Reclaiming the Streets: Black urban insurgency and antisocial security in twenty-first-century Philadelphia

Authors

Jeff Maskovsky, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 1-1-2017

Abstract

This article focuses on the emergence of a new pattern of black urban insurgency emerging in major US metropolitan areas such as Philadelphia. I locate this pattern in the context of a new securitization regime that I call “antisocial security.” This regime works by establishing a decentered system of high-tech forms of surveillance and monitory techniques. I highlight the dialectic between the extension of antisocial security apparatuses and techniques into new political and social domains on the one hand and the adoption of these same techniques by those contesting racialized exclusions from urban public space on the other. I end the article with a discussion of how we might adapt the commons concept to consider the centrality of race and racism to this new securitization regime.

Comments

This article was originally published in Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, available at DOI: 10.3167/fcl.2017.790104