People as infrastructure politics in global north cities: Chicago’s South Side

Abstract

People as infrastructure politics, a fruitful new analytic in urban political studies, has mysteriously been minimally studied in global north cities and their most punished places, America’s rust belt environments. I chronicle a flourishing people as infrastructure politics in one American rust belt city setting, Chicago’s neglected South Side. Here hundreds of subalterns participate in this resistance politics to reverse what I focus on: a commodifying blues club. Subalterns extract life-giving stuff from this space as they toil in Chicago’s and the South Side’s low-wage economies and marginalized communities. I show that this group’s political acts and practices, guided by their ordinary space’s interwovenness with taut political alliances and alternative ways to see, prove more sly and proactive than we have recognized. This slyness, first, entails an active use of a “back-path politics” as actions confront less club practices than the discursive content of practices. This slyness, second, leads with what I term resistive fragments: momentary, political charged interventions that powerfully resound across the club. The results suggest that this distinctive resistance politics is alive in America’s rust belt cities, closely mirrors realities in global south cities, and is far more complex that we had previously known.

Keywords

People as infrastructure resistance politics Chicago blues clubs

Introduction

The notion of people as infrastructure, an exciting new analytic in urban political studies, productively nuances our understanding of how resistance to neoliberalist and neocolonialist realities in cities unfolds (Malason, 2019; Simone, 2004, 2006, 2014; Tonkiss, 2015). At its core, infrastructure as a term is innovatively moved beyond imaginings of its traditional bulwark, roads, sewers, pipes, electric grids, and power stations (see Keil and Young, 2009). Subalterns and the working-class, more than realized, marshal and work through informal, flexible, and improvisational collectivities (built and ever-evolving infrastructures of people) to improve their lives.¹ Nuancing decades of research on community empowerment and political resistance, power is seen to lie not merely in the cracks and crevices of informal life, but in elaborately coordinated, flexible teams of subjects that work through everyday life’s subtleties. The disempowered strike out, in shadowy but powerfully reflexive ways, to upgrade their lives. As a “liminalized” resistance, it simultaneously subverts oppressively organized ways and protocols and substitutes life enhancing alternatives.

Urbanists agree that the people as infrastructure concept gives us something new (see Xiang and Lindquist, 2014). Most generally, it opens up the notion of infrastructure for urbanists. Networks of pipes, power grids, and sewage facilities are one kind of infrastructure with a companion: arenas of people that re-work planned systems of work, social reproduction, and commodity consumption. More precisely, the concept innovatively nuances understandings of below-the-radar resistance politics (a long identified kind of politics, see Bayat, 2012; Cross, 1998). Here, subalterns do not implant a flagrant politics into everydayness, but rather convert this realm into unbroken political flows (see Larkin, 2013; Simone, 2004). Politics, not a “stand-by-itself” thing, is inseparable from daily life’s rhythms that come to embed shadowy but improvisational and elaborately coordinated actions. Moreover, this resistance dives deeply into the nuances and complexities of what everyday spaces of living and work contain (see Simone, 2004). These spaces, not simply resistance-obscuring venues, also store often dimly recognized resources to aid resistance: political alliances, structured ways to see, stocks of enriching and shared meanings, and shared pools of feelings. It follows that this dissent and repair, anchored in elastic collaborations and engagements, both conceals in the informal and is constituted through it.

Yet applications of this new focus have mysteriously all but bypassed cities of the global north and their most punished places, rust belt environments. Global south cities, long the poster child for fractured, deeply impoverished places (Miraftab, 2009; Ranganathan and Balazs, 2015), have been foci for this work even as afflicted global north cities contain millions of immiserated subalterns (Fraser and Lepofsky, 2004; Thurber and Fraser, 2016; Ludd, 2010; Wilson, 2004). Cleveland’s East Side, Chicago’s Far South Side, Detroit’s West End, Flint’s inner city, Gary’s South and East Sides exemplify this (Akers, 2015; Hackworth, 2018; Safransky, 2017). This recognized, I examine people as infrastructure politics in America’s rust belt cities of the global north. I focus on the subtleties of this resistive political form in these cities that remains poorly understood. At the moment, we know one thing about this politics here: that it exists as a shadowy process. In these cities, people working outside managerial surveillance are able to slyly maneuver and supplant debilitating actions and values with life sustaining alternatives (Maekelbergh, 2016; Rahman, 2017).

I focus on people as infrastructure in one setting, blues clubs in South Side Chicago, which now feel the bite of encroaching gentrification. Why the focus on these clubs? They, anything but simple spaces of recreation for decades-patronizing patrons (herein termed “long-term clubbers”), fundamentally nourish their identities and repair scarring haunts and fears from everyday living (Grazian, 2005; Wilson, 2018). Long-term clubbers, often struggling through Chicago’s and the South Side’s low-wage dead-end economy, extract life-giving stuff from these spaces, and identify club commodifying as a potentially searing rupture in their lives (see Painter and Philo (1995) on the quest of subalterns for citizenship). The club’s infrastructural function, in short, fundamentally nurtures these clubbers. In this setting, long-term clubbers have jumped into action as political resistors (Balkin, 2019). They toil as a coordinated collectivity to curate these clubs through nurturing practices and meaning systems that reject the newest delineated notion of how these clubs are to be structured and used (as upscale playgrounds for the affluent). If these clubbers are to have decent lives, they believe, a starting-point is to keep the clubs as they presently are.

To enable a rich, multi-textured assessment of this resistance politics, I focus on a quintessential South Side Chicago blues venue, Beebe’s, which has served up blues music and blues epistemology to mainly working-class and poor black South Siders for more than 35 years.² Yet, ominousness hovers in the club’s air: its fabric is currently threatened by a potentially dramatic commodification. Chicago’s gentrification frontier, this process’s “third-wave” in the city (Wilson, 2018), boldly moves into the South Side that threatens to restructure many things: neighborhoods, shopping districts, music clubs, theaters (Atuesta and Hewings, 2019). Emergent gentrification, as in other global north cities, connects with the provision of music clubs (Holt, 2014; White, 2020). Beebe’s and other clubs now face a reality of becoming one more playground space for the city’s affluent and tourists. Beebe’s club owner, Jackie, will determine the club’s future, and is both ambivalent and tense about the changes. She, on the one hand, realizes the potential economic benefits of club transformation and has recently upscaled drink offerings, begun charging cover fees for live acts, and welcomes the growing legion of blues club gawkers and tourists. Yet she also retains a deep bond with and derives tremendous satisfaction from engaging long-term patrons and musicians, seeing them as fellow struggling subalterns. Pursuit of pleasure and service to community, so important to Jackie, are readily obtained here.³

My core finding about this infrastructure politics: its practices, as shadowy but improvisational and elaborately coordinated actions, prove more sly and proactive than we have recognized. This slyness, first, entails an active use of what I term “back-path politics” as actions confront less club practices than the discursive content of practices (see also Dikec, 2007; Swyngedouw, 2012). Established club practices, reflecting cherished traditions, customs, and habits, are deemed politically off limits in this politics. Instead, long-term clubbers assault the meaning-infused “archives” of these practices (particularly through styles of inter-personal engagement and bodying that I highlight). This slyness, second, leads with what I term resistive fragments: momentary, political charged interventions that powerfully resound across Beebe’s. Extending McFarlane’s (2018, 2019) recent work on fragments as mobilized political objects, I move this notion into the realm of resistance activities and identify it as a crucial political driver. Fragments, as McFarlane’s decisive acts of communicative moments, spearhead in Beebe’s a continuous resistance to its upscaling. .

It follows from these points that participants in this resistance politics, in this case long-term clubbers, function as fixers and repairers rather than how such actors are commonly labeled: as builders or constructionists of new social orders (see Hall, 2015; Lauermann, 2019). Current club practices, to remain essentially intact, become sites for a rehabilitative movement: a subaltern-restorative hermeneutic renovation. Google’s (2020) notion of fixers aligns nicely with my vision of this politics: “as a person [or persons] who makes arrangements for other people, especially of an illicit or devious kind.” These clubbers, it follows, mend and revise rather than brutally transform as they reconfigure meaning systems in club styles, practices and social orientations to service the demands and desires of subalterns. Stitching together the established (club practices) with the new (altered hermeneutic content), these functionaries use political resources and knowledge of official procedures ceaselessly striving for a convertibility rather than a full-blown obliteration. In this way, a sly politics unfolds, often unseen by outsiders, which is able to acquire both an acceptable form and an ability to deftly infiltrate the club’s social habitus.

The analysis that follows proceeds logically. The next section discusses the people as infrastructure notion that provides clarity to our investigation. This resistance politics, we learn, has just recently been identified and its insights have been largely limited to studies that focus on cities in the global south. Then, I begin the detailed ethnographic analysis, examining club owner Jackie (her life, aspirations, and belief system) as the crucial frame to understanding long-term clubber actions at Beebe’s. Her importance in this resistance politics is straight-forward: she is the central decision-maker of the club’s future and who long-term clubbers orient their politics to. Then, in the second part of the ethnographic analysis, I examine the resistance-to-club upscaling politics at Beebe’s spearheaded by long-term clubbers. My concern is with the intricacies of this complicated politics as clubbers seek to win key decision-maker Jackie to their side and keep the club as is. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion about the implications for the findings.

People as infrastructure and resistance politics

Much of what we know about people as infrastructure politics comes from studies of global south cities. These cities, particularly those most class-fractured in Asia and Africa, are revealed as places of extreme inequalities and massive immiserating of the poor. The culprits: Poverty creating governances and indifferent and remote bureaucracies whose contradictory drive to equalize and differentiate city space (make homogeneous commodification space across the city but also splinter it into heterogeneous housing submarkets) ritually plunders politically vulnerable populations (Simone, 2004, 2006; Murray, 2011). In the process, people, cleaved along socioeconomic lines, live different material realities and modes of existence (Doherty, 2017; Malason, 2019). For the wealthy and high-status, everyday life continues through stable and sanctioned social-political practices. For the destitute and struggling, everyday survival becomes an improvised task through complicated and punishing realities. In this context, working-class and subalterns populations, more than realized, organize as informal, flexible, and improvisational collectivities for daily survival. Adjusting years of work on community empowerment and political resistance, power is seen to lie in life’s average spaces as cadres of subjects unify with one another in everyday’s ordinariness.

People as infrastructure here is nuanced political resistance (see Centner, 2012; Lathan and Leyton, 2019; Malason, 2019; Simone, 2014). For example, food vendors in Jakarta resist current working conditions by rejecting how businesses are supposed to operate and put in place their own business tactics. Tapping mundane spaces of resources, they coordinate street-working hawkers to bring them customers, with select police mobilized as intermediaries (Malason, 2019). Same thing unfolds when informal lenders of capital in Nairobi reject current work practices and establish street scouts and eyes across the city to generate potential customers (Ngusale et al., 2014). In the everyday, (the workplace, informal social space, formal public space), people collaborate and subvert for survival as practices are assaulted in a kind of quiet remediation. Mundane life, much more than simply a zone of ruse that conceals resistance, is also a turf through which a politics is made. Its politics-constituting resources – concealed alliances, different visions of the proper, alternative organizing strategies – are continuously drawn on. Poaching on the territory of others, the subjugated, lacking conventional political resources, find their own while working through established rules and protocols.

The scant number of studies on people as infrastructure in global north cities in general and America’s rust belt cities in particular identify a remarkably similar process (see Angelo and Hentschel, 2015; Heil, 2020; Newman et al., 2019). A crucial recognition guides this work: governance interventions and institutionalized treatment of populations, like in global south cities, also afflict tens of thousands. Rust belt cities, notably, are the epicenter of affliction in America from deepened deindustrialization, austerity politics, and neoliberalized governances (Wilson and Heil, 2021). For those in Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee with wealth and status, everyday life persists through enriching, ritualized practices. For the destitute and struggling, everyday survival becomes an improvisational accomplishment with people through informality fending for themselves in punitive realities. This work thereby breaks down the rigid global north-global south divide that mark so much urban studies (Ghertner, 2015; Ranganathan and Balazs, 2015; Robinson, 2016): rigid geographies of difference give way to a global commonality of cities whose shared attributes reflect searing international processes.

This work has also keenly seen these human infrastructures as forms of political resistance (Heil, 2020; Wilson, 2018). A poaching on colonized practices, using current rules and products, works through ordinary social life. h Dimly identifiable alliances, alternative ways to see, different organizing modes mesh to guide a quiet subversion. When, as chronicled, Chicago’s struggling independent taxi companies coordinate a scheme to informally scope out affluent customers at airports and use informants and line organizers to guide them to cabs, neoliberal-bureaucratized transport protocols are breached and replaced (Luedke, 2010). New informal micro-economies anchored in the resources of average social space gain a foothold. Moreover, when day laborers in Milwaukee seek waged work – mired in lines of wait outside Home Depots – and draw on informal nurture space to convert grim social realities to zones of positive identity enrichment, a source of social oppression is subverted (Williams, 2009). Intricate assemblages of discursive and material resources, sutured together at spaces of wait, forge dimly detectable, human-aiding alliances.

Urbanists now see the people as infrastructure concept as a vibrant and important analytic. In vision, city residents across the globe, with inadequate mainstream institutional anchorage, learn to use mundane social space as well as the city and its social relations to their immediate advantage. A resourcefulness continuously explores new relationships among things and people as difficult circumstances force creations of improvisational and spontaneous alliances. Yet as urbanists begin to recognize the concept’s applicability to America’s rust belt cities (where living conditions for subalterns are as horrific as any circumstances across the world), the dearth of understanding about this is glaring. This paper deepens understanding of how people as infrastructure plays out in these cities. The analysis that follows examines a central venue where politics unfolds, aging blues clubs in disinvested and battered communities. Long-term clubbers here rely on these venues: to nourish flagging identities, mend personal haunts and traumas, and provide human pleasure, and now fight for their survival. These clubs, we now know, are as vital to healing and repairing long-term clubbers as any of their workspaces, home spaces, and formal public spaces (Grazian, 2005; Wilson, 2018).

Context for the people as infrastructure politics: The owner

Beebe’s owner Jackie Smith is a crucial actor in this analysis as the prime target for the people as infrastructure politics: all know that she will decide the club’s present and future (why she is centered in this analysis). Jackie over many evenings reveals that she constitutes current Beebe’s in a dominant way: as a struggling, in-need-of-being profit space but which she also covets in its present form. On the one hand, the club, to Jackie, is imagined as an on-the-margins economic instrument which must be profitable to ensure her material survival. For this reason, Jackie desires to have the club appeal to especially affluent tourists in Chicagoland and beyond (loyalists provide a steady stream of revenues to the club but a full club upscaling would dramatically increase this stream) On the other hand, Jackie, surrounded by a sense of fellow subalterns, also revels in the club’s current social ways. Beebe’s, in this sense, is seen by Jackie as her space of sublime living, where she can be comfortable, revel in her projected self, and immerse herself in the pleasures of being among brethren. In this context, Jackie is torn about the ongoing commodifying of the club. She both welcomes it and is wary of it, a dilemma that she has yet to resolve.

On the economic front, Jackie’s concern for Beebe’s ability to produce a decent profit is a source of endless worry. The appeal of club commodification is that these fears could be eliminated (yet she refuses to vigorously advertise the club on social media, declaring this an exercise in futility). Her fears take the form of an emotive oscillation between economic disillusionment and economic hope. In dark moments, Jackie comes close to invoking a dystopic futility about her economic future. This fear, in her words one evening, “is felt throughout the day; when I’m cleaning tables, serving drinks, talking to customers, and dealing with the bands.” Her club, as a kind of discursive artifact, is a reminder of a personally grim economic history. She has first-hand knowledge of hunger, homelessness, and deprivation. She grew up poor on Chicago’s South Side, at the height of Chicago’s second regime of “black ghetto building” (1945 to 1965) where poor African American households were systematically stashed and isolated (see Hirsch, 2009). The South Side at this time was profoundly segregated, disproportionally poor, and aptly characterized by William Tabb’s (1970: 81) moniker “labor plantation economy.” Job opportunities for locals were largely confined to arduous assembly-line and laboring work, with wages typically paltry (Hirsch, 2009; Osofsky, 1967).

But her love for the club and a desire to keep it as is also pushes through her consciousness. Jackie feels hope and possibility for Beebe’s and herself even as she struggles to blunt her deepest economic fears. This appeal propels her to think about blunting the club’s slowly deepening commodification. Here is the other half of a fear-desire coupling in her common thoughts. This sense of hope rises and recedes in her consciousness. When her fears are for the moment supplanted by desires, the club is turned into a venue of possibility. One day, she hopes, Beebe’s will be remarkably successful, beyond her wildest dreams. Jackie hopes for a lucrative club that features the most well-known blues bands in America. “I would one day love to bring the best here – ya know, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Albert King, – but I’m not there yet . but a girl can dream!” In her words, “to bring this talent and inspiration to the South Side would be a dream.” But she also knows that making this a reality in currently neoliberalized Chicago will be extremely difficult. Jackie acutely understands current race-class relations and political times, noting the discursive and material obstacles Black South Siders face. She is also aware of the co-opted black voice as a site for political opposition to change this. In her own words, black people are continuously served up as “dysfunctional,” “unstable and fragile,” and “often uninterested in truly being healed and finding redemption” that render the black voice irrelevant or invalid in common politics.

Subversive politics: Long-term clubbers

The complex beings

Long-term clubbers, a major group every evening at Beebe’s, always surge into the slowly commodifying club just before the live music begins. Other club venues exist across the South Side for these clubbers to patronize, but they covet Beebe’s for its symbolic and aesthetic richness. Immediately upon arrival, their resistance politics is evident: they produce and emit epistemological assertions, especially in fragments of engagements, bodily movements, and modes of dress that fill the club. A non-stop politics efficiently put in motion tinges the social fabric of Beebe’s. Owner Jackie is especially targeted for assertions. Clubbers realize Jackie feels a great affinity for them and watches their actions closely. Throughout evenings, they recognize, Jackie does not merely eye them, she also tracks their demeanor and actions as she spars and reprimands them, for example, for their “crazy social excesses,” “constant need of attention,” and “desire to take over the club.” This clubber-Jackie interplay every evening is performance-tinged, affection-filled, and rife with symbolic content.

These clubbers view Beebe’s in a prominent way: as a refuge from persistent feelings of material and emotive tumultuousness. A tough, gritty life outside the club punctuates them as a slow-burn, long-term (often life-long) haunt which is carried into Beebe’s. In many, this trauma is scarcely concealed as engulfing, quiet terrors. Many, born into circumstances of economic insecurity delivered by a ravaging city and regional capitalism (Bennett et al., 2016; Weber, 2015), have lived this through decades of unstable and afflicting work. Many now labor in Chicago’s burgeoning post-industrial and workfare economies as burger flippers, store cashiers, maintenance workers, retail hawkers, and evening bartenders. Select others, with little remorse, admit that they dabble in the informal economy: money laundering, computer fraud, mobile phone selling. One middle-aged man, in discussion with me, touches upon the haunt and the minimal opportunity: “it’s a real tussle to stay afloat now … many people don’t realize what it’s like out there … scrapin by and holding things together with dreams … lots of crappy jobs out there … it’s amazing so many are surviving”.

Resistance engagements

In this context, long-term clubbers seek to structure the symbolic content in Beebe’s to their specifications. At the heart of this, Beebe’s, particularly in fragments of flurries, is constructed through a relentless dialectic of obliterating meanings and making new ones. “Their own” and Jackie are central targets. Obliterating, on the one hand, seeks to negate any signifier – embedding in social relations and objects – that invokes either the trace of haunts (e.g., meanings elicited from a face, a customer look, a social act like brusque treatment of a club regular) or the signs of commodification (blues tourists, music that is not blues, cover charge for club entrance). Club regulars treat these as kinds of social ruptures to be fixed immediately. Such signifiers, in communicative practices, become banished to the realm of repugnant, the ridiculous, or the bizarre (and cast as worthy of being expelled from the club.). Making, on the other hand, involves building elaborate iconographies to be fitted into existing club practices that can constitute and regularize their rights to Beebe’s. These clubbers, fixers and repairers, do not reject the club’s normal flow of practices, but cut incisively into these to re-mold symbolic content.

The obliterating most immediately sets its sights on impugning the signs of commodification. The presence of North Side and suburban blues voyeurs, upscale drinks, and European and Asian visitors particularly animates this drive. As fixers, the call is not to remove these that would violate club practices and protocols, but to have them understood in a certain way. Thus, to understand blues voyeurs, long-term clubbers, particularly through deploying sarcasm and disdain, work through a space’s embodying of taut political alliances and alternative club visions to slyly construct them. Blues voyeurs become, in one clubber’s words, “the joke of Beebe’s, the folk who stumble around and barely now where they are.” Richly symbolic moments – caricaturing their steps on the dance floor, shooting performative renditions of them across the club as in-the-headlights beings, conducting highly visible whispering regimes about them with groups emitting raucous laughter – narrates their presence as a bizarre unfolding. In theme, South Side interlopers invade a new experiential turf and feign an intimacy with it that they could not possibly understand. To these clubbers, it is space against space – a pretender’s version of what the space of Beebe’s is versus their “truth” of what it truly is.

New upscale drinks being served get the same treatment. The entrance of fine wines into Beebe’s (Malbac, Sharazz, Cabernet Sauvignon) and craft beers from local microbreweries are met with flashes of anger and disbelief. To long-term clubbers, the upscale drinks hook into a scary, emergent common sense: that the club is being shaped to service a more affluent clientele. Whenever clubbers eye these drinks, they see loss and feel anger which scrapes against their space’s taut political alliances and vision of what Beebe’s is to be. Not surprisingly, then, one women, reaching into the club’s fabric of sensibilities, holds a beer bottle in front of me one evening as we make conversation. She soon senses an audience, looks across the club, and derisively tilts the bottle and her head. Many at the bar laugh. She performs this act three times. A man next to her immediately joins the fray, huddling up with friends at the bar to share highly visible laughter about the outrageous “invasion of the alcohol snatchers.” Before my eyes, a counter cultural act unfolds that works through ceremony, ritual, and moral order to assault obedience to club upscaling.

A drive to re-symbolize club elements follows which moves far beyond these discrete acts. Clubbers work with each other and tap their mundane space’s social fabric to etch and disseminate hope across the club’s vastness, in faces, bodies, musical instruments, social relations, and aging pictures and posters on walls. Thus, the stage, pictures on the walls, the bar are not frivolous cultural baggage or simple fallow things, but elements re-animated as extensions of clubber positive identities and their entitlement to the club. Like Roy’s (2017) discovery of Chicago’s struggling poor caring for home and effusively curating its objects, club things and processes are re-symbolized in an elaborate human staging. One clubber’s reach into a space’s social and political sensibilities and subsequent actions sums it up (a 76 year old women who has lived two blocks from the club her entire life). She strolls decisively and visibly across Beebe’s and identifies to me and others nearby her important club elements: “the old historic South Side stage that we all made,” “the grace of the bands,” and “Martin Luther King’s picture majestically perched near the stage that speaks to use about ourselves and Beebe’s.” “These are the things,” she says, that always get her attention at Beebe’s.”

This symbolic re-coding targets other common club practices, i.e., drinking at the bar and informally engaging musicians both off-stage and on-stage. Both practices, under cover of simple pleasure-seeking, are made sites for subalterns to bolster identities and understand entitlement to Beebe’s. Thus, bar talk and musician engagements, punctuated by sassy, colorful interactions, invoke common experiences (e.g., difficulties living amid impoverishment), similar outlooks (e.g., love of authentic blues music, need to preserve blues ways in Beebe’s), and shared circumstances (courageously coping with the tribulations of family life and daily survival). Chatter at the bar and with musicians, emitting momentary, political charged fragments that powerfully resound, communicates that Beebe’s is to have these practices but long-term clubbers will tell you precisely what they are all about. These practices, then, contain what Bakhtin (1981) describes as a social milieu’s shell – appearances – that are to remain intact while embedded meanings are to be re-choreographed. As political strategy, epistemology (what practices mean to people) is made to trump the physical-visual (the existence of practices themselves) (see Roy, 2009, 2010).

Through the symbolic re-coding, moreover, clubbers also simultaneity strive to kill their haunts, assault their rages, and promote a regime of epistemic justice. I most vividly glimpse these goals when clubbers speak to me of “coming to Beebe’s and chasing away the bullshit,” “keeping the wolf from the door when I take in the vibe of the band and the crowd,” and “scoping out the club’s good times that keep me going for weeks.” Once in the club, haunts, fears, and feelings of injustice never lie fallow, but become emotive objects to be engaged and repaired through a space’s cathartic qualities in a kind of “therapeutizing motif” (Ehrenhaus, 1993). These clubbers’ drive for personal catharsis in the club, I find, is relentless. To them, nothing is being killed or decimated in their politicized activities, they pursue only equity, entitlement, and the symbolic content to repair sense of self and personal haunts. In the process, each person’s fragmented, solo flight into the domain of the observably luminous highlights an identity and rights: as individuals, as members of the collectivity, and as a link in a chain of tradition.

This etching of hope into club objects and features is underpinned by a core recognition: clubbers must recast the notion of blackness for all to understand. For their r revisionist symbolism to be accepted, they realize understandings of blackness must be repaired and widely embraced (see Dikec, 2007; Kobayashi, 2013). These clubbers thus reject complicity with established racial thought and the notion of race-class neutrality. In this context, they assert the idea of enriching and enriched people entitled to be blues claimants at Beebe’s. It is a notion of blackness rooted in cultural stability, social normalcy, and political rights (historically strong and stable, proud and resilient beings desirous of equal political standing). The logistic: As Beebe’s stage, musicians, instruments, posters, bar engagements, and social relations are being symbolically re-made as enriching things, this blackness relationally meshes with these as their conceptual anchor. A progressive blackness seeps through the fabric of these notions as each, in Bakhtin’s (1981) “side wards glances,” speaks fundamentally to each other. To these clubbers, it is both an “advocacy blackness” and a “truth blackness:” It does crucial political work for them but also marks out core truth.

Resistance bodying⁴

Long-term clubbers also mobilize something else in this politics, their bodies, as individuals and a collectivity. In-motion, symbolically etched bodies, simultaneously instruments and resources in this politics, powerfully cut across the club’s social space, particularly when clubbers serve themselves up in momentary, highly visible fragments for reading. I feature this bodying for a reason: it is the most aggressive technique in the clubber arsenal to communicate their truths, and no one is immune from the transmitted messages (in dancing, mode of dress, and gestures across tables and beyond). As bodies bound from bar to stage to dance floor to tables, clubbers communicatively target above all else club owner Jackie: her periodic scanning across the club’s tables and the dance floor often results in heightened bodily deployment. Body movements, wrapped in socially sanctioned reverie and recreational pursuits, carry unmistakably anti-club upgrading messages for anyone who is willing to see. In this setting, in-motion bodies relentlessly exude shared “vocabularies of motive.”

Thus, club regulars during evenings dress, move, and order their appearances in brief but powerful symbolic bursts of activity that stake their claim to the venue. Most visibly and directly, they spotlight an embracing of the club’s current character and who they are, and coax new potentials for patrons to see and act. Bodying as a to-be-seen process conveys these meanings as a relentlessly served-up socio-physical form, the unrelenting “blues claimant.” Thus, clusters of woman on a Thursday evening luminously mark their right to the club as “blues bearers” in theatrical dance that powerfully resound. Tucked away from the shadows of the desolate landscape outside, brief flurries of Chicago Steppin, Lindy hop, elegant “slow dragging,” and improvisation display graceful rhythms that massages the club’s widely perceived aesthetic of blues movement and blues sensibilities. A space’s interwovenness with staunch political alliances and blues epistemology guides them. Similarly, two nearby men this Thursday, wearing flowing orange- and blue-fitted shirts, tap politely and confidently to the music and serve up gazes of knowing, appropriating, and sharing a social space’s intimacies. Animated by the camaraderie and support of other knowledge-making beings on the dance floor, communication across the club is immediate.

But there is more communication here. At a deeper level, this bodily communicating is “heteroglossic,” that is, it is a set of communications with a sideward glance (Bakhtin, 1981). People deploying bodies, Francis (2012) tells us, exemplifies heteroglossic communicating. Thus, in its subtle elaborations, it also asserts three key side points. First, as body-speak communicates who should have rights and entitlements in Beebe’s, it suggests who should be disinvested of rights. This questions both the club’s and society’s race-class hierarchy. Second, as the bodying speaks to what is the real blues aesthetic in Beebe’s, it also expresses what is fabricated and fraudulent blues music in Beebe’s and beyond. At issue becomes the reasons for a club’s dive into producing mimicry and simulation of blues ways and blues motifs. Third, as it speaks to what should be the club’s proper aesthetic and vibe, it also communicates what ambiance needs to be marginalized. These bodily messages, in this sense, recognize that club dynamics are irreducibly interwoven with multiple clubber concerns: daily human survival, human rights to proper identity nourishing, and human entitlement to lives and existences that are authentic to them.

Centered in this heteroglossic bodying, one more time, is an assertion: of a proud, productive, and resilient blackness. It rejects the established bi-blackness that pervades current capitalist America – of culturally deficient people or glittery, atavistic creatures (Mercer, 1997) – in favor of a notion of enriched, humane people. Both an aesthetic and a demand become posted. Blackness here is keenly civil and progressively cultural, and has a right to be re-afffirmed and assiduously tended-to. So, people many evenings bound across the club and dance floor to excited proclamations of shared sentiments where a dignified, controlled ethos comes to engulf all. Clubbers’ sense of a black blues aesthetic and a black demand for parity is unleashed across the club. Poignant fragments of movement on the dance floor – flashes of the funky butt, snake hips, the fish tail, the occasional cakewalking – are delivered with grace and pride. Body parts, typically working together in harmony and coordination, proclaim these clubbers as the club’s core ingredient and that this venue should be as much about them as anyone else. All is performed within a benevolent veneer: If a race-class animus exists in the thoughts of dancers, it is never revealed as celebratory black personhood drowns out all.

Through usage of the body, power again embeds in the informal. A sly politics shuns the arena of direct confrontation in favor of working through a space’s dimly seen base of resources. Subtle artistry, radiant symbolic bursts, and informal alliance unleashes a potent politics under cover of informal club practices: Power rooted in a resource assemblage becomes placed not in the unauthorized but in fully sanctioned activities. Jacobus et al.’s (2013) “body as battleground” – a technology that is fitted with confronting codes and assertions – conveys its symbolic reservoir never dipping into the realm of the inappropriate or disapproved. Prevailing club practices as conventional actions may be deemed vulgar, boring, or stupid, but they are expedient to work through as political cover. In the process, demands and implorings load onto an ethos of race-class rights that is seamlessly transported across the club in the form of put-in-motion human bodies. An exercise of power is unleashed in the club as fluid forms – bodies – animate the political voice.

In this context, the politicized bodying is mobilized to communicate opposition to a central commodification practice widely seen to degrade current Beebe’s: the alteration of music. Non-blues music, rubbing abrasively against a social space’s sensibilities, is read by these clubbers as, first, an aesthetic indignity that is out of space and out of place, and second, as a trace of a deepening assault on authenticity (on an authentic blues club, authentic blues music and aesthetics, their authentic way of living). It is bad enough, to these clubbers, that they are isolated, impoverished, and trivialized outside the club. Now their treasured, genuine music and club are being taken from them, and with intensification, all will be irreparably altered. Sense of identities, histories, and constructions of cultural distinctiveness load onto one shared grievance. One more time, the intense emotional investment of these clubbers to the venue visibly makes an appearance. Realizing they cannot legislate or punish Jackie’s acts and attitudes, they lack the power, they strike out using momentary, political charged fragments of activity that powerfully reverberate to lampoon alternative forms of music into oblivion.

So, one particular evening, anger breaks out with alternative music briefly introduced. With the band’s (the Tommy Avila Blues Band) singer on break, quasi disco music shoots across the club. Numerous bodies as radiant fragments immediately flash contemptuousness. Bodies turn away from the stage, heads nod in disapproval, and disdain bordering on nastiness gets etched on faces. One clubber this evening goes so far as to briefly caricature in body movement a disco dance, gyrating John Travolta style across the club to the derisive laughter of friends. Asked about this later, the man in a hushed tone said to me: its’ f____ disco man, it has no place in here, I don’t know why Jackie (club owner) brings that stuff out … it’s f___n s___ … this is a blues club …” Fifteen minutes later, What hard rock music replaces the disco, the response is the same (minus the parodying). At one table, a man in his mid 80s blurts out to me: “blues is Beebe’s, and that’s the end of it … no more b______t - this stuff has no right being here.” The message is unmistakable: the club can have its disco music, we can’t legislate this, but we will tell you what it is about, why we now have it in Beebe’s, and what it’s doing to us and the club. Symbolic content in club practices, one more time, is put under a quiet assault.

Conclusion

I have chronicled a flourishing people as infrastructure politics in one American rust belt city that mirrors currently unfolding political realities in global south cities. In Chicago’s punished South Side, hundreds of subalterns urgently seek to reverse a commodifying blues club that is crucial to their lives. Subalterns extract life-giving stuff from this space as they toil in Chicago’s and the South Side’s low-wage economies, stigmatized social domains, and marginalized communities (rivaling any afflictions transmitted by governances and institutions in global south cities). In this setting, subalterns are compelled to improvisationally and spontaneously create alliances of resistance to nurture survival. A poaching on afflicting environs, using current rules and products, taps resources embedded in a space’s everydayness to offer a kind of quiet remediation. These acts and practices, always structured but flexible and adjustive, are amazingly sly and proactive that creates a unique architecture of infrastructure. Beebe’s becomes a space for a politically charged but obscured counter-legibility that works for those most in need.

The form of this resistive politics is distinctive. A complicated subterranean struggle – over who will dictate and manage the imaginings of a club’s present and future – is a tussle over the politics of circulating meanings. At the core of the struggle are key questions: What do current social practices across Beebe’s mean? What should they mean? What will they mean in the future? Whose interests will be represented by future practices? As strategy, it follows, manufacturing key epistemologies takes precedence over annihilating appearances and practices as rituals of conduct become less important than what they communicate. Here Beebe’s is a space of contentiousness: Two spaces collide, one group’s (long-term clubbers) established fabric of blues epistemology with an emerging space of blues commodification. Produced space, these clubbers realize, is never removed from their producers, invariably reflecting their tools, strategies, politics, and ways. Clubbers thus step up efforts to be producers of space, to them no other way exists to ensure that the club will reflect their desires and needs.

In this context, a key driver in this politics, fragments of meaning-rich expressions, burst with resonance to flesh out articulations of a group’s truths. These fragments, following McFarlane (2019), are luminous and illuminating bursts that preserve (keeping prevailing practices intact) and transform (restructuring what practices mean). A deceptively powerful politics works notably through brief moments of performative clarity. Resistors become something crucial beyond themselves, fixers that lubricate and enable change for fellow subalterns. Emphasizing subtle repair and reclamation of current realities rather than dramatic tear-down and rebuild, they channel demands to the realm of the recognized for those targeted to see (the club owner and fellow subaltern conspirators). A politics, often unidentified by outsiders, ultimately acquires both an acceptable form and an ability to deftly infiltrate the social habitus.

In Beebe’s, a flourishing people as infrastructure politics may signal that this politics is alive and well across Chicago’s South Side and America’s rust belt. In this vast stretch of terrain, deepening squalor (Cordova and Wilson, 2016; Semuels, 2018; Wilson, 2007) and the dire need for “human nourishment space” may compel subalterns in diverse places to forge improvisational human alliances to survive. I believe this people as infrastructure politics is probably extensive across America’s rust belt, but this needs empirical clarification. Across this vast swath of geography, then, where do we find this politics? In this frame, to what degree are these findings about Beebe’s blues club relevant for other clubs in rust belt cities and other places? . With blues clubs now under siege in so many cities (e.g. Cleveland, Baltimore, Detroit, Flint), is this political resistance present? These questions need to be answered if we are going to see what the future holds for the qualities-of-life of these subalterns. One thing becomes clear from this work: Beebe’s, set within Chicago’s blitzed South Side, becomes a blurred class-race battleground in the human tussle for decent lives. In one group’s fight for social justice and decent lives, few things could be as important.

Footnotes

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.

Notes

Biographical note

David Wilson is Professor of Geography, at the University of Illinois. His work currently focuses on regimes of redevelopment and the politics of resistance to inequitable transformation in global north and global south cities. This work extends his long-term interest on city redevelopment and its politics in rust belt cities of America and Europe. He holds a PhD in geography from Rutgers University.

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People as infrastructure politics in global north cities: Chicago’s South Side

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

People as infrastructure and resistance politics

Context for the people as infrastructure politics: The owner

Subversive politics: Long-term clubbers

The complex beings

Resistance engagements

Resistance bodying 4

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Notes

Biographical note

References

Resistance bodying⁴