Sandro Mezzadra – författare

This innovative edited volume places global urbanism in the context of the phenomenal growth of cities of the South, investigating their colonial contentiousness and asking how their history plays out in the twenty-first-century phenomenon of urbanisation.

Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s reflections on the problem of the South, it shows that the question of southern urbanism is about the anomalies and growth of southern cities, the histories of struggles, technological and logistical reorientations, new zoning practices of neoliberal capitalism and the remaking of urban geographies towards a possible urban future that aims to be just. Crucially, it asks whether today’s city is a seamless formation of several overlapping phases of growth or if there is a decisive break today, marked by the hyper growth of these cities. To understand the implications of these questions for visions of an urban future, this volume takes a number of southern cities of Asia and Europe as case studies, including Kolkata, Mumbai, Chittagong, Beirut, Athens, Naples and Marseille. It shows how these cities are paradoxically marked by both fractured geographies and new types of popular mobilisations, solidarities and an ethic of protection and care, showing this to be the core of the Southern question, constituting the urban experience of our time.

It will appeal to advanced-level students and scholars with interests in urban sociology, Southern urbanisation, postcolonial studies, political science, political economy and urban geography.

This innovative edited volume places global urbanism in the context of the phenomenal growth of cities of the South, investigating their colonial contentiousness and asking how their history plays out in the twenty-first-century phenomenon of urbanisation.

Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s reflections on the problem of the South, it shows that the question of southern urbanism is about the anomalies and growth of southern cities, the histories of struggles, technological and logistical reorientations, new zoning practices of neoliberal capitalism and the remaking of urban geographies towards a possible urban future that aims to be just. Crucially, it asks whether today’s city is a seamless formation of several overlapping phases of growth or if there is a decisive break today, marked by the hyper growth of these cities. To understand the implications of these questions for visions of an urban future, this volume takes a number of southern cities of Asia and Europe as case studies, including Kolkata, Mumbai, Chittagong, Beirut, Athens, Naples and Marseille. It shows how these cities are paradoxically marked by both fractured geographies and new types of popular mobilisations, solidarities and an ethic of protection and care, showing this to be the core of the Southern question, constituting the urban experience of our time.

It will appeal to advanced-level students and scholars with interests in urban sociology, Southern urbanisation, postcolonial studies, political science, political economy and urban geography.

A militant reading of struggles and developments in Bolivia form a balance sheet of possibility for a Left program in the country, hemisphere, and the world. 

Bolivia beyond the Impasse sketches the primary characteristics of the current political, social, and economic situation of Bolivia. Longtime militant researchers Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra explain not only how this situation came about but also the obstacles that confront today’s progressive forces and have led to an impasse. Right-wing political and social forces continue to gain strength and constantly hinder or thwart progressive initiatives. Obstacles also arise from within movements, including the vexed question of leadership, which has increasingly surfaced between Evo Morales as leader of the MAS party and Luis Arce as president of the government. Hardt and Mezzadra do not dwell on these obstacles, however, because they also recognize the extraordinary power and innovation that a new phase of political struggle in Bolivia could unleash beyond the impasse. The current situation, they argue, remains open to new political inventions rooted in the wide range of progressive and revolutionary forces both inside and outside the government and the MAS party. 

Firmly grounded in the Bolivian situation, Hardt and Mezzadra keep their eye on the Latin American context because they believe that, just as it was twenty years ago, many of today’s most stubborn political and economic obstacles can only be overcome through mechanisms beyond national boundaries, by inventing effective mechanisms of regional cooperation. Although the path forward is not clear and that new and old right-wing forces constitute continuing and increasing threats throughout the region—from Brazil to Argentina and from Colombia to Chile—Hardt and Mezzadra offer a reading of the struggles that form the balance sheet of possibility for a Left program in the country, and consequently the hemisphere, and world. 

Despite all the threats and obstacles that feed the impasse, however, dynamics of insurgency and struggle continue to resonate and circulate throughout Latin America. As they powerfully demonstrate, discovering how to defend against violent reactionary forces while furthering democratic initiatives and projects for liberation will be a key task for social movements and progressive governments. Bolivia beyond the Impasse makes the claim with passion and rigor that this regional space of political action and innovation is where the potential for moving beyond the impasse is most promising. 

This book offers an original analysis and theorization of the biopolitics of development in the postcolonial present, and draws significantly from the later works of Michel Foucault on biopolitics. Foucault’s works have had a massive influence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political science and international relations, and several authors of this book have themselves made significant contributions to that influence.

While Foucault’s thought has been inspirational for understanding colonial biopolitics as well as governmental rationalities concerned with development, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead, they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment with the political itself in postcolonial works and studies.

Working against the grain of current Foucauldian scholarship, this book underlines the importance of Foucault’s work for the capacity to recognize how this degraded view of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of ‘development’, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. It explores how we can use Foucault’s ideas to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically at a time when fundamentally human capacities to think, know and to act purposively in the world are being pathologized as expressions of the hubris and ‘underdevelopment’ of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today, this book tackles some significantquestions and problems: Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have; nor that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn the life of postcolonial peoples more fully; but that of how such peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove their lives of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.