Urban recalibrations and radical potentials

摘要

The margins, it seems, always come in plural. Rather than being a unified, coherent and fixed mode of existence, the spatial, material, and human entanglements of what is perceived as 'the margins' are constantly being assembled by a variety of agencies, constellations and networks which reject stable definitions and metanarra-tives. Whether present within the normal and the normalised or located outside the centre, the margins are produced by economic, social and political structures that reproduce power while excluding what they define as the leftover and the indigestible. Yet, as Teresa Caldeira (2009, 849) reminds us through the complex experiences inscribed to the urban peripheries of Brazil, what are called 'margins', despite their uncertain conditions, are 'not marginal to the needs of the modern core'. At the same time, counter hegemonic practices and unexpected points of emergence of new cultural and political acts that take place 'at the margins' are possibly also what makes the margins, as suggested by bell hooks in her reflections on marginality in America (1990), a site of radical potential.