Politics of maintenance and care: Rosa Luxemburg’s commonplace urban theorizing

Agata Lisiak

City, 2022, vol. 26, issue 5-6, 755-770

Abstract: Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) is commonly known as a political thinker, economist, and revolutionary socialist. A person of versatile interests and skills, she was certainly a widely admired public speaker, journalist, publisher, teacher, translator, editor, and party leader, as well as an amateur botanist, an occasional painter, and – particularly in her final years – an avid birdwatcher. What also powerfully comes through in her writing (especially her letters), but has received little attention to date, is that she had the mind and pen of an urban ethnographer. In her thick, vivid accounts of urban sights and sounds, Luxemburg generously tapped into her senses and emotions, in the process revealing how affect shapes urban experiences and imaginaries. Focusing on practices and politics of maintenance and care, this paper offers an analysis of Luxemburg’s multisensory descriptions of her urban surroundings and ‘the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now’ that Doreen Massey theorized as throwntogetherness. Taking seriously Luxemburg’s observations in and about the city recorded in her letters and botanical notebooks reveals the small acts of commonplace theorizing that in academia are still too rarely recognized for what they are.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2022.2103904 (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:26:y:2022:i:5-6:p:755-770

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

DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2022.2103904

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 ().