Comparing the US 'Black Belt' with the French 'Red Belt' demonstrates that state structures and policies play a decisive role in the articulation of class, race and place on both sides of the Atlantic. It also reveals the crystallization of a new regime of marginality fuelled by the fragmentation of wage labour, the retrenchment of the social state and the concentration of dispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collective idiom of identity and claims-making. These defamed districts are not just the residual 'sinkholes' of a bygone economic era, but also the incubators of the precarious proletariat emerging under neoliberal capitalism.
Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence and festering street violence resurging in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over social inequality and citizenship at century's dawn.
* Exam copies only available to lecturers for whom the book may be suitable as a course text.
Please note: Sales representation and distribution for Polity titles is provided by John Wiley and Sons Ltd.
"A thoroughly researched manifesto for an urban sociology that empowers the new precarious labour force of the post-industrial city."
Race and Class
"[Wacquant] raises a series of valuable discussion points on methodology, scales of explanation, the value and challenges of comparative study, modes of writing, and the question of the author's positionality and its effects on the drama he is recounting - a rich harvest to garner from a single volume ... would make first-rate reading and discussion material for senior undergraduate and graduate seminars."
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
PROLOGUE: AN OLD PROBLEM IN A NEW WORLD?.
1. The Return of the Repressed: Riots, `Race,' and Dualization in Three Advanced Societies.
I. FROM COMMUNAL GHETTO TO HYPERGHETTO.
2. The State and Fate of the Dark Ghetto at Century's Close.
3. The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in `Bronzeville'.
4. West Side Story: A High-Insecurity Ward in Chicago.
II. BLACK BELT, RED BELT.
5. From Conflation to Comparison: How Banlieues and Ghetto Converge and Contrast.
6. Stigma and Division: From the Core of Chicago to the Margins of Paris.
7. Dangerous Places: Violence, Isolation, and the State.
III.- LOOKING AHEAD: URBAN MARGINALITY IN THE 21st CENTURY.
8. The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Specifications and Implications.
9. Logics of Urban Polarization from Below.
Postcript: Theory, History, and Politics in Urban Analysis
