Delivery As Dispossession

Delivery As Dispossession PDF Author: Zachary Levenson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197629245
Category : Eviction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
"This book explains why nearly 30 years after the transition to democracy, the South African government continues to evict squatters from urban land. It argues that housing officials view occupiers as threats to the government's housing delivery program, which, they insist, requires order and state control. New occupations are therefore stigmatized as "disorderly" threats, and government actors represent their removal as a precondition for access to housing. Drawing on a decade of sustained ethnographic fieldwork in two such occupations in Cape Town, this study explains why one was evicted, whereas the other was ultimately tolerated, answering a central question in urban studies: how do governments decide when to evict, and conversely, when to tolerate? These decisions are not made in a vacuum but instead require an analysis that expands what we typically call "the state." This book argues that the state does not simply "see" occupations, as if they were a feature of the natural landscape. Rather, occupiers collectively project themselves to government actors, affecting how they are seen. But residents are not only seen; they also see, which shapes how they organize themselves. When residents see the state as an antagonist, they tend to unify under a single leadership; but when they see it as a potential ally, they often remain atomized as if they were individual customers. The unity in the former case projects an orderly population, less likely to be evicted; but the fragmentation in the latter case projects a disorderly mass, serving to legitimate eviction rulings"--

Delivery as Dispossession

Delivery as Dispossession PDF Author: Zachary Levenson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019762927X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
A sweeping historical and political analysis with detailed ethnographic fieldwork of the politics of everyday life in postcolonial Africa. In post-apartheid South Africa, nearly a fifth of the urban population lives in shacks. Unable to wait any longer for government housing, people occupy land, typically seeking to fly under the state's radar. Yet in most cases, occupiers wind up in dialogue with the state. In Delivery as Dispossession, Zachary Levenson follows this journey from avoidance to incorporation, explaining how the post-apartheid Constitution shifts squatters' struggles onto the judicial register. Providing a comparative ethnographic account of two land occupations in Cape Town and highlighting occupiers' struggles, Levenson further demonstrates why it is that housing officials seek the eviction of all new occupations: they view these unsanctioned settlements as a threat to the order they believe is required for delivery. Yet in evicting occupiers, he argues, they reproduce the problem anew, with subsequent rounds of land occupation as the inevitable consequence. Offering a unique framework for thinking about local states, this book proposes a novel theory of the state that will change the way ethnographers think about politics.

Delivery As Dispossession

Delivery As Dispossession PDF Author: Zachary Levenson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197629245
Category : Eviction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
"This book explains why nearly 30 years after the transition to democracy, the South African government continues to evict squatters from urban land. It argues that housing officials view occupiers as threats to the government's housing delivery program, which, they insist, requires order and state control. New occupations are therefore stigmatized as "disorderly" threats, and government actors represent their removal as a precondition for access to housing. Drawing on a decade of sustained ethnographic fieldwork in two such occupations in Cape Town, this study explains why one was evicted, whereas the other was ultimately tolerated, answering a central question in urban studies: how do governments decide when to evict, and conversely, when to tolerate? These decisions are not made in a vacuum but instead require an analysis that expands what we typically call "the state." This book argues that the state does not simply "see" occupations, as if they were a feature of the natural landscape. Rather, occupiers collectively project themselves to government actors, affecting how they are seen. But residents are not only seen; they also see, which shapes how they organize themselves. When residents see the state as an antagonist, they tend to unify under a single leadership; but when they see it as a potential ally, they often remain atomized as if they were individual customers. The unity in the former case projects an orderly population, less likely to be evicted; but the fragmentation in the latter case projects a disorderly mass, serving to legitimate eviction rulings"--

Dispossession

Dispossession PDF Author: Pete Daniel
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469602024
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Between 1940 and 1974, the number of African American farmers fell from 681,790 to just 45,594--a drop of 93 percent. In his hard-hitting book, historian Pete Daniel analyzes this decline and chronicles black farmers' fierce struggles to remain on the land in the face of discrimination by bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He exposes the shameful fact that at the very moment civil rights laws promised to end discrimination, hundreds of thousands of black farmers lost their hold on the land as they were denied loans, information, and access to the programs essential to survival in a capital-intensive farm structure. More than a matter of neglect of these farmers and their rights, this "passive nullification" consisted of a blizzard of bureaucratic obfuscation, blatant acts of discrimination and cronyism, violence, and intimidation. Dispossession recovers a lost chapter of the black experience in the American South, presenting a counternarrative to the conventional story of the progress achieved by the civil rights movement.

Debt and Dispossession

Debt and Dispossession PDF Author: Kathryn Marie Dudley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226169118
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Explores the social impact of the farm debt crisis of the 1980's through interviews with members of an agricultural community.

Dispossession by Degrees

Dispossession by Degrees PDF Author: Jean M. O'Brien
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803286191
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
Despite popular belief, Native peoples did not simply disappear from colonial New England as the English extended their domination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather, the Native peoples in such places as Natick, Massachusetts, creatively resisted colonialism, defended their lands, and rebuilt kin networks and community through the strategic use of English cultural practices and institutions. So why did New England settlers believe that the Native peoples had vanished? In this thoroughly researched and astutely argued study, historian Jean M. O?Brien reveals that, in the late eighteenth century, the Natick tribe experienced a process of ?dispossession by degrees,? which rendered them invisible within the larger context of the colonial social order, thus enabling the construction of the myth of Indian extinction.

Witness to Dispossession

Witness to Dispossession PDF Author: Tom Beaudoin
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN: 1570757852
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Tom Beaudoin's first book, Virtual Faith, celebrated the spiritual quest of Generation X and established his reputation as one of the most astute critics of contemporary faith and culture. In this collection of essays he reflects on the task and purpose of theology in a post-modern age. Beaudoin sketches a view of the theologian as a "witness to dispossession." This dispossession involves the letting go of status and power, but also the comfortable certainties of the past. Book jacket.

Markets of Dispossession

Markets of Dispossession PDF Author: Julia Elyachar
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387131
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
What happens when the market tries to help the poor? In many parts of the world today, neoliberal development programs are offering ordinary people the tools of free enterprise as the means to well-being and empowerment. Schemes to transform the poor into small-scale entrepreneurs promise them the benefits of the market and access to the rewards of globalization. Markets of Dispossession is a theoretically sophisticated and sobering account of the consequences of these initiatives. Julia Elyachar studied the efforts of bankers, social scientists, ngo members, development workers, and state officials to turn the craftsmen and unemployed youth of Cairo into the vanguard of a new market society based on microenterprise. She considers these efforts in relation to the alternative notions of economic success held by craftsmen in Cairo, in which short-term financial profit is not always highly valued. Through her careful ethnography of workshop life, Elyachar explains how the traditional market practices of craftsmen are among the most vibrant modes of market life in Egypt. Long condemned as backward, these existing market practices have been seized on by social scientists and development institutions as the raw materials for experiments in “free market” expansion. Elyachar argues that the new economic value accorded to the cultural resources and social networks of the poor has fueled a broader process leading to their economic, social, and cultural dispossession.

The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887-1934

The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887-1934 PDF Author: Janet A. McDonnell
Publisher: Bloomington : Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253336286
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
History of the Dawes Act.

Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City

Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City PDF Author: Kristen L. Buras
Publisher: Teachers College Press
ISBN: 0807770671
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In cities across the nation, communities of color find themselves resisting state disinvestment and the politics of dispossession. Students at the Center—a writing initiative based in several New Orleans high schools—takes on this struggle through a close examination of race and schools. The book builds on the powerful stories of marginalized youth and their teachers who contest the policies that are destructive to their communities: decentralization, charter schools, market-based educational choice, teachers union-busting, mixed-income housing, and urban redevelopment. Striking commentaries from the foremost scholars of the day explore the wider implications of these stories for pedagogy and educational policy in schools across the United States and the globe. Most importantly, this book reveals what must be done to challenge oppressive conditions and transform our schools for the benefit of all students.

Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory

Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory PDF Author: Claudio Saunt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393609855
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Winner of the 2021 Bancroft Prize and the 2021 Ridenhour Book Prize Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction Named a Top Ten Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post and Publishers Weekly and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2020 A masterful and unsettling history of “Indian Removal,” the forced migration of Native Americans across the Mississippi River in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of their lands. In May 1830, the United States launched an unprecedented campaign to expel 80,000 Native Americans from their eastern homelands to territories west of the Mississippi River. In a firestorm of fraud and violence, thousands of Native Americans lost their lives, and thousands more lost their farms and possessions. The operation soon devolved into an unofficial policy of extermination, enabled by US officials, southern planters, and northern speculators. Hailed for its searing insight, Unworthy Republic transforms our understanding of this pivotal period in American history.