Neil Smith and Don Mitchell, eds. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018. i–viii and 349 pp., maps, figures, photos, index. $29.95 paper (ISBN 9780820352824), $94.95 cloth (ISBN 9780820352817), $29.95 electronic (ISBN 9780820352080).
Revolting New York is a beautifully produced book, with impressive visuals accompanying a history told in nineteen empirical chapters. The qualities of this book go well beyond aesthetics, however.
The book is in a way a tribute to the work of Neil Smith, whose urban revolution seminar taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York from 2007 lies at its origin. Following Smith's death in 2012, Don Mitchell was involved in the project as a general editor, also providing an empirical chapter as well as an introduction and an afterword. The result is an excellent collection of the riotous history of New York, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The readers are in for a treat with lively accounts, maps, pictures, and photos, as well as with an introductory chapter that provides a conceptual framework to interpret and make sense of the unruly practices that have made, and that continue to remake, New York.
The opening line of the first empirical chapter summarizes the main theme that runs throughout the book: “New York City was born out of the ashes of revolt” (p. 19). The main premise of the book is that revolts are an integral part of the making of the city. They are a manifestation of the various struggles in and over urban space. They are born out of such struggles, a product of them, but they also expose latent tensions and enduring conflicts that might otherwise remain occluded or hidden from public spaces, both literal and symbolic. As Alain Locke put it with reference to the 1935 Harlem Riot, they are “a revealing flash of lightning” (p. 1) that brings into sharp relief the conflicts, tensions, and power structures entrenched in the urban landscape.
The book's conceptual framework is built around Locke's description of the Harlem Riot, bringing it into dialogue with geographical writings on the social production of space, political economy of urbanization, and right to the city. The result is an understanding of urban revolts as not merely a destructive phenomenon, but a creative one, produced not by the individual flaws of individuals, but by the very production of space that is laden with conflict. They are mainly, but not always, a struggle against domination and oppression, and they reveal the vested interests and power struggles in the production of urban space. The book shows that what structured New York was not only the dominant power of the workings of the capitalist production of urban space, but also that the city has been marked by constant struggle in and over urban space, although not always with desirable outcomes for the revolting masses or the more disadvantaged groups.
The book is careful to not subscribe to a naive and heroic view of urban revolts. As the empirical chapters show, they were violent and not all of them were guided by progressive ideals. Not all the struggles in and over urban space took the form of violent outbursts, either; there was also a great deal of organizing, campaigning, and behind-the-scenes deal making.
The empirical chapters cover a 400-year period, offering a catalog of various revolts since the seventeenth century, when the indigenous Munsee people cleared the way for New York by helping to destroy Dutch New Amsterdam through their revolt in 1655, to Occupy Wall Street of 2011, ending with a reflection on the political context in 2017. The coverage of the riotous history of New York is admittedly nonexhaustive, but the book is pretty impressive in scope and detail.
The empirical parts of the book have an unorthodox structure. Each revolt is examined in detail in longer chapters, but these are followed by shorter, two- to three-page descriptions of other revolts, providing a useful reference for those who want to explore these further. In addition to the nineteen detailed accounts of revolts, therefore, we also have vignettes of another twenty-eight incidents of unrest.
The empirical accounts follow a chronological order. The authors of the empirical chapters use the space available to them to provide detailed information on the cases they are examining, and refrain from theoretical exposition. This is not as problematic as it might sound. As I mentioned earlier, the introductory chapter provides a useful conceptual framework, and the analyses in the empirical chapters have a loosely defined conceptual unity with their emphasis on the historical geographies of revolts and production of urban space. Leaving the theoretical luggage at the door allows the authors to go into more empirical detail, and is, in my view, much more preferable to a gestural theoretical exposition done almost mechanically. The empirical accounts are informative and very readable.
The coverage, as I noted, is impressive. The chapters on the earlier period of New York rebellious history, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, start with the Munsee revolt mentioned earlier, then move on to the Great Negro Plot of 1741, the Stamp Act revolt of 1765, and troubles of the city during the Revolutionary War. The nineteenth-century accounts of revolt include the Astor Place riot of 1849, the draft riots of 1863, the police riot of 1874 in Tompkins Square, and the transit strikes at the end of the century.
The twentieth century opens with the Tenderloin race riots of 1900, and continues with the Gary Plan riots of 1917; the Communist Party organizing during the Great Depression; the Harlem riots of 1935, 1943 and 1964; the CUNY open admissions strike of 1969; the Stonewall gay club riot of the same year; the 1977 blackout and riots; and the 1988 fight over Tompkins Square Park. At the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century, the global justice movement came to New York. Other chapters on the twenty-first century focus on the city's immigration protests of 2006 and Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
What these chapters, and the supplementary vignettes, show is the continuity of dissent, resistance, and revolt: “rarely a decade passes” in New York without some form of violent revolt or counterrevolt (p. 2)—uprisings, bombings, strikes, arson, and boycotts. There is a variety of actors, from indigenous people to slaves, from the working classes to the forces of order, and to women, immigrants, queers, and students. The book tells a story not only of struggle, but also of displacement—of indigenous people, of former colonizers, of racialized or socially and economically disadvantaged groups. What Revolting New York does, then, is to provide a perspective to the historical geographies of the city through mainly the hardship and struggle of those excluded from—and oppressed by—the established power structures of the city. The revolts reveal the class, ethnic, gendered, and racialized geographies of the city, but also unsettle them; former oppressive structures are at times remade, and power geographies reshuffled. At other times, however, they are preserved through violent quelling of dissent.
If urban struggle has a long history in New York, so do urban violence and oppression. Slavery was a significant part of New York's economy until the nineteenth century. The increasing prominence of New York as a financial and industrial center in the nineteenth century kept racialization and class as factors of urban violence and oppression. Women, gays, lesbians, queers, and immigrants all had their share of the sometimes violent making and remaking of the city's landscape and the regulation of everyday urban life. Another merit of the book, then, is to show how the structuring and restructuring of urban landscapes carry an element of violence that deserves attention.
Revolting New York encourages readers to reconsider violence. The revolts are violent, but so are responses to them. Even more important, however, violence is what leads to revolts in the first place, and violence takes many forms, as the history of the making and remaking of New York shows—from physical assault and murder of racialized or marginalized groups to disinvestment, disenfranchisement, new strategies of policing and surveillance, or exclusionary legal tools, policies, and planning measures. It is important, the book suggests, that the violence unleashed during urban upheavals does not detract from the violence exercised by authorities, encouraged by policies, and unchecked by institutions.
The book works on many levels. It is a reference book—and will no doubt remain so in the decades to come for scholars of New York—on New York's rebellious making and remaking over the past four centuries. It also lends itself to a thematic reading (on, e.g., different sorts of riots, strategies of policing, class struggle, racialization, and marginalization). It, moreover, provides, as I mentioned earlier, a useful conceptual framing of urban unrest. Revolting New York, therefore, will be of much interest not only to those interested in the city's past and present, but also to all those who are interested in urban unrest, racialization, class struggle, gender politics, policing, and the making and remaking of urban landscapes through tension, conflict, and struggle.
Revolting New York was a real treat to read, which left me with a mixed feeling of despair and hope. The continuities—racism, class bias, gender bigotry, greed, and police violence—are worrying, but the permanence of the rebellious spirit is certainly encouraging.