Two Faces of the Ghetto

The "ghetto" has become a keyword of our age: a synonym for urban exclusion, poverty, and violence. It evokes images of dread and dissolution, it stokes the fear of racialized difference, and it conjures up the specter of internal secession. And yet the ghetto is none of these things, separately or in combination. Mating the philosophies of science of Max Weber and Georges Canguilhem, Wacquant draws on a comparative analysis of configurations of ethnicity, marginality, and power in the city across six centuries and five continents to forge a robust sociological concept of the ghetto as spatial instrument of ethnoracial closure and succor anchored by the mutual assignation of pariah population and tainted territory. He shows that, contrary to ordinary, policy and scholarly common sense, ghettoization is not coterminous with segregation and not a vector of disorganization but is, instead, a modality of bifurcated integration. At its peak, the ghetto is a powerful magnet and a protected life-space in which the confined category fashions a unified identity and accumulates the capitals that will enable it to challenge oppression. Spotlighting the paradoxical profits of ghettoization for the subordinate allows us to recover the "horizontal" dimension of solidarity, reciprocity and dignity that grows out of, and dialectically complements, the "vertical" dimension of subordination and denigration in any system of domination, thus paving the way for what Wacquant calls a diagonal sociology. An analytic concept of the ghetto as Janus-faced device, both cage and cocoon, for the seclusion of a stigmatized group offers a way out of the semantic morass and empirical confusion created by the shifting folk notions used among political and intellectual elites alike. It allows us to describe, differentiate, and explain the diverse spatial forms developed by tarnished populations as they come into the city without falling into the traps set by the rhetorical and metaphorical usages of "the ghetto." It also gives us the means to grasp the structural and functional kinship between the ghetto, the prison, the reservation, and the camp just as the state managers of the advanced societies are increasingly resorting to defended borders, walls, and bounded districts as the means to define, confine, and control problem categories. Elegantly mixing theory and history, philosophical reflexivity and empirical comparison, The Two Faces of the Ghetto will be of interest to students of ethnicity, marginality, space, fear and power in the city across the social sciences and the humanities.