Critical Commentary Urban Studies 2016, Vol. 53(6) 1108–1112 Ó Urban Studies Journal Limited 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0042098015613258 usj.sagepub.com Reading Wacquant in Oakland: Poor people’s movements and the state Emma Shaw Crane New York University, USA Abstract In ‘Class, ethnicity and state in the making of marginality: Revisiting territories of urban relega- tion’, Loı ¨c Wacquant argues that the state is central to the production and maintenance of racia- lised urban marginality. This rejoinder draws upon recent work on territory to extend Wacquant’s relational analysis to the everyday operation of state antipoverty programs. I use an early War on Poverty community development program in Oakland, California, to demonstrate that poor people’s movements engage and subvert attempts to govern urban space. I argue that antipoverty programs are not the direct implementation of repressive state policies on the ground but programs of government, characterised by contradictions, unexpected slippages and multiple political agendas. Keywords poor people’s movements, poverty, territory, urban marginality Received October 2014; accepted September 2015 In ‘Class, ethnicity and state in the making of marginality: Revisiting territories of urban relegation’, Wacquant reflects on his magisterial book, Urban Outcasts (Wacquant, 2008), a comparative study of advanced marginality in the Black American ghetto and working-class European urban peripheries. He reminds us that the ‘proper object of inquiry is not the place itself and its residents but the multilevel structural pro- cesses whereby persons are selected, thrust, and maintained in marginal locations.’ For Wacquant, relegation is a ‘collective activity, not an individual state; a relation (of eco- nomic, social and symbolic power) between collectives, not a gradational attribute of persons’ (emphasis in original, Wacquant, forthcoming). The first thesis of Urban Outcasts, as discussed in Wacquant’s article, is that state structure and state policy play a pivotal role in the production and mainte- nance of relegation and racialised marginal- ity. This insistence on the centrality of the role of the state is present throughout the majority of Wacquant’s work, and a radical departure from dominant methodologies and theories of poverty knowledge that focus on the places, bodies and lives of the poor. In this rejoinder, I argue that extend- ing Wacquant’s relational, processual Corresponding author: Emma Shaw Crane, New York University, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, 20 Cooper Square, 4th floor, New York, NY 10003-7112, USA. Email: emma.crane@nyu.edu by guest on April 2, 2016 usj.sagepub.com Downloaded from