Keisha-Khan Perry’s Black Women Against the Land Grab (2013), brought to mind Rita Segato’s “Territory, Sovereignty, and Crimes of the Second State: The Writing on the Body of Murdered Women” (2010). In this essay Segato masterfully articulates the socio-economic complexities of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, while simultaneously performing an in-depth cultural reading of the city’s pervasive feminicides. This balancing act sheds light on the corners where coloniality, neoliberalism, global trade, patriarchy, and the urbanity of Ciudad Juarez intersect. As national frontiers are shaped and reproduced by hierarchical socio-economic relations—as cities are formed by these very same forces, so are bodies. Perry writes, “Invisibility is the direct result of extreme visibility—a dual construction formalized by the legal system and the local bureaucracy that determines what the city is, what the city should be like, while hiding the things, places, and people that do not belong in the new social order” (36). Hubs of neoliberal order, of capital accumulation—namely urban spaces like Salvador, Brazil and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico—are shaped by market needs, obliterating some lives in order to profit off of others. These profitable elements of the city, like Salvador’s cultural “Blackness,” are lifted into visibility, into legibility granting them some sort of economic legitimacy.
The question of legitimacy is an interesting one. Perry notes that Salvador’s community mobilizations around cultural needs gain more legitimacy than mobilizations organized around material needs (25). This sheds light on the ways in which certain communities are made visible, and those legible aspects are the terms on which legitimacy is founded. How do the “hyper-visible” break this discursive framework of selective visibility/invisibility? Of obliteration? What are the “lines of flight?”
Saskia Sassen, in analyzing the post-1989 economic order, writes that “The power of finance is its capability to invent instruments and to invent ways of subjecting more and more sectors of an economy to those instruments” (73). The adaptability of post-1989 capitalism is its strength. It consistently finds new markets, new “profitable terrains” (Harvey, 53), to re-invent itself. But as he notes earlier in the text, “Violence is required to build the new urban world on the wreckage of the old” (33). The violence of capitalist reinvention, like the feminicides of Ciudad Juarez, acts upon certain bodies, racialized, gendered bodies. Precarity, like capitalism, finds new terrains, new spaces to act out. Precarity follows the rhythm of the city, it breathes and moves with every bulldozer and every condominium, but it also often acts on the same people. The city gives precarity shape–– race, class and gender give it direction.
Sources:
Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review, 53, September-October 2008.
Perry, Keisha-Khan Y. Black Women Against the Land Grab. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Sassen, Saskia. “The Return of Primitive Accumulation.” In The Global 1989: Continuity and Change in World Politics, edited by George Lawson, Chris Ambruster, and Michael Cox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Segato, Rita L. “Territory, Sovereignty, and Crimes of the Second State: The Writing on the Body of Murdered Women”, In Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas, edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
