Dr. Nasser Abourahme is a Princeton-Mellon/Humanities Council Fellow and a scholar on the intersection of urban studies and postcolonial thought. He has written for a variety of publications including the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Public Culture, and CITY, where he is the special features editor. Chris Russo sat down with Dr. Abourahme to discuss citizenship, liberal cities, and how we might understand the crises of Western democracies in the era of Trump, through the lens of colonial history.
CR: In your essay “Of Monsters and Boomerangs,” you talk about how we can understand the crises of Western democracies as a return of the modes of repression and control of colonialism to the metropole and especially the liberal city. How do you understand New York City today, an exemplary liberal, cosmopolitan city?
NA: New York is exemplary but also quite unique in a lot of ways. I think New York displays a lot of the characteristics I had in mind when I talked about the demise of what we can think of as the liberal city. I try to identify in a slightly gestural sense, how what we took for granted as the liberal city—that is, a city of free circulation, a city of free movement, a city in which freedom of individual subjects is not just the aim of forms of rule but the very basis of rule—is no longer the same.
After 9/11, after the War on Terror, New York City has become a hyper-securitized city. It is a city subject to forms of mass surveillance and all other new forms of repressive control. The expansion and intensification of police power is quite clear in New York City. New York was one of the leading adopters in this country of stop-and-frisk policies, which have since been rolled back. The city came under heavy criticism for the way informants were used in Muslim communities as part of counterterrorism.
People have talked before about modes of accumulation, modes of wealth extraction in urban spaces, but what I’ve tried to do is explore the relationship of our present and what used to be understood as its colonial past. This era is not really finished, but is alive in all of these processes that are extending and intensifying.
City life in New York has changed, obviously since the 1970s where I begin to chart the story beginning with neoliberalism. What’s billed as the difficult decade of the 70s in this city—the city goes bankrupt and is imagined and articulated by various political forces as unruly and ungovernable. There’s a big law and order agenda that comes out of New York and for which New York becomes a sort of centerpiece as it goes nationwide. That culminates in the Giuliani era with what was seen as the cleaning up of New York. These are trends that have been there for while. I try to pick up how after the crisis of 2008, after austerity, they’re intensified and take a more clear role.
This forces us to think about what we take for granted in liberal urban life such that we see it as the opposite of the thing that we call the authoritarian out there in the bad places in Middle East or in Latin America or in Asia—the distinction becomes less clear cut. I’m not saying that there is no difference. There are different systems of politics at play, different instruments. Liberalism’s self-image has been constructed on the idea that there is a typological distinction. If you go back and read early liberal thought—Mill, Montesquieu, anyone—they’re building it in opposition to a certain image, often of the east: Oriental despotism, Middle Eastern sexuality, licentiousness.
Having said all that, I would add that New York City, like all cosmopolitan, diverse cities in the West and elsewhere, can’t just be reduced to instruments of repressive control or to these large scale apparatuses of urban accumulation. There’s a lot more going on in this city. It’s a recalcitrant place, and it can’t really be domesticated. When you actualize the abstract way in which I wrote about it in a city like this it stops being so clear cut.
CR: Can you explain what you mean by the “subject,” as opposed to the “citizen”?
NA: One way is to think about the subject and the citizen as distinct categories. A citizen is someone who is not subject to the rule of others, but is a free individual who enters into voluntary contractual relationships with the state and with others vis-à-vis civil society. In colonial thought there is a split between citizens in the metropole and subjects in the colony.
Another way is to think about citizens and subjects as antinomious couplings—citizens are always subjects, in a certain sense. The emergence of the institution of citizenship itself always entails a form of subjection. There is a paradox at the heart of the concept, which is really a paradox at the heart of our political order. The very concept that marks your freedom, your subjectivity, your ability to do something, also marks your subjugation to a form of power.
To concretize this, this way we think about the citizen-subject in liberal democracy as fundamentally a subject of freedom. In a certain sense, you are controlled through your freedom. Today, we witness a space in which this relationship is no longer so clear cut. I think part of the ways in which obedience around the notion of citizenship in a country like this works is beginning to fray. These things have to be qualified by race and class, but let’s take an ideal type, a white male—the way we’ve understood it in theoretical terms is that obedience in a society like this comes out of conviction. You don’t obey the law because you’re afraid, but you obey the law because it is right and it is just and it is the contract you have entered into with the state and your fellow citizens. You know that there is an imperative somewhere, but you obey not out of compulsion.
Part of what we see in the post-austerity moment is the collapse of the givenness of this conviction. You can see this in the language of the far- right—an insurrectionary language, in which the rules of the game are up for grabs again. In a sense, Trump’s election was a protest vote, but a protest of what? In a way, they’re rejecting politics as a whole. The idea that the political order and its norms are as just as can be, even for those for whom citizenship was meant to be a guarantee of a stake in the game, not its racialized minorities, is fraying. There is a crisis at the heart of the institution if white propertied men are almost in a state of revolt; the contractual deal citizenship held in place is not as stable as it once was. The hinge that moves one from subject to citizenship, that makes you internalize the ethic of power—“I ought to obey”—isn’t as clear anymore.
CR: Hudson Yards [a $25 billion ultra- high end real estate development in Midtown Manhattan] has taken a lot of heat recently from architecture critics who see it as an epitome of the worst of NYC real estate development in recent years. What do you make of New York’s evolving architectural landscape? How does the lived urban environment relate to these crises of liberal cities?
NA: I would have to agree with most of those critics. Hudson Yards is a giant mess; that’s not the hill I’m gonna die on. The triumph of the law and order agenda, of what’s called the Giuliani era “broken windows theory,” really is the bedrock of the movement of financial instruments into NYC real estate. The mass gentrification that happens in Manhattan and in large parts of Brooklyn really needs as a prerequisite the forms of increasing repressive control—expansion of police power, street surveillance, patrolling, stop-and-frisk all make the material political foundation of projects like Hudson Yards. Because real estate value is tied to a wider geography, what they call the “cleaning up” of a neighborhood provides the basis for valorization, for capitalization. They need the long arm of the state. Capital always needs it.
New York really in that sense is not too unique; it resembles a lot of what has been happening in so called global cities and big metropolises—real estate becomes not just a financial instrument, but a type of currency. One of the striking things if you look at a city like London or even parts of the Upper East Side are occupancy rates and how empty some of these apartments are for large parts of the year. This is something that intensifies quite starkly after 2008 and after interest rates collapse. Surplus capital needs new forms to take. Real estate really just as a way of parking money becomes central in that, and NYC is at the forefront. If you look at the number of foreign investors, investment arms buying up property you’d see a huge increase in the past 10 years.
Architecturally, Manhattan is increasingly an imprint of that phenomenon, though arguably it always has been. I think it is more uniformly so than it has been in the past, and Hudson Yards is an example of that. There are others, and really in terms of an architectural aesthetic there is really not much going on outside large scale corporate architecture. How many Renzo Piano buildings can New York sustain?
CR: You’ve discussed before about how denaturalization is a particularly worrying encroachment on the rights of the citizen. What do you make of the Trump administration’s denaturalization pushes?
NA: The institution of citizenship will not necessarily protect bodies from state violence or from being effectively stateless, even though you are technically and legally a citizen. Disenfranchisement through criminalization can be thought of as a form a statelessness. But, there are ways that even that formal status of citizenship is being rolled back. You see it in what are called terror cases, in post-Bataclan France where there is now the spectre of denaturalization and denationalization. Of course Trump has raised this spectre here, of denaturalization en masse. Formal, legal protections wilt in the face of executive power. Why is this worrying?
We know the history of it. We know that denaturalization and denationalization are usually the first steps in either the removal or, sometimes worse, the elimination of groups of a population. The history of WWII in Europe demonstrates that for most states denationalization is a first step in the encampment, and then the elimination of populations. The spectre that all of this talk and its actualization raises is the tangibility of the removal of peoples, either territorially, physically, or their removal from political participation en masse, or their encampment in various sites of concentration. It’s not beyond imagination. Citizenship is not enough to protect you, but at the same time, forms of state power are reaching even deeper or threatening to remove that formal and legal guarantee.
CR: We tend to see Trump and far- right nationalism as a movement that comes from outside of big, liberal cities, and feels foreign to their residents. The anti-immigrant, Islamophobic rhetoric seems to particularly go against what, say, New Yorkers or San Franciscans see as their values. You seem to think otherwise—can you explain how this political moment is deeply tied to liberal cities?
NA: There is something tempting and something to a degree true about the fact that there are these bicoastal liberal cities that are removed from the interior of the country—what is seen as the bedrock of the right, the bedrock of white nationalism, Trump’s base if you will. Certainly those of us who consider ourselves New Yorkers say we have nothing to do with that mess. There’s an ease and there’s a comfort in that, but I think it’s illusory.
Trump is a product of New York’s financial and real estate world, and his worldviews were formed in New York as much as anywhere else. If you consider his role in the Central Park Five-the vilification, the demonization, the witch hunt of those five kids of color -that’s not something that was formed in the Rust Belt or the interior, that’s a New York City phenomenon. In more political terms, one has to question at a certain level this liberal civility and centrism and its entanglement and complicity with the resurgence of white nationalism and the Right in this country. These are not necessarily oppositional phenomena, even if now they want to raise their eyebrows and look away in contempt and join the so-called resistance.
CR: The #Resistance.
NA: It’s the policies of a liberal centrism that produced the world from which Trump appears. Mass inequality, which liberal centrists never wanted to do anything about; racism, imperial war. These are the constituent elements that liberal centrism was perfectly fine with. There’s this notion that had we just voted in HRC or another liberal centrist or had another term of Obama and it would have all been fine—no, you would have just delayed this phenomenon another four years and it would have come back just the same, if not stronger.
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