Dissent, Public Space and the Politics of Citizenship: Riots and the ‘Outside Agitator’

Abstract

This paper presents an historical examination of a signi®cant period in which state authority and citizenship came together around the question of dissent in the US. Drawing on congressional records, news accounts and legal documentsÐand deploying theories of citizenship and spaceÐit presents an argument about how state power and geographical space came together around the question of the`race riots' that swept American cities in the late 1960s. I focus in particular on how government of®cials and others constituted the ®gure of the`outside agitator' as the cause of illegitimate dissent and the subject of state intervention. Such arguments about the geography of authority and dissent were themselves interventions in the politics of citizenship. More broadly, then, the paper argues for closer attention to issues of differenceÐand the geography of differenceÐin the constitution of state power.

Transnational disruptions: materialities and temporalities of transnational citizenship among Somali refugees in Cairo

“…We should not underestimate the relevance of debates on temporality and materiality for conceptualizations of transnational citizenship. In their critical engagements with citizenship, human geographers have called for an understanding of how specific socio-economic, cultural and embodied relations produce 'material spaces' (Cresswell 2009;D'Arcus 2004;Painter and Philo 1995;Smith 1995). At the same time, critical migration scholar Peter Nyers (2006Nyers ( , 2011Nyers ( , 2013 has drawn attention to the implicit 'temporal bias' characterizing conceptualizations of migrant and refugee struggles.…”

“The Dirty Scruff”: Relief and the Production of the Unemployed in Depression‐era British Columbia

“…As Bruce D'Arcus (2004:357; see also Mitchell 2002) suggests, “the outsider is a label not of neutral geographical origins, but an assignment of moral worth: of rights to both authentic identity and place”. In the URC's evaluation of the unemployment problem, they describe how the city was becoming inundated with loathsome figures without an authentic attachment to Vancouver: the outsider rather than the citizen, the criminal, the ailing and “accident” cases, and foreigners who became the burden of the Relief Department.…”

“…Still, the government and right‐wing civil society groups such as the Citizens League of British Columbia, feared it was idle youth “who were quick to adopt the catch phrase of the political propagandist”, and that “it is in the mind of the idle man that the seeds of subversive doctrines are most easily sown” (Weir 1939:147). Critics of socialism and communism believed that BC's youth were being duped by the “outside agitator” who was a deviant anti‐citizen that upset the “organic balance of a local place” (D'Arcus 2004:357). For example, a booklet from the Citizens League of British Columbia (1935) claimed to describe the “truth” about communism in BC: “the Communist strike organiser is like the prize fight manager who, from the safety of his corner OUTSIDE the ring, admonishes his bruised and bloody principle: ‘Go on in and fight; he can't hurt US.’”…”

‘It's a public, I reckon’: Publicness and a Suburban Shopping Mall in Sydney's Southwest

“…Similarly Kirby (2007), recalling the post‐civil war lynching of African‐Americans, argues that public space in the United States has been used in its recent history as a platform for public terror in the service of undemocratic and non‐progressive causes. Fundamentally, both authors argue that a less nostalgic understanding of the history of the urban public realm allows for a more complex if not more compassionate assessment of contemporary publicity (see also Domosh, 1990; 1998; Roberts, 2001; D'Arcus, 2004).…”