Unsettled Area: Popular Territories of Blackness

Abstract

Popular territories is an increasingly favored designation of urban spaces designed and developed by an amalgam of poor, working, and lower-middle classes reflecting an intersection of home-grown practices and political sensibilities. While such territories appear increasingly riven by authoritarian populisms, religious conservatism and a systemic undermining of the economic relations that once supported intensive collaboration, they remain a locus through which new institutional arrangements are prefigured. From Brazil to Indonesia to Nigeria, they facilitate the gestation of new economic and political solidarities; where forms of affiliation and cooperation take shape, where statuses, identities, and functions are aligned in ways that do not necessarily line up with a conventional sense of neighborhoods or communities. This article examines the ways in which particular conceptions of Blackness might be mobilized to highlight how the entanglements of perspective, circulatory trajectories, and ways of life shape such territories. Blackness has long been appropriated as a mechanism of decanting, de-selection, and extraction, deployed to particularize specific territories and populations as objects of disposal, surplus or exoticization. The singularities of popular territories thus emanate from a constant tension between the generativity of their own self-produced histories and their enforced vulnerabilities to expropriations beyond their control. Blackness operates as a methodological lens suited to apprehend such “ontologies” in their doubleness.