do counterhegemonic alternatives need to infiltrate into state agencies in order to be effective in changing existing conditions? What, in other words, is an ideal relationship, if any, between the state and relational poverty politics? Clearly in certain cases, such as that discussed by Jim Glassman, there would seem to be little state openness to alternative approaches, but that will not always be the case. Yet, on the other hand, openness can lead to co-optation. So, this theme raises questions for me about the most promising potential relationships between the state and the sorts of counterpolitics engaged in by those named as poor.
A third aspect of the book is alliance-building, which is crucial to the rethinking of poverty and also fraught in terms of the nature of collaboration across difference. The chapters make it clear that relational poverty politics is a very time-consuming and by no means always successful endeavor. It is work—work that is transformative of those involved and often of the world, to one extent or another. Yet, even then, it is not always necessarily transformative in the ways that might be hoped for. Indeed, it may be negated by the forces of the “thinkable,” as Lawson and Elwood put it. The chapters by Antonádia Borges, Jim Glassman, Felipe Magalhães, Jeff Maskovsky, and Thomas Swerts, among others, make this clear. Therefore, this is a book about both the potentialities and difficulties of developing knowledge in alliance with others, developing and circulating alternative ideas, and transforming what we know through transforming
Relational Poverty Politics is a rich and valuable book that clearly answers and provokes numerous questions that will, no doubt, fuel worthwhile discussions in the future. Those interested in poverty and its politics will benefit greatly from engaging with it.
Dialogic learning and the politics of the unthinkable
City University of New York, USA
To give breath
In this brief commentary, I think with the scholarship of Audre Lorde in order to consider Relational Poverty Politics: Forms, Struggles, and Possibilities as a praxis of radical learning. In her essay “Learning from the 60s,” Audre Lorde (2007) argued that “There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living” (Lorde, 2007: 134). Writing from the 1980s against the geopolitical backdrop of US interventions in Grenada and Nicaragua, Lorde (2007) asks how we might better learn from the liberation struggles of the past so as to “become ourselves and effective” (Lorde, 2007: 138) in our present.
First, Lorde challenges us to refuse the twin ruses of historical romance and despair—that we have already arrived politically or that there is nowhere yet to go—and reminds us that continuities of both structural oppressions and radical traditions do not happen passively or automatically, but are actively produced and built-upon. Second, Lorde’s careful reading of the Black Power movements of the 1960s provides a template for transformative and dialogic political engagement. She critically reflects upon her evolving relationship to the writings of Malcolm X and to the transformations in Malcolm’s own thinking around gender, sexuality, and nation. By holding space for both processes of political becoming, Lorde embodies an ethical practice of grounded learning, openness, and radical humility that serves as a guide for social transformation.
Third, Lorde (2007) urgently (re)defines the terms of political struggle. She declares that “there is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives” (Lorde, 2007: 138). Lorde’s “we” is transnational in scope, encompassing those occupied, abandoned, and dispossessed the world over. As Lorde (2007) challenges us to “recognize that our wars are the same” (Lorde, 2007: 142), she asks us to think differently about the nature of militancy. She writes, Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming. It means doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary to forge meaningful coalitions, and it means recognizing which coalitions are possible and which coalitions are not … It means fighting despair (Lorde, 2007: 141–142).
In this spirit, Relational Poverty Politics engages “dialogic learning across diverse sites, subjects and forms of action” (220) that work toward these ends. Dialogic learning encompasses both the writing of new “geographies of theory” (19)—the disruption of Eurocentrism and attention to interrelations between seemingly incommensurable place-based struggles—and a commitment to difficult and loving dialogue between comrades as a basis for radical worlding (Hawthorne & Meche, 2016). It is thus a provocation to ask different questions through place and to deepen our practice of listening.
Intergenerationality and iterative aesthetic education
Relational Poverty Politics offers urgent lessons toward the forging of solidarities and unsettling of ideological projects around poverty and the current social order. Here, I will briefly discuss two of these lessons.
First, Relational Poverty Politics teaches that liberation must be fought for—materially, ideologically, and analytically—on intergenerational terms. The stakes of intergenerational struggle are illustrated by the research of LaShawnDa Pittman and Antonádia Borges. Pittman examines the experiences, survival strategies, and everyday practices of resistance of Black grandmothers in Chicago who become primary caregivers for their grandchildren. She argues that these grandmothers negotiate a contradictory set of requirements for public assistance. For example, some subsidized senior housing programs do not allow children. In other cases, grandmothers decide not to list dependents on the lease to protect their housing situation, but this, in turn, restricts access to child care subsidies and other public benefits. The result is a heightened state of precarity.
Antonádia Borges explores processes of desire, dispossession, and premature death in South Africa through one family’s story of land redistribution. The Kubhekas fought and waited for some 10 years before receiving a farm roughly 10 kilometers from the ancestral lands from which their family had been previously displaced. It was there, on the land that Sibongile undertook a “ritual by proxy” to finalize the traditional marriage ritual between her grandparents. Her grandparents lived stretched and transitory lives between townships and amidst the East Rand taxi wars of the mid-1990s. While they were legally married, they were unable to complete the traditional marriage rituals before Sibongile’s grandmother unexpectedly passed away. The proxy ceremony can be understood, in part, as a reparative act of care across generations and against state violence. It is a practice of dwelling across the worlds of the living and the dead and a rearticulation of the “line of flight between tradition and modernity” (194).
While at first glance it may seem like these examples have little in common, I suggest that reading them together opens up important conceptual itineraries for understanding racism—“specifically, the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore, 2007: 28). Such a reading calls attention to the residual effects of premature death and liberatory lifeways through space-time, asks us to consider age as an undertheorized marker of social difference, and prompts a radical redefinition of “home” as more than shelter and as a basis for articulating visions of a meaningful life.
The second theme that I wish to highlight in Relational Poverty Politics is that of iterative aesthetic education. In their chapter on theater, hunger, and poverty politics in contemporary India, Dia Da Costa and Richa Nagar posit cross-caste, multiethnic theatrical productions as “an aesthetic education with no guarantees [that] reveals that the arrangement of desires is tentative, not definitive—an unending dance between creative enduring and overcoming of suffering” (205). The authors challenge common conceptions of art as secondary to social reproduction and “proper” politics or as meaningful only insofar as it provides provisional respite from abjection and despair.
The implications of this argument are much deeper than a simple (re)politicization of art. In the words of Pradeep, one of the Bhudan performers, the aesthetic practices of political theater prompt new questions about what it means to “create more people who will think of other people” (204). To create, in this sense, is not a hierarchical distillation of knowledge but an iterative, open-ended process of being in relation and writing the world through “collective coevolving reinterpretation” (201). This process of creation is at the heart of Lordean militancy. What Nagar and Da Costa teach us is that creating moments of aesthetic and performative encounter—on stage, in the streets, or around a dinner table, where people can collectively dwell in “shared tears and tales” (208)—has the potential to disrupt normative desires and create unanticipated, transgressive forms of learning and alliance, however ephemeral. These moments of rupture and becoming are not fixed or predetermined; yet, neither are structures of oppression or categories of difference.
Relational histories: Routes and grounds
In “No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean,” one of the main texts that inform Lawson and Elwood’s notion of the unthinkable, McKittrick and Woods (2007) challenge us to consider the crosscurrents of history and the material relations through which Black geographies are rendered unknowable. Erasure and epistemic violence are produced not only by the tools of empire and hegemonic power structures and through the categories of analysis that many critical geographers take for granted. In this final section, I will discuss two historical examples that provide generative lessons toward relational counter-mapping and stretch our geographical imaginations to more effectively learn from the past.
Despite an extensive historiographic record, there is a tendency to understand the Black feminist movements of the 1970s as primarily a response to racism in the women’s movement and sexism in Black nationalist movements, rather than as a continuation of Black women’s autonomous militancy. Such misrecognition flattens the relational contours of struggle and forecloses opportunities to effectively learn from the past. Discussing the formation of the Brixton Black Women’s Group in South London in 1973, former members explained that, We were influenced far more, at the time, by what was happening in the liberation movements on the African continent. There were more and more examples of Black women who were active in revolutionary struggles in places like Angola, Mozambique, Eritrea, Zimbabwe and Guinea-Bissau. And those sisters weren’t just picking up a gun and fighting they were making demands as women (Bryan et al., 2018: 148–149).
The second example that I want to point to is the work of revolutionary historian Walter Rodney. During his short life, Rodney worked to build multiracial working-class alliances to challenge the forces of racial capitalism and imperialism. In London and Dar es Salaam, Kingston and Georgetown, Rodney embodied a collective commitment to Black study and struggle. From his Hyde Park reading circles with CLR James, he learned that “It was not enough to study Lenin’s State and Revolution. It was important to understand why it was written,” that theories could not be decoupled from their conditions of production (Rodney, 1990: 28). Through his groundings—informal political conversations with the working people in inner-cities and bauxite mining towns—he explained that, “he learned more than they learned from him because he discovered that they had their own remarkable pedagogy for developing ideas about their reality” (Hill, 2012: 66).
For Rodney, history was a weapon. In September 1979, Rodney delivered a speech on a street corner in Georgetown, Guyana. He called on the crowd to “come together to draw strength from the traditions of resistance that have come down from slavery and indentureship and anticolonialism to the present” (Rodney, 1979). Rodney and the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) mobilized tirelessly across urban and rural divides, among Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese communities, and with elders and youth to shape their collective destiny. While organizing with the WPA, he wrote A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (Rodney, 1981). His study teaches that racial-spatial divisions were neither historically inevitable nor intractable, carefully demonstrating how the planter classes have historically exploited and accentuated differences as well as moments of mutual recognition and alliance between indentured and formerly enslaved peoples. Rodney submitted the manuscript for his final book, just a few months before he was assassinated by the Forbes Burnham administration in 1980 at the age of 38. His life teaches us that to truly ground and give breath to ideas that we cherish is to put them to use, whatever the cost.
The significance of relationality
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Social scientists struggle with the concept of relationality. On the one hand, relationality is ubiquitous in our annals, from relational comparison (Hart, 2016) to urban theories concerned with relationality and territoriality (McCann and Ward, 2010). After all, the grand frameworks on which we rely, from Marxism to feminism, are relational ontologies. On the other hand, lived social relations—embedded, embodied, affective, emplaced—are often consigned to the realm of the ethnographic. Put another way, relationality is contained in neatly bounded structures of power rather than interpreted as “the messy ontological grounds of everyday lives” (Giles, 125). In Relational Poverty Politics, and in the broader project of building and nurturing the RPN, Lawson and Elwood have laid the analytical foundations for a study of relationality that is attentive to structural determination as well as to a dynamic openness.
The implications of this stretch well beyond critical poverty studies but are also immediate and decisive for scholars concerned with social justice. Liberal theories of justice, most famously that advanced by Rawls (1985: 227), struggle with how to devise social arrangements of distribution among “citizens … conceived as free and equal persons.” Is social unity, or at least a moral conception of fairness, possible when the self is “unencumbered” in this way (Sandel, 1984)? Sen (2006) tries to remedy this flaw by foregrounding “entitlement relations,” a person’s command over commodities, which in turn is shaped by the “rules of entitlement which specify what a person in any given position in society can legitimately command” (Gore, 1993: 431). But as Gore (1993: 447) argues, what Sen is missing is a conceptualization of “social action,” of the “unruly social practices” through which the rules of entitlement are negotiated and challenged. Such unruly social practices are at the very heart of what Lawson and Elwood (2018: 2) term “unthinkable poverty politics.” They shine a light on “thinkable projects of government” that regulate and govern poverty and frame poverty politics (see also Roy and Crane, 2015). But they also uncover “vital repertoires of poverty politics outside thinkable orders,” those of “refusal, hope, and possibility” that lie beyond “imaginaries and practices typically recognized as political and transformative” (Lawson and Elwood, 2018: 5, emphasis in original).
Relational Poverty Politics thus generates a set of complex questions for poverty scholarship, for example: what is the scope and range of unthinkable poverty politics? And how should poverty scholars make sense of this “wide repertoire of subjects, spaces, and practices … that refuse thinkability” (Lawson and Elwood, 2018: 8)? In the book, these range from Giles’s (113) analysis of the “abject economies” created through the “discarded surpluses of liberal markets and publics” to Negrón-Gonzales’s theorization of the politics of deservingness and tropes of respectability that abound even in seemingly radical movements mobilizing against the illegalization of immigrants. These are expressions of what Lawson and Elwood (2018: 4) very usefully term “modes of differential incorporation,” a concept that is vitally important for an understanding of (neo)liberal regimes of poverty management. But are these also different forms of unthinkable poverty politics? And as Giles (128) pithily puts it, “so what?”
It is difficult to find a singular response to such a question in an edited volume. Yet, there are key elements of a response in the various chapters which serve my (perhaps unfounded) need for a conceptual guide to navigate the heterogeneity of unthinkable poverty politics. Together they point to what is often invisible or illegible in critical poverty studies, notably a relational poverty politics that sits uncomfortably within the coordinates of legible politics and authorized radicalism. Take for example, Maskovsky’s chapter on AIDS activism. Maskovsky focuses on how the movement, “founded mostly by middle-class gay white men and their allies,” managed “race and class divisions,” including the “meaningful political participation by poor and homeless African Americans” (79). These, as he argues, are “relationalities that are typically unthinkable … the urban poor’s civic and political relationships with their more affluent counterparts” (80). Of course, relationality does not imply a neat stitching together of difference. Instead, unruly social practices abound. I am especially interested in this unruliness, in the surplus of meaning, that cannot be easily read as a script of radical politics. Giles (126) presents these as “illiberal embodiments,” those that “confound liberal recognition and differential incorporation and yet meaningfully organize participants’ social worlds.” His answer to the “so what?” question is that this is “one account of how else to constitute a politics” (128).
My concern is with the “liberal recognition and differential incorporation” that is a part of these political formations. This is what Lawson and Elwood (221) describe as the dialectical relationship between thinkable programs of government and unthinkable poverty politics. It is what Negrón-Gonzales (70) describes as the dialectical relationship between “the world of low-wage work” and the “educational pursuits” of undocumented students seeking to present themselves as model immigrants. Do these scripts mark the limits of poverty politics or are they a crucial part of the politicization of poverty, illegality, and more? This question haunts my ethnographic study of poor people’s movements. Take for example, the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign which fights for housing rights in Chicago with an acute awareness of racialized dispossession and with a transnational imagination of Black liberation. I have written about such movements as creating unanticipated forms of collectivism, including new meanings of property and personhood (Roy, 2017). Now consider that, since the political ascendancy of Trumpism, this movement has demonstrated occasional support for the Department of Housing and Urban Development led by Ben Carson. In the face of massive cutbacks to housing entitlements, the movement has advanced cooperation rather than conflict. Or consider that this movement, organized to fight displacement, including forced evictions, participates in the housing committee of the very city government and mayoral regime that has criminalized poverty and pushed out working-class communities of color. Is this unthinkable poverty politics? Is this an illiberal embodiment? So what? The significance of Relational Poverty Politics is that it has created an analytical space for the study of poverty politics in registers that defy the usual normative categories and narratives of cooptation and resistance.
The politics of cooperation in Chicago can be read as an instantiation of what Sampat calls “differentially incorporated alliances” (200). As she emphasizes, there is nothing necessarily egalitarian about the “imaginaries of development from below” that such alliances articulate and advocate (Sampat, 107). Sampat’s chapter raises the question of historical conjuncture. In her analysis, the limits of egalitarianism in India are marked not only by “the historical foreclosure of redistributive land reforms after independence from colonial rule,” but also by the present moment of “progrowth poverty politics” (Sampat, 99, 96–7). In my own work, I have argued that it is insufficient to understand the historical conjuncture at hand as late liberalism or variegated neoliberalization or austerity urbanism. Instead, we must also pay attention to new formations of economic hegemony, including Asian ascendancy. Ideologies and policies of “inclusive growth” are central to such developmentalism, reinscribing poverty in a new global language of sustainable human development and governing poverty through new national programs of reform (Roy, 2014). As Ferguson (2015) and Ballard (2013) have argued, many of these programs defy the formula of neoliberalism, instead promoting new modes and new politics of distribution. I do not see these as a counterpoint to the brutal processes of racial capitalism and “authoritarian dispossession” (Piven and Maskovsky, 2018) that seem to be at work in the North Atlantic. Instead, inclusive growth and racialized dispossession may very well work hand in hand. This too is a relationality.
I am not wholly sure how Relational Poverty Politics would have us think about the present historical conjuncture or about the histories of thinkable and unthinkable poverty politics. In particular, I am interested in how modes of differential incorporation might take on different, but perhaps iterative, forms at different historical moments. What then are the methodologies to be used by critical poverty scholars as they seek to uncover the relationalities of impoverishment, alliance, mobilization, and more? Is it what Katz (2015) has described as the “archaeology” of poverty as an idea? Or something else?
Such contemplation leads me to a final point. In my own engagements with critical poverty studies, I have relied on a landmark text, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, written by anthropologist Arturo Escobar (1995). Deconstructing the Bretton Woods project of development, Escobar (1995: 6) shows how the West “enframed” the non-Western world through the problems of “poverty and backwardness.” This in turn positioned the industrialized nations of North America and Europe as the “indubitable models” of prosperity and modernity (Escobar, 1995: vii). Escobar’s critique speaks back to orthodox development thought. He analyzes the professionalization and institutionalization of development through the discovery of poverty pivoted on a “faith in science and technology, invigorated by the new sciences arising from the war effort” (Escobar, 1995: 35). As he shows, in the Cold War era, one type of science led the diagnosis of poverty and its solutions: development economics.
I have argued in previous work that today’s age of poverty also enlists various types of scientific knowledge and professional practice (Roy et al., 2016). From a renewal of development economics as “poor economics”—Banerjee and Duflo’s (2011) pithy phrase—to the emergence of fields of inquiry such as “development engineering,” the problem of poverty is once again being located in specific domains of scientific expertise. That these are powerful and well-resourced academic and professional domains—engineering, economics, business administration, and medicine—is significant. No longer consigned to the realm of social work or anthropological investigation, poverty is being refashioned in engineering labs, through microeconomic field experiments, and in places like Wall Street. These knowledge-power relations are the architecture of thinkable poverty politics. I read Relational Poverty Politics as a bold disruption of this scaffolding, a shaking-up of the very foundations of poverty science. Yet, all of us are a part of the lived social relations of the global university. In this sense, we are entangled with, rather than separate from, the business of poverty expertise. In what ways, does this embeddedness and embodiment shape and limit our capacity to (re)politicize poverty?
Learning in relation: Relational poverty politics and unthinkability
University of Washington, USA
Many people have leaned into making the RPN, and this collection of essays is a beautiful example of generous, caring and critical engagement. For six years, (we) Sarah and Vicky have asked what can a network do (!). These essays, offering robust and rigorous readings of the possibilities and limits of relational poverty politics, are one answer to our perpetual question. The learning that produced this volume is only possible because of the generosity of people in this network who share ideas, who patiently engage each other in mutual learning, and who assume good intent when conversations have been clumsy. This book results from the work of building relations across difference in ways that have moved us towards future conversations that none of us could have fully framed at the beginning. This collaboration—including both contributing authors and our commentators here, and many in the larger network—has been a project of mutual support and learning that has at its base the principle of generosity. The making of this book and the discussions arising from it are a hopeful politics of care, trust, and respect that continues to allow new knowledge and ways of being to emerge. Each of these commentaries engages with the intellectual–political project of relational poverty work in ways that deepen and extend it. We are grateful.
All our commentators reiterate a central goal of Relational Poverty Politics: the importance of repoliticizing poverty by broadening “… the register by which we analyze poverty and poverty politics” (Herrera, 4). As Herrera (3) argues, the book encourages analysis of the “multiple identities [that] shape the conditions of possibility for human beings”. For example, contributors to this book point to the co-constitution of migrant illegality and impoverishment (Negron-Gonzales); to the crucial, and often ignored, role of African-American actors in AIDS activism (Maskovsky) and to moments of creative encounter that create open-ended processes of political being and learning (Da Costa and Nagar; Miller). As our commentators argue, each of these moves calls attention to knowledge-making subjects that are consistently erased in hegemonic poverty research and action. Crucially, these multiply-positioned actors bring to light rebellious, creative and hopeful projects of unthinkability that challenge poverty. Poverty as both a violent concept and condition that is restlessly being challenged.
We are grateful that our commentators value the importance of unlearning thinkable poverty politics in order to imagine and act otherwise on poverty politics. As McCann (6) points out, our book aims “… to continue a critical ‘unthinking’ and remaking of academic approaches to poverty studies.” Equally importantly, the commentaries all engage the possibility of imagining and enacting different futures by learning unthinkable poverty politics from those who have been rendered illegible within poverty scholarship. This said, our commentators make clear that deeply understanding unthinkable politics entails more work than our book accomplishes. As Miller (10) argues eloquently, “[e]rasure and epistemic violence are produced not only by the tools of empire and hegemonic power structures … [but also] through the categories of analysis that many critical geographers take for granted.” While the book opens arguments for unthinkable politics, it does not engage with histories of Black radical imaginations and militancy, nor indeed knowledges produced over centuries by Indigenous scholar/activists. We agree with Miller that this limits our analysis and that we have much to learn from longstanding unthinkable struggles to build a more deeply relational politics for our present moment.
Thinking forward from our book, we are inspired by Byrd et al. (2018) who ask … how it might be possible to think and work for a relationality grounded both in place and in movement, which simultaneously addresses Black geographies, dispossessions, and other racialized proprietary violences as incommensurate to yet not apart from Indigenous land and sovereignty. (5)
Our commentators also raise critically important questions about the limits and possibilities of unthinkable poverty politics, especially as they confront, refuse, and bump up against colonial and White supremacist institutions of poverty hegemony. The academy, the state, and philanthropic foundations have long done the work of reinscribing poverty knowledge and are complicit in reproducing the epistemic, social, and economic orders that create the violence of impoverishment (Kohl-Arenas, 2015; O’Connor, 2001). Roy (14) reminds us that we write from within the belly of the beast, asking how this embeddedness in the global university “shape[s] and limit[s] our capacity to (re)politicize poverty?” For us, positioned as privileged White scholars deeply advantaged within the academy, this question underscores the importance of repoliticizing poverty through pedagogies of unlearning that crack open the closures of thinkable poverty politics. Unlearning entails providing evidence that refuses normative shaming and blaming explanations of impoverishment and instead exposes processes of predatory dispossession, wage and land theft, White middle class wealth consolidation through state policy, and much more. Yet, we also must be engaged in our own uncomfortable work of learning and unlearning. For instance, Miller’s insistence that unthinkable politics must be situated within longstanding histories of Black and Latinx radicalism seems so obvious in retrospect. But that we must constantly relearn such modes of thought is an uncomfortable reminder of what we have ignored or left unseen. Herrera’s essay offers a related yet different answer to Roy’s question, illustrating the power of otherwise illegible subjects to challenge colonial spaces of the academy. Situating himself as formerly undocumented, “brown queer man living in a settler colonial state,” Herrera describes the relational poverty politics he practices within the colonial academy. He engages undocumented students in reflecting on what life has already taught them—that “illegality” is a form of violence producing economic precarity—a truth that they have not been allowed to speak or know within the power-knowledge structures of the academy. Herrera’s pedagogies are rebellious politics that make visible what white supremacy obscures, by building intergenerational relations of mutual learning that (re)politicize poverty within one of the bastions of hegemonic poverty knowledge.
McCann asks us to think about the relationship between unthinkable poverty politics and the state. Our ongoing dialogic learning with our colleagues teaches us that unthinkable politics operate largely outside of seemingly settled hegemonies and that these politics resist by challenging the legitimacy of violent constructions of subjects and by challenging state-sanctioned violence against people experiencing poverty (Goldstein, 2012; Edwards, 2017). Practicing openness to a broad range of unthinkable poverty politics is important both analytically and politically. Indeed, an urgent question for our work going forwards is what present histories and future possible worlds might be conceived through an openness to the repertoire of unthinkable politics? As Roy suggests, unthinkable politics opens analytic space for knowing otherwise the normative categories and structures of meaning used to frame politics of liberal recognition—such as cooptation or resistance. In Relational Poverty Politics, we draw the idea of unthinkable politics from Black geographies, postcolonial and critical race feminism (Cacho, 2012; McKittrick, 2016), to apprehend illegible analyses and politics that confront overlapping relational oppressions that produce impoverishment: coloniality, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism. Our chapter authors offer creative incisive illustrations of these politics.
Yet, the questions raised by our commentators prompt us toward a deeper engagement with the trajectories of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous thought that animate a richer relational poverty politics. These thinkers-activists remind us that unthinkable politics are always already happening but often ignored or repressed even as their radical imaginations are being articulated and acted upon in many spaces (Byrd et al., 2018; Miller, Herrera). In our book, these forms of politics entail imaginations and tactics such as allyship that connect across difference (Maskovsky, Swerts, Sampat, Da Costa, and Nagar); disidentification (Borges and Giles); intergenerational struggles for change (Pittman); and the incitement, and therefore explicit visibility, of state sponsored violence (Glassman, Giles, and Magalhães). From scholars working in Black, Latinx, and Indigenous intellectual traditions, we have more to learn about how unthinkable politics are articulated through epistemologies and philosophies that are unintelligible within the normative terms of mainstream poverty studies. Their political work for self-determination, reparations, and more-than-human-centric and other futures take up a range of forms and tactics that cannot be achieved (or indeed, even imagined) within settler colonial White supremacist formations of state and democracy (Byrd et al., 2018; Johnson and Lubin, 2017; Naylor et al., 2018; Ramirez et al., 2018).
Our commentators’ essays here—and their generous thinking with us over many years—chart a course for ongoing learning. These essays have invited us to deeper work on where unthinkability takes us an analytic, prompting us to ask ourselves whether our project must de-center the category of poverty altogether, toward a focus on unthinkable politics challenging impoverishment as a condensation point of multiple intersecting oppressions. They remind us of the necessity of stepping back to humbly learn from thinkers-activists who are always already catalyzing unthinkable politics from long-standing radical intellectual-political traditions rooted in Latinx, Black, and Indigenous life. Returning to where we began, this is part of what a network can do: catalyze projects of ongoing mutual learning through the ideas and modes of thought and action that our colleagues demonstrate in their commentaries. The RPN is at heart a hopeful project of persistently seeking to know and do otherwise. Geographical relational analyses build from ontological foundations that claim the possibility for (violent, oppressive) spaces and politics to be transformed. Many in the network are early career scholars pushing us to engage present histories in order to chart different intellectual and political futures. All this will mean a radical rewriting of geographical relational poverty studies. We welcome this journey.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to our book commentators, to all the authors in Relational Poverty Politics who made this intellectual journey with us, and all our interlocutors who participated in discussions both at the 2018 American Association of Geographers book launch and at the University of Washington Book Store Launch, especially Chandan Reddy and LaShawnDa Pittman. We also thank Eugene McCann for not only contributing an essay but also for editing this forum.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.