For the Race, Place & Critical Theory Reading Group, convened by Dallas Rogers, my role was to act as a reader of the final main chapter and coda of Abdoumaliq Simone’s The Surrounds: Urban Life within and Beyond Capture. Here is my write up of that reading.
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So here we are. We are surrounded.
In the Coda to Abdoumaliq Simone’s book The Surrounds comes the definition of the surrounds as ‘a space of exception’, or as ‘a shape-shifting matrix of spaces, times, and practices that exist right now within the turbulent processes of contemporary urbanisation’. Earlier in the text, instead of envisioning urbanism as the unfolding of definitive forces of value capture, asset creation, and resource extraction, he defines the surrounds as ‘a liminal interstice in between multiple, diverging trajectories of urbanisation that are always in the process of being sutured, more or less’, but always in an unsettled relation.
What are the major themes in the final main chapter of the book and how has “doing time” with this text been?
Reading the book on its own terms, two connective tissues assemble the infrastructure of the surrounds in Chapter 3. These are 1) social reproduction; and 2) the refusal of redemption. My treatment deals generatively with the first theme of social reproduction and then critically with the second theme of the refusal of redemption. Drawing from Edward Said’s notion of “travelling theory”, we can perhaps all generatively travel, I think, with the focus on social reproduction and the surrounds as a plural stitching together of the mutual implications of space. Critically, however, what lurks within the interstices of Simone’s own refusal of redemption and his ‘indifference to time itself’? What is left unspoken within this refusal of redemption and the inescapable surroundedness of the surrounds?
On the built environment of the surrounds, we finally come home—however temporarily—to those spaces and places that provide domestic functions: the role of social reproduction therefore comes to the fore within wider surrounds of residing, storing, fabricating, processing, extracting, and speculating as itineraries of movement and circulation. Perhaps the household is itself a form of dehiscence? Meaning a partially separated edge, an improperly healed wound, that is attempting to offer repair against the damage done by time? “What of the household”, as Simone asks, “can be sustained as generative ferment that at least wards off premature closure, and what is simply a carceral experience?”
Feminist voices get to provide an intellectual backstop to this treatment of the mobilisations across reproductive space. For example, there is this:
Entering the public realm of protest requires leaving to some extent the private realm of reproductive or domestic labour. Who will now pick up the kids after school, get dinner on the table, oversee homework, and help family manage grief? Surrogate maternals, many times younger or older women, such that teenage daughters or grandmothers might be utilised to fill the void more than their masculine counterparts.
Yet the void here is in Simone’s bibliography. The citation to James (2018), after all, is absent in [...]
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