Category Archives: Power

Production of Territory

Brenner, Neil, and Stuart Elden. 2009. “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space and Territory.” International Political Sociology 3(4): 353-377. I have read this incredibly important article enough times that I hardly need to be writing notes on it. It’s pretty engrained … Continue reading

Posted in Boundaries, Henri Lefebvre, Nation/Nationalism, Political Economy, Power, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

Antonio Gramsci: On Hegemony

In Antonio Gramsci’s first Prison Notebook—he wrote 29 of them—he’s still using hegemony in the sense of a crude political leadership, much in the same way as he used it in his seminal essay “Some Aspects of the Southern Question.” … Continue reading

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Hegemony, Marxism, Power, The State | 2 Comments

Guha: Dominance Without Hegemony?

Guha, Ranajit. 1997. Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Intro & Ch. 1] Intuitively, it’s odd that the Subaltern Studies crowd has drawn so heavily on Gramsci, since he had surprisingly little to … Continue reading

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Critique, Hegemony, Historical-Geographies, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Post-Colonial, Power, The State, Violence | 5 Comments

Suffering for Territory

Moore, Donald. 2005. Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. This is a hard book to summarize because of the intricacy of the argument, its theoretical architectures, and its deep ethnographic empirics—they are … Continue reading

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Governmentality, Historical-Geographies, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Place, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, Violence | 1 Comment

Laclau and Mouffe on Hegemony

Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics. 2nd Edition. London: Verso. The authors situate their book with what they perceive as a crisis of Marxism in the mid 1970’s, and they position … Continue reading

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Hegemony, Marxism, Power, The State | 3 Comments

Hegemony à la Raymond Williams

Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Ch. 6] Williams claims hegemony goes beyond both conceptions of “culture” and “ideology”: for culture, because of “its insistence on relating the ‘whole social process’ to specific distributions of power … Continue reading

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Hollow Land and the Politics of ‘Archupation’

Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. All military occupations are spatial operations and strategies. But the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and government have managed to make space the continuation of war by other means. New … Continue reading

Posted in City, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Maps, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Networks, Place, Power, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 4 Comments

Discipline, Punish & Illegalities

Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. “‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole … Continue reading

Posted in Governmentality, Illegality, Law, Michel Foucault, Power, Spatiality, Violence | 4 Comments

Foucault and Geography

Crampton, Jeremy W. and Stuart Elden, eds. Space, Knowledge, and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. [Selections] The introduction to this collection lays out plainly the importance of spatiality in Foucault’s work. As early as 1967, when the Heteroropias … Continue reading

Posted in City, David Harvey, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Power, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

The Poverty of Theory Debate

Thompson, E.P. 1978. “Poverty of Theory or An Orrery of Errors” Anderson, Perry. 1980. Arguments Within English Marxism. London: Verso. Is there any polemic more biting in its wit, rigor and distaste than E.P. Thompson’s (EP) “Poverty of Theory”? Today, … Continue reading

Posted in Critique, Historical Materialism, Marxism, Political Economy, Power, The State | 2 Comments