Cleveland’s Hough riots of 1966: ghettoisation and egalitarian (re)inscription

Abstract

This article is concerned with Cleveland's Hough riots of 1966. The Hough neighbourhood experienced rapid racial transition and ghettoisation as a result of urban renewal, suburbanisation and freeway construction. The riots, it is argued, rather than being primarily a frustrated reaction to ghetto conditions, represented what Jacques Rancière terms “democratic politics”: an appearance of the people in the order of the police. Attention to political re-inscription processes may provide scholars and activists with the tools needed to build linkages between political events.

Keywords:

• Cleveland
• democracy
• ghetto
• Hough
• inscription
• police
• politics
• Rancière
• riots
• urban renewal

Acknowledgements

For their help in crafting this article, I would to thank the following people: James H. Adams, Tantely Andriamasilalao, David Bernatowicz, Roldo Bartimole, Gloria Hanson, Joyce Kessler and Christopher Strathman. Thanks to Stephen Titchenal and Sreenath Narayan for their help in constructing the cartographic representations. I am also grateful to Mark Purcell and the editorial board at Space and Polity, along with two anonymous reviewers. I take full responsibility for the final text.

Notes

1. A notable exception here is Abu-Lughod (2007).

2. Rancière also engages here with Marx who in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right defined the proletariat as “a class that is in civil society but not of civil society” (Marx, 1970, p. 141).

3. Rancière writes, “[T]he word aesthetic … gets two meanings … On the one hand it designates the specific forms of linkage existing between the forms of the aesthetic regime and the modern forms of politics. On the other hand it designates the way in which political actions and conflicts are conflicts about the distribution of the sensible, conflicts about what is visible, what can be said about it, who is entitled to speak and act about it, etc” (Rancière 2009, p. 121).

4. See Staeheli et al. (2012) for a discussion of “citizenship as ordinary” that dovetails nicely with Rancière's partage du sensible.

5. Swyngedouw (2008, p. 6) argues that the police order is increasingly a “science/technology-management-policy assemblage”.

6. In an earlier publication (Hanson, 2012), I followed Deranty (2003) and used the term le politique to refer to a mediating space of “politics” between la police and la politique. Upon reading Chambers' (2013) persuasive account, I have dropped the use of le politique.

7. See Norval's (2006) application of Wittgenstein's aspect seeing to political processes.

8. Roldo Bartimole, personal communication, February 2013.

9. See map of Cleveland's east side: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=204661335735556483333.0004d872482da9706e771

10. This section draws from the excellent study by Rose (1988).

11. See Jelen (1983) for a discussion of the many racial conflicts in the Hough and Sowinski Park area in the month preceding the riot.

12. Toward understanding these processes, analytic resources may be found in the work of anthropological linguists concerned with the entextualisation, decontextualisation and recontextualisation of discourse (see Bauman & Briggs, 1990).