Revolutionary legality and the Burkinabè insurrection

ABSTRACTCoup leaders often purport to restore constitutional order. During Burkina Faso's 2014 ‘insurrection', however, Blaise Compaoré's opponents advanced detailed (international) legal arguments that significantly constrained their subsequent conduct. Theirs was to be a legal revolution. This article situates this stance within Burkina Faso's distinctive history of urban protest, whilst emphasising under-analysed international sources for the insurrection. ‘Insurgent’ lawyers, it argues, used international instruments to reinvigorate longstanding activist attempts to reconcile constitutional rights with a language of popular justice promoted by the revolutionary regime of Thomas Sankara (1983–7). After the insurrection, however, their emphasis on legality was used by Compaoré's supporters to expose the transitional authorities’ double-standards. Meanwhile, insurgent lawyers working for the transition had to work hard to reconcile (international) legal justifications for the insurrection with the expedient politics needed to defend the new dispensation.

Concealing the urban dominant: The socio-spatial dialectic and urban protest in Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s La saga/fuga de J.B.

In the post-Fordist world, cities emerged as increasingly contested terrains upon which capital and ordinary citizens struggled to control the urban process. Henri Lefebvre discerned this contestatory dynamic early on and in response developed the ‘urban’, a concept that cleaves a critical pathway towards a host of material, cultural and ideological processes that attach to capitalist modernity. Around the same time, the Spanish novelist Gonzalo Torrente Ballester was working to sketch the contours of his magnus opus La saga/fuga de J.B. Torrente would eventually come to recognize the roles that the urban process and the socio-spatial dialectic play in mediating contemporary urban life. The present article thus carries out first a close reading of Torrente’s personal journals to detail the ascendency of the ‘urban dominant’ as a central structuring component of his fictional writings. Thereafter, the critical analysis of La saga/fuga de J.B. will reveal that the ‘urban dominant’ stands concealed at the heart of this notoriously complicated novel. This urban cultural studies reading of La saga/fuga de J.B. will argue that, like Lefebvre, Torrente denounces capital’s static conception of space at the same time that he draws upon historical movements of urban protest for textual inspiration. And what will eventually emerge is that, beyond a master of the metafictional novel, Torrente was also an astute observer of everyday life in the urban context.

People, protest and place: Advancing research on the emplacement of LGBTQ+ urban activisms

There is a vibrant literature on LGBTQ+ urban geographies, as well as established traditions in sociology and political science on collective action, but research infrequently brings these interdisciplinary fields of sexualities, social movements and urban studies together to explore the emplacement of LGBTQ+ urban activisms. In this article, I use contributions from this special issue of Urban Studies to propose two pathways, conceptualised as analytic shifts, that can advance the field: (1) scalar shifts (modulating from a national and structural focus of mobilisation to local, grounded and quotidian acts and interactions between activists); and (2) spatial shifts (using conventional and queer methods to study spatial plurality and the commensurability of places where people protest). Together, these proposals form an integrative framework for the study of LGBTQ+ urban protest and placemaking.

Late Antiquity: The Age of Crowds?*

The objective of this article is to place the study of urban protest and violence in the period from about 300 to about 600 CE in a broader perspective and to subject the investigation of plebeian activism to the basic precepts of analysis of collective action developed by social scientists and historians studying other periods. Its main argument is that, contrary to wide held assumptions in the historiography, what characterized Late Antiquity was not simply the exacerbation of violence or its tighter control, but the crisis of aristocratic hegemony and the expansion of opportunities for popular intervention in city life. What has been perceived as the product fanaticism, irrationality and deprivation of the masses, of the manipulation of bishops and aristocrats or of the failure of the mechanisms of coercion was actually the result of a dramatic social change that, on the one hand, involved a new dynamic of power and, on the other, a shift in the way the people understood their role and power in local communities.

‘We Cover New York’: Protest, Neighborhood, and Street Photography in the (Workers Film and) Photo League

This article considers photographs of New York by two American radical groups, the revolutionary Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL) (1931–1936) and the ensuing Photo League (PL) (1936–1951), a less explicitly political concern, in relation to the adjacent historiographical contexts of street photography and documentary. I contest a historiographical tendency to invoke street photography as a recuperative model from the political basis of the groups, because such accounts tend to reduce WFPL’s work to ideologically motivated propaganda and obscure continuities between the two leagues. Using extensive primary sources, in particular the PL’s magazine Photo Notes, I propose that greater commonalities exist than the literature suggests. I argue that WFPL photographs are a specific form of street photography that engages with urban protest, and accordingly I examine the formal attributes of photographs by its principle photographer Leo Seltzer. Conversely, the PL’s ‘document’ projects, which examined areas such as Chelsea, the Lower East Side, and Harlem in depth, involved collaboration with community organizations that resulted in a form of neighborhood protest. I conclude that a museological framing of ‘street photography’ as the work of an individual artist does not satisfactorily encompass the radicalism of the PL’s complex documents about city neighborhoods.

Domestic Workers and Foreign Occupation: Haitian Servants, US Marines, and Conflicts over Labor and Empire in Haiti, 1915–1934

During the US military occupation of Haiti, domestic workers performed the crucial labor that allowed Marine households, the city of Port-au-Prince, and the entire country to function. In this sense, they represented a human infrastructure for the entire occupation. Their experiences show that the debates over labor, race, and sovereignty that defined the high politics of the occupation actually reached into private spaces where face-to-face interactions between occupier and occupied occurred. Domestic work, like other types of labor in the occupation, ran the gamut from highly coerced forms of unpaid child labor and convict work to various configurations of wage labor. Domestic sites influenced mutual processes of race-making, including the US exoticist obsession with Haitian Vodou. Servants’ conflicts with their Marine employers included—but ultimately went beyond—daily struggles over labor. Their proximity to marines influenced domestics’ participation in acts of anti-imperial activism, such as the Caco rebellion, and explains why servants were invoked by radical journalists and cultural nationalist writers who opposed US rule. Domestics’ activities also highlight under-explored areas of Haitian activism, such as their use of formal state institutions to seek redress and their participation in emerging forms of urban protest that included other members of the urban working class. Although novel and relatively small during the occupation, such urban protests have become a staple of Haitian politics in the present day.