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This book is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policymakers, and the general public continue to frame Black precarity as just another racial, cultural, or ethnic conflict that can be solved solely through legal, political, or economic means. This book argues that the historical and material production of blackness-as-risk is foundational to the historical and material construction of our society and certainly foundational to the construction and experience of metropolitan space. The book also considers how an ethics of lived blackness—living fully and visibly in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erase—can create a powerful counter point to blackness-as-risk. Using a transdisciplinary methodology, the book studies cultural, institutional, and spatial politics of race in North St. Louis County, Missouri, as a set of practices that are intimately connected to each other and to global histories of race and race-making. As such, it adds important insight into the racialization of metropolitan space and people in the United States. The arguments presented in the book draw from fifteen years of engaged research in North St. Louis County and rely on multiple disciplinary perspectives and local knowledge in order to study relationships between interconnected practices and phenomena.

This book details the fraught dynamics of rural life in the arid periphery of southeastern Morocco. The book considers whether agrarian livelihoods can survive in the context of globalized capitalism and proposes a new way of thinking about agrarian practice, politics, and land in North Africa and the Middle East. The book questions many of the assumptions underlying movements for land and food sovereignty, theories of the commons, and environmental governance. Global market forces, government disinvestment, political marginalization, and climate change are putting unprecedented pressures on contemporary rural life. At the same time, rural peoples are defying their exclusion by forging new economic and political possibilities. In southern Morocco, the vibrancy of rural life was sustained by creative and often contested efforts to sustain communal governance, especially of land, as a basis for agrarian livelihoods and a changing wage labor economy. The book follows these diverse strategies ethnographically to show how land became a site for conflicts over community, political authority, and social hierarchy. The book makes the provocative argument that land enclosures can be an essential part of communal governance and the fight for autonomy against intrusive state power and historical inequalities.

This book explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in rural Niger. At the same time, the book looks at the larger bureaucracy and the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic structures and procedures and peoples' lives. The world of facts and files exists on one side, and the chaotic and messy human world exists on the other. The book contends that bureaucracy and police work emerge in a sphere of constant and ambivalent connection and separation. The book's frontier in Niger (and beyond) is seen through ideas of space, condition, and project, packed with constraints and possibilities, riddled with ambiguities, and brutally destructive yet profoundly empowering. As the book demonstrates, the tragedy of the frontier becomes as palpable as the true impossibility of police work and bureaucracy.