Classify, Exclude, Police: Urban Lives in South Africa and Nigeria Contributor(s): Fourchard, Laurent (Author) |
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ISBN: 1119582644 ISBN-13: 9781119582649 Publisher: Wiley OUR PRICE: $33.20 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2021 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Sociology - Urban - Social Science | Minority Studies |
Dewey: 305.568 |
LCCN: 2020043244 |
Physical Information: 0.63" H x 6" W x 9" (0.89 lbs) 304 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Classify Exclude Police Laurent Fourchard's deep, first-hand knowledge of the history and contemporary politics of Nigeria and South Africa forms the basis of an insightful and compelling analysis of how states produce invidious distinctions among their people and at the same time how political linkages are forged between state and society, elites and subalterns, bureaucratic structures and personal relations. Violence, control, police and political order are essential dimensions of metropolis. In this exceptional book, Laurent Fourchard compares decentralised exercises of authority in providing vivid analysis of exclusion of youth and migrants, policing and riots, politics of 'Big men' and fine-grained blurring between bureaucracy and society. A masterpiece of urban politics. This book is a major contribution to rethinking urban politics from the experiences of African cities. Based on detailed historical analysis of South Africa and Nigeria, Fourchard recalibrates the actors, stakes and terms of urban politics around African-centred concerns. The cities of South Africa and Nigeria are reputed to be dangerous, teeming with slums, and dominated by the informal economy but we know little about how people are divided up, categorised and policed. Colonial governments assigned rights and punishments, banned categories considered problematic (delinquents, migrants, single women, street vendors) and give non-state organisations the power to police low-income neighbourhoods. Within this enduring legacy, a tangle of petty arrangements has developed to circumvent exclusion to public places and government offices. In this unpredictable urban reality - which has eluded all planning - individuals and social groups have changed areas of public action through exclusion, violence and negotiation. In combining historical and ethnographic methods, Classify, Exclude, Police explores the effects and limits of public action, and questions the possibility of comparison between cities often perceived as incommensurable. Focusing on state formation, urbanization, and daily lives, Laurent Fourchard addresses debates and controversies in comparative urban studies, history, political science, and urban anthropology. The book provides a systematic, comparative approach to the practices, processes, arrangements used to create boundaries, direct violence, and produce social, racial, gender, and generational differences. |