Race, violence and neoliberalism: crime fiction in the era of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter

Abstract

This paper uses recent instances of police killings of African-American men, and of the retaliatory violence that has flared up in cities across the US (e.g. Ferguson, Baltimore, Baton Rouge), and of the emergence of Black Lives Matters since 2012, as a starting point to think about how well crime fiction can help us to make sense of the larger problem of political violence in the contemporary US. Crime fiction is well-placed to offer insight into the problem of race, drugs, poverty and policing but by paying close attention to The Wire, Walter Mosley's Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned and Chester Himes's Plan B, I argue that the issue of depicting police violence in a form where the law must also be validated and of accommodating the destructive potentiality of black political violence in a form narratively orientated towards rational explanation and resolution requires very careful consideration. What is different about our contemporary moment is not simply that young black men are being killed by the police or that violent retaliation inevitably follows but rather that these circumstances are also tied to the precariousness experienced by poor black people under neoliberalism. The issue at stake is how exemplary crime fictions make sense of, and critically interrogate, the relationship between race, violence and neoliberalism.

‘Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others’: The Hierarchy of Citizenship in Austria

“…This article is broadly based on the premise that all 'animals' may or may not be equal in principle, but their perceived physical differences are critical sources of social advantage and disadvantage in all 'animal kingdoms'. This strategy resonates with the view that multiple manifestations of (dis)advantages in many parts of the world have connections with racial forces (Alexander 2012;Gilroy 1987;Forsyth et al 2013;Hazard 2011;Hipp and Kubrin 2017;Pepper 2017;Tynes et al 2016). As many social scientists have noted, 'race' is a social construct, and much of 'reality' is socially constructed (e.g., Burt et al 2012;Fogiel-Bijaoui 2016;Ghafournia and Easteal 2018;Graber 2019;Hazard 2011;Hipp and Kubrin 2017;Tynes et al 2016;UNESCO 1969).…”

“…By implication, Austrian citizens from immigrant-background require visas to visit their country of origin or that of their parents. Similar to Anglophone Western nations (Burt et al 2012;Ghafournia and Easteal 2018;Graber 2019;Hipp and Kubrin 2017;Pepper 2017;Polanco 2015), and non-Anglophone Western nations such as Italy (Colombo et al 2009;Policek et al 2019), Germany (Kranz 2017;Moffitt et al 2018), 'immigrant-citizens' have inherited the negativisation bestowed historically upon those who are culturally 'Other' in Austria (Zaslove 2004;Refaie 2001;Horvath 2014;Cochrane and Nevitte 2014). As a consequence, there is widespread vilification of immigrants in the media and in political discourse that is well documented (Hipfl and Gronold 2011;Messinger 2013;Rheindorf and Ruth 2019).…”

“…As many social scientists have noted, 'race' is a social construct, and much of 'reality' is socially constructed (e.g., Burt et al 2012;Fogiel-Bijaoui 2016;Ghafournia and Easteal 2018;Graber 2019;Hazard 2011;Hipp and Kubrin 2017;Tynes et al 2016;UNESCO 1969). While there is a general consensus that racial groups do not exist (e.g., Banton 1998), it is, however, indisputable that 'race' has enduring real-life consequences (Agozino 2018;Burt et al 2012;Graber 2019;Pepper 2017;Tynes et al 2016). It is also undeniable that its persistence as a stratifying feature of societies is to some degree universalisable (Alexander 2012;Wolfe 2017;Tynes et al 2016;UNESCO 1969).…”