http://www.metamute.org/en/Grassroots-political-militants-Banlieusards-and-politics

Grassroots Political Militants: Banlieusards and Politics
by Emilio Quadrelli
Mute Magazine

French cities burst back into flames after President Sarkozy’s election on a ‘clean the scum off the streets with a high-pressure hose’ ticket. It won't be the last time, as long as the factors necessitating the mass revolt of November 2005 remain in place, in France and elsewhere. This text, translated by Matthew Hyland, based on Emilio Quadrelli's interviews in the Paris banlieues during and after the 2005 events, overthrows the whole spectrum of slurs against the racialised, pathologised racaille. The myth of an all-boy riot is trashed by female combatant leaders, and leftist commonplaces incur special scorn, above all those about the inarticulate cry for help of the ‘socially excluded’.

Radical Philosophy #141 January 2007 (written September 2006)
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/

Shack Dwellers on the Move in Durban

Shack settlements began to be constructed in the South African port city of Durban following the loss of land and the imposition of various taxes after the destruction of the Zulu Kingdom by English colonialism in 1883 and the simultaneous movement into the city of Indian workers who had completed their indenture on sugar plantations. Colonial authorities soon tried to act against the settlements but they were defended by a series of rebellions. For a while Umkumbane, the largest settlement, flourished and its urban cosmopolitanism produced all kinds of social innovation including its famous gay community where institutionalised homosexual marriage was pioneered in South Africa. But in March 1958, with the population of Umkumbane at 120 000, and the apartheid state achieving its full power, the Durban City Council, working within a colonial academic and policy consensus with a global reach, began a ‘slum clearance’ project that forcibly removed shack dwellers to racially segregated modern townships on the periphery of the city.