Affect and the dialectics of uncertainty: Governing a Paraguayan frontier town

Abstract

This article discusses the affective politics enabling urban development in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, a young frontier boomtown where the volume of the extralegal transborder trade once exceeded the GDP of the entire nation. Against stereotypes of the city as lawless, I demonstrate how governing practices work through affect and emotion. I argue that local strategies of governing have temporal and spatial dimensions that produce an affective field of uncertainty for hawkers and street vendors. Paradoxically, the legal and spatial ambiguities that produce uncertainty as a disciplining structure of feeling are also the grounds from which vendors make claims to urban space. Yet vendors develop their own registers of need and entitlement through a politics of affective interconnection. This paper contributes to debates on the government of precarity and to geographical studies on emotion and affect by exploring how this dialectics of uncertainty enables exclusionary urban development.

Uncertainty and the Governance of Street Vending: A Critical Comparison Across the North/South Divide

“…Street vending is a placed urban‐economic practice. In Latin America, where public space is a key site of work, street vendors are managed through intense negotiability over the use of urban space (Tucker, ), electorally useful forbearance (Holland, ), and the privatization of public space (Crossa, ). In US cities too, contradictory regulations structure conflict over the publicness of sidewalks (Loukaitou‐Sideris and Ehrenfeucht, ) and the ways street vendors are organized and governed in public space (Devlin, ).…”

Being surprised and surprising ourselves: A geography of personal and social change

“…A bibliographic search for geographical scholarship that contains at least one of the words ‘surprise’, ‘surprised’, ‘surprising’ in their title returns only a handful of papers (Deutsche, 1995; Lee, 1976; Mackenzie, 2007; Mills, 2013), none of which is dedicated to the detailed investigation of the phenomenon of surprise as such. The indirect, implicit exploration of ‘surprise’, however, has been a long-standing endeavor in phenomenology, social theory, and human geography, under the guise of related terms such as ‘encounter’ (Adams, 2017; Kallio, 2017; for a review, see Wilson, 2017), ‘event’ (Dilkes-Frayne and Duff, 2017; for a review, see Shaw, 2012), ‘unpredictability and uncertainty’ (Simandan, 2010a, 2019a; Tucker, 2017; for a review, see Fusco et al, 2017), ‘estrangement’ and the ‘extraordinary’ (Ash and Simpson, 2016; Larsen and Johnson, 2012; McCormack, 2017), as well as ‘risk’ (Neisser and Runkel, 2017), ‘hazard’ (Nobert and Pelling, 2017), and ‘disaster’ (Hu, 2018).…”

The Bottlenecks of Free Trade: Paraguay's Mau Cars and Contraband Markets in the Triple Frontier

“…The ambiguity of what exactly has been “legalized” (Jusionyte :244) by the trade deal is tactically deployed by a variety of actors. In Paraguay, the powerful Zacarías family (city mayors from 2001 to 2018) uses discourses of public “disorder” and contraband to dispossess informal vendors in the city center (Tucker ). In both Argentina and Brazil, public officials strategically deploy moral panics about Paraguayan contraband to accomplish a variety of local political goals (Rabbosi 2012), ranging from policing racialized consumption practices in Brazilian markets (e.g., Dent , ) to justifying the militarization of the border and crackdowns on petty smugglers (Aguiar :15–18).…”

“…See, for example, Jennifer Tucker's (, ) research on street vendors in the urban core. For an example of the pervasive discourse linking insecurity to informality, see, for example (Sausi and Oddone :189–200).…”