Central London under siege

Diaspora, 'race' and the right to the (global) city

Bibliographic Data

ID3564537
AuthorsDavid Garbin (University of Kent, corresponding author), Gareth Millington (0000-0003-3337-1513, University of York)
Year2018
Volume66
Issue1
Pages138-154
Publication date2018-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0038026117703251
OpenAlexW2606997977
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited40

Drawing upon an ethnography of recent Congolese diasporic protests in central London, this article pays attention to the traversal histories of 'race' and the postcolonial dynamics that precede the emergence of a contemporary diasporic 'right to the city' movement. The authors critically engage with Henri Lefebvre's 'right to the city' as a way of explaining how the urban is not only the site but also, increasingly, a stake in urban protests. In doing so the authors relocate urban centrality - its meaning, symbolic power and heuristic status in protests - in a context where activists' claims are not restricted to one city or, simply, the political present. Rather, protestors talk about making geopolitical connections between local and global scales and contemporary and historical injustices. Drawing upon Simone's notion of 'black urbanism', the authors claim to enrich Lefebvre's original formulation by unpacking the complex performative dimensions of protest as they intersect with race and, more specifically, blackness and postcolonialism. It is concluded that activists' experience is fundamentally ambivalent; they are at once enchanted and disenchanted with protest in central London

Aesthetics · Context (archaeology) · Diaspora · Global city · Media studies · Performative utterance · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Right to the city · Sociology · Transnationalism · Urbanism · Architecture · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Migration, Refugees, and Integration