What an honor to be included in this book review forum! Sara Safransky’s The City After Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit is a gift and an inspiration. Check out my review The legacy of Black Power, the future of abolition, and the urban land question in The City after Property.
Find a couple excerpts from my review below!
From the intro:
An ethos of Black Power inspires the community organizers active in the 2010s whose voices are centered in The City after Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit. Rooted in land struggles and racial upheavals dating to the late 1960s and early 1970s, this ethos is grounded in concrete practices of collectivity, self-determination, and defense of Black city space. It is further grounded in solidarity between the Black Power movement in the U.S. and global movements for decolonization. It is an ethos that is both practical and visionary. As such, it deserves careful attention in the contemporary movement for the abolition of policing and incarceration in the U.S. as it situates itself within global decolonial movements.
In this review, I highlight threads in The City after Property that contextualize the history and legacy of the Black Power movement through community organizing in the 2010s in Detroit. I bring these threads in conversation with the political analyses of early Black Power theorists including James and Grace Lee Boggs, C.L.R. James, Eldridge Cleaver, and Kwame Ture, who were informed by the racial geography of Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I conclude by considering Safransky’s contributions in The City after Property in dialogue with these earlier theorists to discuss the place of property and land in the future of a transnational movement for abolition.
And from the conclusion:
Despite this turn, the radical, decolonial torch of Black Power has never been laid to rest. Future community engaged scholarship could learn from contemporary organizers who carry this torch in building solidarity between Black, indigenous, and immigrant struggles. The alignment of Black activism with the movement for a free Palestine is a key example. Since the Black Power era, solidarity between Black and Palestinian struggles has been continuously articulated as an inseparable fight against imperialism, militarized policing, and land expropriation. Such revolutionary transnationalism goes beyond coalition building, instead representing these struggles as internally related and inseparable.
In this contemporary organizing, cities as geographically distant as Detroit and Al-Khalil converge as a shared terrain of struggle. Both the drawn-out bureaucratic evictions in Detroit and the direct seizures of Palestinian homes by Israeli settlers in Al-Khalil can only occur when backed by the threat of militarized violence. This militarized violence ensures that access to the benefits of property rights is racialized, selective, and exclusive. As such, just as the resistance from the U.S. to Palestine faces the same weapons and techniques of militarized policing, it also shares an aspiration for self-determination on a land freed from occupation and exclusionary property regimes.
Consistent with the imperatives of contemporary movements for abolition and decolonization, the practices of direct action portrayed in The City after Property undermine property regimes by claiming autonomy and collectivity in contested and fugitive places in Detroit. Such claims to the city are not based on the legal property rights that Black people have perpetually been denied, but in unsanctioned assertions of stewardship, collectivity, survival, and defense. Through these insurgent relationships to land, the city after property is made material.
For more about this book and the larger conversation, you can find Julie Ren’s editor’s introduction of the book forum The City after Property: a conversation on critical geographies of race and property, and you can find Sara Safransky’s response On writing The City after Property. And, check out the full issue of Urban Geography for all of the other contributions to the forum.
Also, check out Julie Ren’s article Book review forums: reviving a platform.