Is it all coming together? Further thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis: (8) Dark Ages, prisons and escape routes

City

Volumn 10, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 242-256

  Catterall, Bob ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34347338903     PISSN: 13604813     EISSN: 14703629     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13604810600737006     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Jacobs, J. Dark Age Ahead (2005), New York: Vintage, p.171. Subsequent references to page numbers are included in the main text above.
2. It can be argued that urban studies is a particular disciplinary area within social studies, a particular specialist concern. There seems no strong reason, though, for taking this position. A concern with 'society' that sidelines 'the urban' is clearly inadequate now in a highly urbanized society and, if not to the same extent, for all of rccorded history.
3. Solnit, R (2006) 'Three Who Made A Revolution', The Nation April 3, pp29-32
4. See, Marcuse, P. (2005) 'The city as perverse metaphor' City 9:2, pp. 247-254.
5. See 'Is it all coming together ...', variously submitted and numbered 1-7 in City 7:3, 8:2 to 10:1.
6. The notion of the post-Roman 'dark age' succeeding classical decline and collapse and preceding the medieval period was itself largely eliminated - a topic to which I shall return; for an expert challenge to this academic conjuring trick, see historian and archeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome and the end of civilization, Oxford University Press, 2005.
7. The current relevance of the terms 'empire' and 'imperialsm' are not acknowledged by Jacobs but neither are they explicitly rejected.
8. Perhaps, to return to the argument around Hardt and Negri's Empire there is no need to opt for a US-centric or non-US-centric view of Empire. Both tendencies are apparent.
9. Smith, N. (1996) The new urban frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist city London: Routledge.
10. For an account of Jacobs'urban praxis in Toronto particularly, with reference to the general Canadian situation, see Ken Greenberg's review of Dark Age Ahead, headed 'The Avenger of Cities', in Harvard Design Magazine Fall 2005/Winter 2006 pp109-114.
11. For an account of the national political situation within which Jacobs was seeking to operate, see James Laxer 'Fake Left, Go Right:AN insider's take on Jack Layton's game of chance' The Walrus May 2006, pp. 44-51 (perhaps more revealingly entitled on the cover: 'Neo-Conned: How the NDP Fell for Stephen Harper').
12. For a characteristically complacent view of Jacobs' book, see The Economist obituary, May 11, 2006 where it is summarised as having 'lamented the loss of interdependence in society'.
13. Davis, A. (2005) Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (interviews and an introduction by Eduardo Mendieta) New York: Seven Stories Press 2005, pp.113-114.
14. There is a CD of a talk made by her in 1997 Angela Davis: The Prison-Industrial Complex. It can be ordered online at www.arkpress.org at www.freedomarchives.org
15. Davis refers to 'a thirty-five year engagement with the prison system' after her imprisonment and to activity before that (105-106)
16. Davis, M (1995), A prison-industrial complex: Hell Factories in the Field' The Nation February 20 1995, pp. 229-234
17. Mumia Abu-Jamal wrote 'about Pelican Bay in 1993. A civil suit had been filed in federal court, charging the state with 'lawless activity.' 'one defense psychologist, Dr Craig Haney, found "chronic depression, hallucinations and thought disorders" at levels existing at no other prison in the United States. The findings were comparable only to findings from a psychiatric prison in the former East Germany, known for torture and solitary confinement' However though the disease is so acute in Pelican Bay, the contagion seems to have spread, in a sense, from the former worst 'hellhole' Marion Federal Penitentiary, Illinois.
18. That, Abu-Jamal writes was known as Son of Alcatraz, Pelican Bay is Son of Marion. 'Five years from now, will we be moaning about the Son of Pelican?' see Abu-Jamal. M. 'Skeleton Bay' (1993), in Bruce Franklin, H (ed.) (1998) prison writing in 20th-century america New York: Pengun Books, p. 355.
19. Sadly, almost ten years later there is still cause to moan about Pelican Bay according to 'a federal watchdog report... which is part of a longtime legal settlement involving inmate abuse at Pelican Bay...' (Report by Mark Martin, 'Governor accused of retreat on Prisons: Report says Schwarzenegger abandoned reform efforts and caved in to guards union', San Francisco Chronicle, 22 June, 2006)
20. And to the state, as the heading of the Chronicle's report (above) suggests. Agreeing with the union seems to be a rewarding relationship for would-be govenors' campaigns, from 'almost $1 million to Pete Wilson's gubernatorial campaign' (Mike Davis) to the $10 million the union has to spend this year on Schwarzenegger or his Democratic opponent (Mark Martin)
21. This and subsequent page numbers refer to Davis, A. (2005)
22. Bruce Franklin's introduction to his book (1998), p.15 -see note 14 above
23. 'B-Block Days and Nightmares' (1990), in Franklin, 1998, pp351-352
24. For George Jackson, extract (dated 1970) from Soledad Brothers in Franklin (1998), p. 161. A strong sense of the actual experience of George Jackson and his associates can be gained from AK Press's CD Prison on Fire: George Jackson, Attica and Black Liberation. It can be ordered online from www.freedomarchives.org.
25. Left Turn 20, May-June 2006, See their website: www.leftturn.org
26. Matlin, D.(2005) Prisons: Inside the New America; From Vernooykill Creek to Abu Graib second edition Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, pp. 8, 136.
27. I have referred here only to her publication, Abolition Demcracy. In that book she and Eduardo Medieta refer to her strong relationship to the work of W.E.B.DuBois and Herbert Marcuse. The latter's work has suffered more than most from the '1989' syndrome. In the sequel to this piece I take up Davi's continuities as well as new areas of her work.
28. Mendieta suggests that 'Davis is laying out a post-Foucauldan genealogy of geographies of imprisonment...' (email, 24 June 2006) I shall also refer to the significance of Davis (1998), Blues Legacies and Black Feminism...'. My thanks, with the usual limited liability, to Eduardo Mendieta for this and other comments in response to an early draft of this piece.
29. Jacobs, p.176. This passage is discussed in the Editorial to this issue.
30. In a note Eduardo Mendieta fills out this too brief characterisation of the state, particularly, of the humanities In U.S.public universities: 'We are having to become more aggressive about external funding, while having to teach more and more students, with less and less junior and younger faculty, even as we continue to lose high profile faculty... 'Then there are the internal crises brought on by epistemic shifts...the devestaing postcolonal and global critique have left a lot of people simply cold about the humanities... 'It is a dark age for the humanities and public universities...' (email, 23 June 2006)
31. I explore these contradictory aspects of Derrida in: 'Still Running": Derrida's Tomorrow" in Radical Philosophy Review 8:2, 2005, 225-234
32. Derrida, J (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge (originally published in French in 1993)
33. Smith, J.K.A (2005) Jacques Derrida: Live Theory New York: Continuum pp. 85-86
34. See 'Catterall, B (2004) 'Is it all coming together? Further thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis: (2) What time is this space?' City 8:2, pp. 307-335.
35. pp. 86-87.
36. Catterall, B (2004), partic, pp. 324-331 where the distinction is made between 'actual' and 'radical' time.
37. P. 89
38. Everett, B., 'A Lethal Fall...' London Review of Books 11 May, 2006
39. Saadawi, N (1994) Memories from the Women's Prison translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, Berkeley: University of California Press p.200 (originally published in English in 1986;the quotation is from the 1994 Afterword)