City Fairs

Urban Outcasts comparatively examines, down to the finest detail, the structure, dynamics, and lived experiences of the dispossession process in the current fabric of the American "Black Belt" and France's "Red Belt," which refers to working-class suburbs. Wacquant's primary aim here is to define and explain racial domination in the United States, as well as the institutional transformation undergone by the African-American ghetto caught in the wave of uprisings that swept through the metropolis in the 1960s. The second goal of his analysis is to distill elements for a sociological sketch of advanced marginality from the similarities and differences exhibited by America's "hyperghettos" and France's declining "urban peripheries." What Wacquant means by advanced marginality is the new order in which social and spatial exile and exclusionary confinement emerge in post-Fordist cities as a result of the unequal development of capitalist economies and the shrinking of welfare states. Wacquant emphasizes that the deteriorating American ghetto of the early 90s and the French working-class suburbs are historical wholes and argues that they should not be artificially frozen within static typologies. For, according to Wacquant, the American ghetto and French working-class suburbs should not be viewed as self-sustaining structures outside the intersection of market, state, class, and ethnicity factors. According to Wacquant, these factors permeate the physical space, constantly weaving these neighborhoods. Wacquant's analysis provides an inventory of urban marginality and an assessment of the forces that shape it, thereby contributing to the historical sociology of our time. It also establishes a conceptual and empirical foundation for deciphering observed or assumed evolutions from past to present.