Classify, Exclude, Police. Laurent Fourchard

Classify, Exclude, Police - Laurent Fourchard


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networks; or we might question why the everyday work of patrolling neighbourhoods, which appeared to be identical in Ibadan and Cape Town, has had radically different effects on the construction of community boundaries within these cities, on the use of coercion, and on what these practices tell us about the nature of a state that outsources its security functions in this way.

      This process echoes the genealogical analysis of Foucault, whose aim is to retrace the historical conditions of emergence of specific apparatuses of power. Foucault was largely influenced by Nietzsche’s own interpretation of history, as shown in his key text published in 1971 (Foucault 1971, pp. 1004–1024). Genealogy aims to ‘detect the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality’ (Foucault 1971, p. 1004). It requires the meticulousness of knowledge, a large number of materials piled up, details, random beginnings, accidents, small deviations or complete reversals, errors, misjudgements, miscalculations. Foucault is said to have challenged ‘traditional history’, but according to his friend, the historian and philosopher Paul Veyne, Foucault believed only in the truth of the facts, of the countless historical facts that fill all the pages of his books; he was sceptical towards any universal concepts and started from the concrete practices of the state, and ordinary places of power rather than from general and well‐known ideas (Veyne 2008, p. 9, 19, 33). Interpreting history as a series of accidents and considering ‘that the forces at stake in history do not obey a destination or a mechanism but the randomness of the struggle’ (Foucault 1971, p. 1016) was quite unusual in the 1970s. Foucault’s genealogy was opposed to meta‐historical forms of writing (Foucault 1971, p. 1005), to historians who focus excessively on causal relationships (Veyne 2008, pp. 38–39), and to a history that does not take into account ordinary mechanisms of power (Foucault 1971, p. 1019). As David Garland explains (2014, p. 372), ‘genealogical analysis traces how contemporary practices and institutions emerged out of specific struggles, conflicts, alliances, and exercises of power, many of which are nowadays forgotten’. This book is an attempt to discover exercises of power, often located outside state power, sometimes within it.

      This dialogue between history and social sciences are central in the tradition of interdisciplinary knowledge in African studies (Balandier 1985 [1955]; Coquery‐Vidrovitch 1993; Ferguson 1999; Freund 2007; Mbembe and Nuttall 2004) which in some cases have entered into a productive dialogue with urban studies of the continent (Myers 2011; Simone and Pieterse 2017; Robinson 2006; Simone 2004). These have helped to include a more diverse historical experience in understanding the urban world and possible peculiarities of urban histories of the global south. Despite this tradition, a very specific use of history needs to be interrogated within some segments of urban studies. First, the historical experience is rarely based on a dialogue with the long tradition of African history. Second, while ethnographic methods have become central in so many disciplines, historical methods, i.e. the patient time‐consuming archival work and collection of oral and material sources, often seems to be marginal, leaving urban scholars with a second‐hand approach and a relative neglect of historical everyday life. Third, many scholars have not totally avoided a form of presentism. Presentism – or the rise of the category of the present until this comes a ubiquitous evidence – partly consists of reinterpreting the past according to this present (Hartog 2003, p. 223). A genealogical analysis is suggested as a possibility to avoid that risk while questioning the often‐marginal place devoted to the historicised dimension of urban life.

      Many scholars have recommended provincialising Western urban analysis to achieve a more comprehensive view of global urbanisation, to give priority to a post‐colonial approach, and to call for a localisation of theoretical production (Robinson 2012; Roy 2011). If this book explores colonial and postcolonial history to figure out a peculiar historicity that may not fit a ready‐made definition of the urban, my aim is not to take part in developing a ‘Southern theory’ that would abstract from, circumvent or challenge ‘Western thought’. I prefer to read academics promoting Southern theory as cultural intermediaries who have raised these issues precisely because they have knowledge in different fields and different academic institutions (northern and southern). James


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