The war on teenage terrorists

Vanessa A. Massaro and Emma Gaalaas Mullaney

City, 2011, vol. 15, issue 5, 591-604

Abstract: This paper interprets a recent, aggressive state crackdown on public gatherings of African American youth in the streets of Philadelphia's commercial districts against the backdrop of historical geographies of race and disinvestment. Drawing on news accounts and government publications, and deploying theories of securitization and space, it joins those who argue that the performance of security in everyday spaces works to conceal the social relations undergirding the post-9/11 security state. We consider how city officials and others have constructed the collective figure of the 'flash mob’ as a perpetrator of urban terrorism and the subject of state intervention. We trace the application of this subjectivity to individual bodies marked by age, race and class, thereby revealing how the latest strategic move in a historic reinforcement of the US ghetto sustains and feeds off of newly heightened and intertwined anxieties about the sources of criminality, violence and terror. If the venal urban geopolitics of Philadelphia reproduces long-standing spatial segregation and social inequality, it does so by exploiting newly emerged nationalist identities and under the auspices of antiterrorist legislation. More broadly, then, this paper argues for closer attention to the social warrant of racialized space and of banal terrorism in the constitution of state power.

Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2011.630856 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:15:y:2011:i:5:p:591-604

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CCIT20

DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.630856

Access Statistics for this article

City is currently edited by Bob Catterall

More articles in City from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().