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theses

This dissertation analyzes life after the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2007-09 in a neighborhood straddling a major city and small township on the East coast of the United States. Research participants included members of the professional middle class, lower income residents partially dependent on state support, small business and retail outlet workers, men working in the street economy, and a group of radical activists. The oft-invoked category of “crisis”—denoting a critical turning point and a moment calling for decisive action—had an entirely different valence when seen from the viewpoint of these research participants. The dissertation especially focused on: how young black men in and around the street economy organize their experience of dispossession and pervasive violence. These men assimilated the economic cataclysm into the narrative of a Devil Pact and a secret conspiracy that would culminate in a deadly apocalypse called “The Culling;” the relations, practices, and outlook of a sect-like radical collective who viewed the crisis as proof of an inevitable utopian revolution and their vision of leading the masses towards it; the political implications of a struggle between two men in the street economy. Seeking to create and lead a group, they enact an alternative conception of politics that refuses forms of democratic participation from which they are excluded. Comparing the convergence of the utopian vision of the radical collective and the dystopian catastrophe predicted by the young black men, this study argued that tales of conspiracy and fantasies of revolution conform to the logic and structure of occult discourses. These discourses, designated in the anthropological record under terms such as “sorcery” and “witchcraft,” index an experience of pervasive menace, where threats to body and wealth emerge from unexpected sources. Such forms of explanation arise when there is a failure of social norms, reciprocity, and mutual recognition. They, just like paranoiac conspiratorial narratives, bespeak an ambivalent relation to power that promises success but also threatens death. Conspiratorial and radical views also reflect a loss of faith in democratic institutions, free market ideology, and a rejection of the social contract. These responses to the financial crisis and Great Recession allow for a critique of the structural context of long term decline in economic mobility, mass incarceration, and failure of community in an individualistic society living under neoliberal economic and social ideology. Facilitating the extraction of political, symbolic and economic capital, black men emerge as marginal yet integral to the economy and state; placed outside society in prison, or “expended” through internecine or state violence. The hypervisibility of the murdered black body made possible by social movements such as Black Lives Matter must contend with the schisms and shifting alignments of color, contiguity and social class that attenuate possibilities of collective mobilization. The dissertation used mixed methods for data collection including participant observation and interviews (life history, structured, narrative), census data, news reporting, new media, and informal conversations during daily routines of research participants. These included professionals, working families and the unemployed, men in the informal economy, shopkeepers, community leaders, and state functionaries such as lawyers and politicians. Data was also collected from local volunteer groups, church based formations, and independent activists in advocacy forums ranging from street protests to meetings of governmental bodies and public service providers.

ETD_7717

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Kartikeya Saboo

doi:10.7282/T3M61NPZ

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.