Classify, Exclude, Police. Laurent Fourchard

Classify, Exclude, Police - Laurent Fourchard


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but thinking from more than one point of view at the same time’ (Ferguson 2012), a comment made in reference to Jean and Jane Comaroff who, like many ‘intellectuals of the South’, have positioned themselves in the space between them (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012).

      In Part I, I suggest that the genealogy of exclusion takes root in the classifying obsession of colonial and apartheid governments. Racial discrimination, city planning and segregation schemes designed to keep black native populations at a distance from white European populations have played a pioneering role in developing the concept of a segregated city (Home 1997; Nightingale 2012; Swanson 1977). For American historian Carl Nightingale, it is impossible to wish away the power of race in the history of colonial cities, whether it was during moments when planners did draw colour lines clearly on their maps or moments where they sought to hide race away (Nightingale 2012). He rightly insists, ‘the biggest problem with urban racial separation is the maldistribution of resources that disproportionally disfavours those racial groups that the colour line also helps to subordinate politically’. Actually, the construction of the modern networked city in the Western world from a fragmented provision of water, sanitation, electricity or transport in the mid‐nineteenth century to a standardised system in the mid‐twentieth century – or what is referred to as a ‘modern infrastructural ideal’ by Graham and Marvin (2001) – never happened in the colonies. Network of infrastructures has ‘always been fragmented’ in colonial Bombay (McFarlane 2008; Zerah 2008), it was a truncated modernity in colonial Lagos (Gandy 2006, p. 377) and even considered as a system of urban apartheid in the earlier literature (Abu‐Lughod 1980; Balbo 1993). An approach on colonial surveillance and control of conducts has simultaneously become an important reinterpretation of the colonial city inspired by a Foucauldian analysis. Some have suggested that disciplinary colonial power and the racist narrative behind the civilising mission were penetrating the smallest details of everyday life that could only be resisted by colonised social and political practices (Celik 1997; de Boeck and Plissart 2004; Myers 2003).

      While the racial classification and the surveillance dimension of the colonial project are too important features to be brushed aside, it does not fully account for the role of bureaucratic, political and social engineering in shaping colonial classification,


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