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As a lexical concept, slum has been widely criticized by twenty-first-century researchers, but the formulation and spread of the concept have profoundly altered actual cities in many parts of the world since the early twentieth century. Examining the discursive history of the slum concept demonstrates the contribution literary studies focused on the city can make to urban history. Urban historians concerned with areas labeled as slums would benefit from problematizing the concept of slum as well as from establishing comparative histories of stigmatized urban zones in a planetary context. Such work leads to a definitional challenge in which undesirable conditions do need labeling in some way, but the challenges and materialities of different cities on different continents are also all unique and potentially damaged by the application of an overarching tag such as slum. In various ways, the contributions to this special feature all address the foregoing issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concern of this article surrounds the discourse of recent calls by elite researchers to do away with the "s-word," to quote Mike Davis's endorsement of Alan Mayne's (2017) groundbreaking new study. I take issue not with their critique of the idea of the "slum," even if others have pointed out limitations in their visions (Harris 2018), but rather in their essentialist assumption: accepting as ontological fact the pre-given existence of a geographical body identified by others as a "slum," they only disagree that this categorization does not accurately represent the "essence" of that space. Their critical discourse may resolve issues with the particular conceptions and stereotypes associated with the term, "slum," but it does not effectively challenge the theoretical and practical foundations on which that term rests. Against current post-slum calls for a more accurate representation of these spaces, I conclude with a call to abandon the logic underpinning both slum and post-slum discourses of the twenty-first century: the assumption of a bounded and identifiable space with "naturally" representable interests. To demonstrate this thesis, I turn to a reading of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) as a means to re-orient researchers' relationship with mediating and re-presenting the slum. This reading of Ulysses calls for researchers to embrace a diverse set of subject formations, modes of habitation, and fluid residencies that can no longer be contained within the ontologies of slum and post-slum discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the decolonial foundations at the beginning of punk in the United States and England during the 1970s and 80s. More precisely, it investigates the work of Bad Brains and John Lydon (both during his time with the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd.) to see how they staked out a particular decolonial position from within punk. This article's argument is triple. First, I argue that Bad Brains struggled with the tension of placing their identity as Black men formed through a decolonial engagement with Rastafari and reggae into dialogue with a punk community dominated by white, middle-class musicians. The case of Bad Brains demonstrates both how decoloniality formed a part of punk's foundations and how white members of punk rejected this mode of thought. Second, the patriarchal masculinity underlying Bad Brains's mode of Rastafari – one that was explicitly homophobic and misogynistic – demonstrates how discourses of decolonization themselves can serve to further the oppression of colonized subjects. In other words, some forms of decolonial agency exceeded the representational capacity of Bad Brains's discourse of decolonization, becoming in effect what I call a decolonial excess. Third, I argue that John Lydon attempted to construct a vision of punk decoloniality based on such a decolonial excess. What emerges with this discourse, however, is that Lydon failed to fully recognize the relationship between such a decolonial excess and the politics of decolonization. As such, if this article on the one hand examines the historical problem of the decolonial foundations of punk in Washington DC and London, on the other hand it illuminates the tension between national decolonization and decolonial excess. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that punk urbanism is best understood as the attempt to paradoxically conceive of and organize cities as unorganizable, contested, and heterogeneous spaces; the consolidation of a stable and coherent urban community is challenged within punk urbanism by the constant disruption of any identifiable and stable urban meaning. More precisely, sections of London punk in the 1970s revealed that a cultural geography based around a coherent urban meaning creates an 'other' that does not accord with and that is subsequently (attempted to be) eliminated or contained by the policing of that dominant urban meaning. In contrast to common theories of insurgency that seek to organize urban 'others' into an identifiable and affirmative collective identity – instead of being a mere negative of a hegemonic urban meaning – that will then replace the dominant culture of an urban space, punk seeks to maintain the moment when that 'other' interrupts and undermines that dominant urban culture. In other words, punk urbanism proposes what is usually identified as an urban 'crisis' as a new form of collective urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Latin American decolonial thinking has always maintained an interest in taking the theories and practices of the communities of Latin America's colonized peoples seriously, the theorization of communality and communal systems has been a new focus of the last two decades. That is, the academic decolonial dedication to diversity and difference has recently been imagined as a pluriverse of communal systems. As such, this decolonial group of thinkers has been effectively demanding that the radical theories of communality produced by Indigenous communities of the Global South be taken seriously as real and viable alternatives to capitalism and representative democracy. Nevertheless, a critical engagement with Latin American decoloniality reveals a serious oversight in communal-oriented decoloniality: it fails to engage in a serious manner the millions throughout the world who are not or are perceived as not part of any community or are exiled from their community. To demonstrate this threat within the communal-oriented vision, one can look to another (de)colonial context ubiquitously overlooked in Latin American decolonial thought: Ireland. More precisely, as a reading of James Joyce's Ulysses reveals, the communal-oriented Irish anti-colonialism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries contained a common mode of modern anti-Semitism: Jews belong to no community and uproot and hollow out the life of any community they encounter. This article argues that although the pluriversal vision of communal-oriented decoloniality is explicitly opposed to the denigration, dismissal, or rejection of any community, it can still be characterized by this other mode of othering: the denigration, villainization, and oppression of persons who are perceived as embodiments of anti-communality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]