M J Murray
Biographic Data
| ID | 6328 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M J Murray |
| GIVEN NAMES | M J |
| FAMILY NAME | Murray |
| SIGNATURE | MURRAY M J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Binghamton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4448-281X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 68 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 162 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The making and unmaking of place
Our work unpacks divergent trajectories of abandonment, vacancy, and reuse in the active production of decline in Detroit. • Post-bankruptcy Detroit is an uneven landscape where the afterlife of abandoned spaces acquires sui generis characteristics. • Our examination of Detroit’s Mapleridge neighborhood challenges singular narratives of generic recuperation. • Mapleridge experienced contradictory pressures: introversion (place-based inertia) and …
The troubled legacies of gold mining in South Africa
The Contested Urbanism of Abandonment
In post‐industrial cities in decline, what happens to leftover spaces after abandonment? This question lies at the root of trying to make sense of entrenched distress in neighborhoods in deindustrializing Detroit, a city struggling for more than five decades with disinvestment, job losses, population shrinkage, a collapsed housing market, abandoned properties and dysfunctional public services. Located on the west side of Detroit, Brightmoor and D…
Delivery as Dispossession
Jacob Johanssen, Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture
A review
Theorising the messiness of global urbanism
The aim of this Viewpoint, along with the response from Gavin Shatkin, is to foster debate and dialogue regarding how we theoretically understand the trajectories of global urbanism at present. Conventional approaches to understanding of urban transformation on a global scale have failed to keep pace with the complex forces that have reshaped the rhythms and patterns of urban transformation on a global scale in the early decades of the twenty-fir…
The City in Fragments
Panic City
In post-apartheid Johannesburg, crime and the fear it engenders has triggered a decisive turn toward securitization in which residents of suburban residential neighborhoods have hired the services of private security companies to provide protection
AidanMosselson2019
Peer Reviewed
'White Gold' or 'White Blood'?
The expansion of rubber production in colonial Indochina after 1910 can be understood through the changing patterns in the capitalist world economy. However, the plantation system which evolved in colonial Indochina, including the methods of labour procurement, the closed compounds, the rigorous work regime and harsh disciplining of labourers, the forms of payment as compensation for expenditure of labour, and the strategies designed to speed-up …
Taming the Disorderly City
The Urbanism of Exception
This book challenges the conventional (modernist-inspired) understanding of urbanization as a universal process tied to the ideal-typical model of the modern metropolis with its origins in the grand Western experience of city-building. At the start of the twenty-first century, the familiar idea of the 'city' - or 'urbanism' as we know it - has experienced such profound mutations in both structure and form that the customary epistemological catego…
Sentimentalizing Racial Reconciliation in the “New South Africa”
In an age when the obsessive fixations on virtual reality scenarios and digital simulations of historical events have blurred the boundaries between truth and fiction, collective memory—and the authenticity it purports to maintain—come under threat of irrelevance if not outright extinction. As a distinctive kind of storytelling, filmmaking can be a powerful tool for promoting the collective remembrance of the past. Yet film is a notoriously slipp…
Jacques Lacan
Building from Scratch
By the start of the twenty-first century, the once dominant historical downtown core of Johannesburg had lost its privileged status as the center of business and commercial activities, the metropolitan landscape having been restructured into an assemblage of sprawling, rival edge cities. Real estate developers have recently unveiled ambitious plans to build two completely new cities from scratch: Waterfall City and Lanseria Airport City (formerly…
Waterfall City (Johannesburg)
Located halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria, the mixed-use megadevelopment called Waterfall City is a master-planned, holistically designed, urban enclave built entirely from scratch on 2200 ha of vacant land. This expansive city-building project at Waterfall City combines a hypermodernist stress on 'smart' growth, cutting-edge technologies, and state-of-the-art infrastructure with the New Urbanist focus on mixed-use facilities, a human-sca…
Glorified Fantasies and Masterpieces of Deception on Importing Las Vegas into the 'New South Africa
With the end of apartheid, Johannesburg and other South African cities are now part of a new global race to become 'world-class' tourist and business centers. At the center of this development is the importation of Vegas-style spectacle by local entrepreneurs, firms and other city boosters who create fantasyscapes such as the Emperor's Palace and GrandWest. Financed and run by South African impresarios - whose luxurious empires transcend the cont…
Policing in Johannesburg after apartheid
This paper traces the genealogy of the “double paradigm shift” that transformed policing in Johannesburg after apartheid: from public to private and from reactive to proactive. The emergence of a market for residential security services led to the growth of a private security industry and a reconfiguration of urban governance. Responding to a growing demand for “proactive” security services, private security companies have recently begun innovati…
Cape Town beyond Apartheid
Just as wealthy Victorians in the late nineteenth century extolled the beauty of nature, the cosmopolitan elite in the twenty-first century has discovered the wonders of the city. Tourists flock to
Commemorating and Forgetting
The end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy brought to the surface a host of tensions that were long suppressed under white minority rule. Yet as the ‘new nation’ struggled to establish a firm footing, the lingering ghosts of the past continued to haunt the present. The primary aim of this book is to explore how collective memory works, that is, how the historical past is made to matter in the ‘new South Africa’. A central …
Fire and Ice
Johannesburg is a divided city where propertied middle-class residents and the urban poor live in existentially separate worlds. If the steady accretion of luxury entertainment sites, enclosed shopping malls and gated residential communities in the northern suburbs has come to symbolize the entry of middle-class urbanites into the culture of aspirant 'world class' cities, then the proliferation of overcrowded, resource-starved informal settlement…
CHAPTER 4 The City in Fragments
Evil Paradises
Cinema and the edgy city
Oliver Schmitz's Hijack Stories (2000) is a story of cross‐over cultures and mixed genres set in Johannesburg. In this blurring of boundaries, he presents us an interplay between the dangerous city of both fact and fiction. Schmitz's cinematic depiction of the city, weaves in and out, as well as to and from yuppie neighbourhoods and Soweto. Thus, we see how post‐apartheid Johannesburg is a place of hybrid identities not only in the different spac…
Ordinary cities
Waterfall City (Johannesburg)
Located halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria, the mixed-use megadevelopment called Waterfall City is a master-planned, holistically designed, urban enclave built entirely from scratch on 2200 ha of vacant land. This expansive city-building project at Waterfall City combines a hypermodernist stress on 'smart' growth, cutting-edge technologies, and state-of-the-art infrastructure with the New Urbanist focus on mixed-use facilities, a human-sca…
Building from Scratch
By the start of the twenty-first century, the once dominant historical downtown core of Johannesburg had lost its privileged status as the center of business and commercial activities, the metropolitan landscape having been restructured into an assemblage of sprawling, rival edge cities. Real estate developers have recently unveiled ambitious plans to build two completely new cities from scratch: Waterfall City and Lanseria Airport City (formerly…
Fire and Ice
Johannesburg is a divided city where propertied middle-class residents and the urban poor live in existentially separate worlds. If the steady accretion of luxury entertainment sites, enclosed shopping malls and gated residential communities in the northern suburbs has come to symbolize the entry of middle-class urbanites into the culture of aspirant 'world class' cities, then the proliferation of overcrowded, resource-starved informal settlement…
White gold' or 'white blood
The expansion of rubber production in colonial Indochina after 1910 can be understood through the changing patterns in the capitalist world economy. However, the plantation system which evolved in colonial Indochina, including the methods of labour procurement, the closed compounds, the rigorous work regime and harsh disciplining of labourers, the forms of payment as compensation for expenditure of labour, and the strategies designed to speed-up …
Alien Strangers in our Midst
Martin J. Murray, Alien Strangers in Our Midst: The Dreaded Foreign Invasion and "Fortress South Africa", Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 37, No. 2/3 (2003), pp. 440-466
The Formalization of Informal/Precarious Labor in Contemporary Argentina
In this article we argue that the Argentinian state is legalizing or formalizing informal/precarious labor. In the actual context of employment crisis in Argentina, the state intervenes in the labor market through a legislation that promotes low wages and unstable and unprotected work. Paradoxically, these precarious conditions are associated with informal labor, where the established theory does not recognize the power of regulation of the state…
Radical Sociologists and the Movement
The spatial dynamics of postmodern urbanism
Blackbirding' at 'Crooks' corner
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Africans in search of work were attracted to the wage‐paying employment opportunities on the Witwatersrand. These work‐seekers travelled great distances on foot, battling hunger, disease, and the harsh environment. For those Africans wishing to enter the Transvaal without benefit of official permission, the border presented little obstacle. These clandestine migrants easily bypassed police posts, but…
The Natives are always stealing’
During the formative years of capitalist agriculture, white farmers in the Orange Free State relied on both legal and extra-legal means to create a docile labour force of African workers. Coercive laws were a necessary component in the overall process of fashioning a rural working class out of quasi-independent squatter communities. Yet, no matter how repressive, the legal system alone was not sufficient to ensure work-discipline and docility on …
The Triumph of Marxist Approaches in South African Social and Labour History
Marxism has evolved as the dominant intellectual perspective in South Africa, replacing South African liberalism, because liberalism has failed to acknowledge the connection between capitalism and apartheid. But the emergent Marxist paradigm was divided into two distinct poles: the "structuralists" and the "social historians." The tension between these two alternative perspectives has pervaded a number of sub-fields, including studies of rural re…
Policing in Johannesburg after apartheid
This paper traces the genealogy of the “double paradigm shift” that transformed policing in Johannesburg after apartheid: from public to private and from reactive to proactive. The emergence of a market for residential security services led to the growth of a private security industry and a reconfiguration of urban governance. Responding to a growing demand for “proactive” security services, private security companies have recently begun innovati…
The origins of agrarian capitalism in South Africa
The ‘social history’ perspective is the dominant intellectual paradigm guiding historical research in the field of agrarian studies. By making use of previously untapped primary source materials and by narrowing the focus of historical investigation, social historians have made great strides in pioneering whole new arenas of scholarly research. Yet the ‘social history’ paradigm does not rest on solid epistemological and conceptual footing. Its de…
Glorified Fantasies and Masterpieces of Deception on Importing Las Vegas into the 'New South Africa
With the end of apartheid, Johannesburg and other South African cities are now part of a new global race to become 'world-class' tourist and business centers. At the center of this development is the importation of Vegas-style spectacle by local entrepreneurs, firms and other city boosters who create fantasyscapes such as the Emperor's Palace and GrandWest. Financed and run by South African impresarios - whose luxurious empires transcend the cont…
The 'Agrarian Question,' Class Struggle and the Capitalist'State in the United States and South Africa
Theorising the messiness of global urbanism
The aim of this Viewpoint, along with the response from Gavin Shatkin, is to foster debate and dialogue regarding how we theoretically understand the trajectories of global urbanism at present. Conventional approaches to understanding of urban transformation on a global scale have failed to keep pace with the complex forces that have reshaped the rhythms and patterns of urban transformation on a global scale in the early decades of the twenty-fir…
Cinema and the edgy city
Oliver Schmitz's Hijack Stories (2000) is a story of cross‐over cultures and mixed genres set in Johannesburg. In this blurring of boundaries, he presents us an interplay between the dangerous city of both fact and fiction. Schmitz's cinematic depiction of the city, weaves in and out, as well as to and from yuppie neighbourhoods and Soweto. Thus, we see how post‐apartheid Johannesburg is a place of hybrid identities not only in the different spac…
Configuring the Trajectory of African Political History
Moralising the agrarian question
Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919-1936
The Popular Upsurge in South Africa, 1984-1986
This paper examines the popular revolt in South Africa between 1984 and 1986. We survey the course of this revolt in different regions of South Africa. Special attention is given to the emergence during this period of a more powerful independent black trade union movement. We also consider the nature of the white minority regime and its response to the popular upsurge. Finally, we note the emergence of new forms of popular resistance that point t…
Burning the wheat stacks
On a single night in late 1924 unknown arsonists burned freshly harvested wheat stacks on the farms of a number of white settlers in the Pokwani area of the northern Middelburg district. This wave of incendiarism that swept this recently settled frontier area of the northeastern Transvaal symbolized in microcosm the ongoing class struggle between white farmers and their farm labourers. Farmers were determined to clear their lands of unwanted Afri…
The Post-Colonial State
Measuring Power, Public Opinion and Policy
Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism
The Articulation of Modes of Production
Minangkabau Social Formations
The Rural Sociology of the Advanced Societies
The 'Agrarian Question,' Class Struggle and the Capitalist'State in the United States and South Africa
Books/Livres
Volkskapitalisme
History in Black and White
South Africa
Burning the wheat stacks
On a single night in late 1924 unknown arsonists burned freshly harvested wheat stacks on the farms of a number of white settlers in the Pokwani area of the northern Middelburg district. This wave of incendiarism that swept this recently settled frontier area of the northeastern Transvaal symbolized in microcosm the ongoing class struggle between white farmers and their farm labourers. Farmers were determined to clear their lands of unwanted Afri…
The Sixties in Retrospect
The Triumph of Marxist Approaches in South African Social and Labour History
Marxism has evolved as the dominant intellectual perspective in South Africa, replacing South African liberalism, because liberalism has failed to acknowledge the connection between capitalism and apartheid. But the emergent Marxist paradigm was divided into two distinct poles: the "structuralists" and the "social historians." The tension between these two alternative perspectives has pervaded a number of sub-fields, including studies of rural re…
The Natives are always stealing’
During the formative years of capitalist agriculture, white farmers in the Orange Free State relied on both legal and extra-legal means to create a docile labour force of African workers. Coercive laws were a necessary component in the overall process of fashioning a rural working class out of quasi-independent squatter communities. Yet, no matter how repressive, the legal system alone was not sufficient to ensure work-discipline and docility on …
The origins of agrarian capitalism in South Africa
The ‘social history’ perspective is the dominant intellectual paradigm guiding historical research in the field of agrarian studies. By making use of previously untapped primary source materials and by narrowing the focus of historical investigation, social historians have made great strides in pioneering whole new arenas of scholarly research. Yet the ‘social history’ paradigm does not rest on solid epistemological and conceptual footing. Its de…
The Popular Upsurge in South Africa, 1984-1986
This paper examines the popular revolt in South Africa between 1984 and 1986. We survey the course of this revolt in different regions of South Africa. Special attention is given to the emergence during this period of a more powerful independent black trade union movement. We also consider the nature of the white minority regime and its response to the popular upsurge. Finally, we note the emergence of new forms of popular resistance that point t…
Books reviewed
James Ferguson, The Anti‐Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1990), xvi + 320pp, £32.50/ $49.50 Peter Carstens, Gerald Klinghardt and Martin West (eds) Trails in the Thirstland: the Anthropological Diaries of Winifred Hoernli (Communications, No 14/1987, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town) pp vii + 198, £3.00 Phyllis Johnson and David Martin, …
Capitalist Development and Crisis Theory
Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919-1936
Christian-Nationalism and the Rise of the Afrikaner Broederbond in South Africa, 1910-1948
The Struggle for Socialism in Vietnam
Confronting the dilemmas of socialist development
Since 1975, following the U.S. military withdrawal and political disengagement from Indochina, there has been a slow but steady growth in scholarly literature devoted to the U.S./Indochina War and the problems of postwar reconstruction. While it is difficult to classify these studies unambiguously, it is perhaps useful to group them into two broad categories. On the one hand, one group of authors address questions such as “What went wrong?” “Why …
Radical Sociologists and the Movement
White gold' or 'white blood
The expansion of rubber production in colonial Indochina after 1910 can be understood through the changing patterns in the capitalist world economy. However, the plantation system which evolved in colonial Indochina, including the methods of labour procurement, the closed compounds, the rigorous work regime and harsh disciplining of labourers, the forms of payment as compensation for expenditure of labour, and the strategies designed to speed-up …
Political science (47 works) · Sociology (41 works) · History (30 works) · Law (29 works) · South African History and Culture (22 works) · Geography (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Law (16 works) · Art (15 works) · Archaeology (14 works)