The Tumultuous Politics of Scale
Contemporary politics, this book contends, depend upon the turbulent struggles and strategies around scale. Conflicts over scale can be seen as opaque class struggles. Political projects, whether from the ground up or representing corporate or state interests, continually contest the scale at which authority is vested. This volume looks at the way global corporations redefine the scale of power and how working-class and other movements build alliances and cross scales to develop political blocs. What injustices are perpetrated or, more hopefully, redressed in this process? The book, consisting of contributions from anthropologists, geographers, and cultural studies scholars, explores theoretical issues around contested temporal and spatial scales, and around variations in scale from the body to the global.
Part I focuses on bodies in motion, entangled in battles over new boundaries and political coalitions, and the ways in which migrants and refugees are disrupted by intersecting time scales. Part II on the nation-state addresses the shifting responsibilities assigned by law at different historical moments and the impact of global energy trade on national austerity policies. Part III, on rescaling sovereignty, discusses the misleading media discourse on Brexit and reconstructs the class bases of the move to the Right in Eastern Europe that threaten the EU. Part IV on the histories of changing scales of movements revisits historical debates on uneven and combined development, and sets out the transnational labor movements of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic, which prefigure contemporary struggles of labor in a world which is still one of uneven and combined capitalist development. Finally, Part V considers ways in which some social movements are constrained by scale while others reshape parties and traverse nations in their efforts to build class alliances and political blocs.
Donald M. Nonini, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has undertaken research in Malaysia, Australia, and the United States on citizenship in the Chinese diaspora; U.S. local politics; and on the commons. His latest book is Getting by: Class and State Formation among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell University Press, 2015).
Ida Susser, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has published on popular mobilizations, social movements, and the urban commons in the United States, Europe, and Southern Africa. Her books include Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood (Oxford University Press, 2012) and the co-edited volumes, Rethinking America (CRC Press, 2009) and Wounded Cities (Berg, 2003).
The Tumultuous Politics of Scale
Unsettled States, Migrants, Movements in Flux
Edited by Donald M. Nonini and Ida Susser
First published 2020
by Routledge
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The right of Donald M. Nonini and Ida Susser to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nonini, Donald Macon, editor. | Susser, Ida, editor.
Title: The tumultuous politics of scale : unsettled states, migrants, movements in flux / edited by Donald M. Nonini and Ida Susser.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019037052 (print) | LCCN 2019037053 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367186265 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367186241 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429261138 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Power (Social Sciences) Classification: LCC HN49.P6 T86 2020 (print) |
LCC HN49.P6 (ebook) | DDC 303.3dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037052
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037053
ISBN: 978-0-367-18626-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-18624-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-26113-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Newgen Publishing UK
Dedicated to the memories of
Fernando Martnez Heredia (19392017), Cuban revolutionary, leading intellectual, and Director, Juan Marinello Cuban Institute of Cultural Investigation.
Neil Smith (19542012), socialist, friend, and brilliant geographer of the politics of scale.
We missed you both in Havana.
This book is a worthy and interesting contribution to the revival of political-economic anthropology that is to the analysis of ethnographic findings in terms of vastly unequal classes and class struggles. The books central question is what it means for anthropologists to return to political economy in the globalized world of today. Overall, the collection of essays makes the case for a new set of interlocutors for the discipline.
Jane Schneider, City University of New York
Contents
Donald M. Nonini and Ida Susser
PART I
Scales of Domination: Transnational Migration and its Discontents
Sebastian Cobarrubias
Winnie Lem
PART II
Problematizing the Nation and the Nation-State
Ruchi Chaturvedi
Sandy Smith-Nonini
PART III
Rescaling Sovereignty: The Case of the European Union and its Outside Insiders
Don Kalb
John Clarke
PART IV
The Longue Dure
Gavin Smith
August Carbonella
PART V
Social Movements: Transforming the Scales of Conflict
Donald M. Nonini
Sharryn Kasmir
Ida Susser
August Carbonella is Professor of Anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is the editor (with Sharryn Kasmir) of Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor (Berghahn Books, 2014), and editor (with Linda Green and Don Kalb) of Berghahns Dislocations book series.
Ruchi Chaturvedi is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Cape Town. Her research, writing, and teaching revolve around political life in postcolonial contexts with a special focus on democratic competition, mass actions, violence, and criminal justice in India as well as various parts of Africa.
John Clarke is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the Open University, UK and a Recurrent Visiting Professor at the Central European University, Hungary. His work has explored the contested politics at stake in the remaking of welfare, states, and nations, around which he has written many books and articles.
