The Blackstone Legacy, Islam, and the Rise of Ghetto Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Some aspects of the intersection of Islam with a legendary Chicago street, gang, the Blackstones, provides a counter-intuitive instance in which postindustrial ghetto space produces alternative forms of cosmopolitanism. This is referred to as “ghetto cosmopolitanism” and is introduced as part of a larger history through which contending notions of Black subjectivity have emerged to challenge the dehumanization of poorer and more marginal African American communities. The story of the Blackstone legacy and Islam explores this unique indigenous engagement with Muslim identity towards that end, while it also expands the way in which we understand contemporary ghetto space relates to transnational processes and globalization.

Keywords:

• Cosmopolitanism
• ghetto
• Islam

Notes

Mignolo, D. Walter. “The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism.” In Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Home K. Bhahba, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds., Cosmopolitanism (Millenial Quartet) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 157–187.

Turner, Bryan. “Cosmopolitan Value: Loyalty and the City.” In Engin F. Isin, ed., Democracy Citizenship and the Global City (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 130–147.

Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In Donald Levine, ed., Georfe Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), pp. 324–339.

These studies include a range of authors who have used the notions of Saskia Sassen's noncosmopolitan globalities to challenge the dominant discourse on this subject (Sassen 2006, chap. 6).

Zorbaugh, H. W. The Gold Coast and the Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929).

Turner, Bryan. “Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism.” Theory, Culture and Society 19 (2002): 45–63.

Turner, Bryan. “Cosmopolitan virtue, Loyalty and the city.” In Engin F. Isin, ed., Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 130–147.

Writing on the Stones, Islam, & Space. The study of the Blackstones over the last several decades has been a sporadic and often-limited process hindered by the confines of mainstream criminology. Yet, in the last several years there has been an encouraging trend among a group of young social scientists to treat the subject of the “gang” in a broader and even global context. While the Blackstones have still not been featured in an engaging analysis within such a framework, this essay attempts to connect the theoretical headway made by such studies to the treatment of the Blackstones and their relationship with Islam. An emerging group of sociologists (like Wacquant and Vankatesh) as well as other more seasoned gang specialists like Hagerdorn and Short have encouraged a more nuanced examination of how issues of race, transnational communities, neoliberal ideology, and the changing urban political economy are changing the way gangs should be studied. Of all issues related to the legacy of the Blackstones, nothing is more controversial in today's political climate than its cultural and structural incorporation of Islam over the last several decades. Yet, the unique set of cultural and spatial issues that emerged through this convergence confronts and undermines oversimplified and highly politicized accounts of Islam, gangs, and violence in the inner city.

Wacquant, Loic. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” Punishment and Society 3(1) (Winter, 1998): 95–134.

Conquergood, Dwight. “One City,” Chicago Council on Urban Affairs, (1990) pp. 11–17.

Nwankwo, Ifeoma Kiddoe. Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

Ibid.

Marcuse, Peter. “The Ghetto of Exclusion and the Fortified Enclave.” American Behavioral Scientist 41(3) (1997): 311–326.

Nightingale, Carl H. “A Tale of Three Global Ghettos: How Arnold Hirsch Helps Us Internationalize U.S. Urban History.” Journal of Urban History 29(3) (2003): 257–271.

Sassen, Saskia. Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1994).

Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and its discontents (New York: New Press, 1998).

Sassen, Saskia. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Wacquant, Loic. “Red Belt, Black Belt: Racial Division, Class Inequality, and the State in the French Urban Periphery and the American Ghetto.” In Enzo Mingione, ed., Urban Poverty and the “Underclass”: A Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), pp. 234–274.

Wacquant, Loic. “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the US.” New Left Review 13 (Jan./Feb. 2002): 41–60.