As a resident of Amsterdam and a researcher working in Kingston, Jamaica, I have often wondered why certain cities seem more inclined towards street-based political mobilization than others. With so many instances of sustained protests and public democratic experiments in Europe and Latin America, why don’t the public spaces of Amsterdam and Kingston foster similar democratizing movements? Where are their urban spaces of “insurgent citizenship”, first described by James Holston for São Paulo and subsequently identified in different forms in cities across the world?

Could it be that their citizens are too complacent? In the past, Dutch welfarist policies might be taken as explaining Amsterdam’s lack of riotous demands for urban and political alternatives. But current austerity measures, everyday racism, displacement through state-led gentrification, increasingly revanchist policing and widespread dissatisfaction with the political system would seem to be sufficient cause for unrest. Certainly Kingstonians have enough to protest about, given what many call Jamaica’s “state of chronic”: seemingly unchangeable levels of violent crime, political corruption and material deprivation. Yet despite pervasive cynicism regarding representative politics in both contexts, no forms of mass political mobilization seem to have emerged in public space, no sustained attempts to formulate alternatives.

But perhaps our perspective on democratizing forms of urban insurgency has used too narrow a lens. Decades of neoliberal ideology have transformed citizenship into consumer-citizenship. This not only entails a politicization of the market, with consumer choices – such as the purchase of local, fair-trade, organic and otherwise ethical products and services – becoming the site of political action. It also involves the marketization of politics, with political participation and inclusion increasingly reliant on the capacity to consume. Consumer-citizenship tends to individualize collective action and limit the influence of low-income groups; it has all the limitations we might expect of market-based politics. However, I suggest that the rise of consumer-citizens informs a global urban trend that we might term “insurgent consumerism”.

I see this trend in Amsterdam, Kingston and many other (urban) spaces. In comparable ways to movements of insurgent citizenship, insurgent consumerism can function as a public claim to inclusion. In Kingston, impoverished black inner-city residents claim inclusion in global circuits of style-making, appropriating and redefining name-brand commodities, engaging in what anthropologist Deborah Thomas has called “racially vindicating capitalist consumerism”. Having an American refrigerator or washing machine – often bought with remittances sent by relatives living abroad and powered through illegal electricity connections – can provide an important source of dignity that we should not dismiss out of hand. In Amsterdam, we can recognize similar racialized and classed forms of inclusion-through-consumption. Bourgeois white Amsterdammers are increasingly being crowded out of the city’s shopping streets, with even the formerly elite P.C. Hooftstraat gradually becoming a go-to space of consumption for the same groups of racialized Dutch youth that the police like to “disturb” (verstoren or hinderlijk volgen). Especially for those who feel excluded from the formal political realm, consumption – and especially consumption-in-public – can be a public claim to inclusion in a larger urban, national or transnational community, a visible way of affirming personhood.

Might we similarly understand other recent urban phenomena, such as the UK riots of 2011, as a form of insurgent consumerism? While many British commentators saw these riots as apolitical or even post-political, the rioters’ focus on consumer goods might be taken as political or even radical in the context of consumer-citizenship – a serious/fun way of being-in-common that rejects mainstream property rules even as it embraces mainstream consumerism. In Brazil, recent urban unrest has included a police crackdown on rolezinhos. These are basically social gatherings in shopping malls, organized through social media, with (often non-white) low-income youth strolling, flirting and showing off stylish outfits in the city’s main spaces of consumption.

Rather than dismissing these phenomena – and their less dramatic complements in Amsterdam or Kingston – as indicating the extent to which young people in particular have been ruined by materialism, hedonism and nihilism, might we not see them as the logical site of political action in a neoliberal age? And is not the reflexive rejection of such acts as empty or apolitical precisely the privilege of (racially unmarked) bourgeois liberals whose dignity and personhood has never been denied on the basis of a lack of material goods or an inability to consume?

Rivke Jaffe

Rivke Jaffe is associate professor at the University of Amsterdam since 2012. She previously held teaching and research positions at Leiden University, the University of the West Indies, and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). Her anthropological research focuses primarily on intersections of the urban and the political, focusing specifically on the spatialization of power, difference and inequality within cities.