Boundaries

of Dissent

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 Boundaries
of Dissent
P r o t e s t a n d St a t e P o w e r
in the Media Age

B r u c e D ’A r c u s

New York London

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RT4088_RT4086_Discl.fm Page 1 Thursday, October 13, 2005 1:09 PM

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D'Arcus, Bruce.
Boundaries of dissent : protest and state power in the media age / Bruce D'Arcus.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-94872-X (hb : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-415-94873-8 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Protest movements--United States--History--20th century. 2. Protest movements in mass
media--History--20th century. 3. Protest movements--United States--Case studies. 4. Mass
media--Political aspects--United States--History--20th century. 5. Public spaces--Political
aspects--United States--History--20th century. 6. State, The--History--20th century. 7. United
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 Acknowledgments

The work condensed into this book stretches back to graduate

school. A lot has happened in the years since, and I’ve accumu-
lated a lot of debts.
The kernel of this project began life as a dissertation. Don
Mitchell was a great advisor: both challenging and supportive.
I learned a lot from him and can only hope this work follows his
example of politically committed scholarship. My dissertation
committee—John Mercer, Mark Monmonier, Beverley Mullings,
and Geróid Ó Thauthail—also offered useful feedback that has
informed this book.
During the dissertation research, I benefited from funding
from both the National Science Foundation and the Syracuse
University Geography Department. More recently, Miami Univer-
sity of Ohio has generously supported me with both research and
writing grants. The actual research process has been smoothed by
the help of archivists and librarians in various places, most nota-
bly at the Minnesota State Historical Society in Saint Paul and at
the Harvey G. Mudd Library at Princeton.

v
vi • Acknowledgments

Nick Blomley has kindly helped me in a few ways, among

them his tracking down a copy of the Tremblay v. Québec ruling
that figures prominently in Chapter 6. Alas, that document is
written in French, a language in which I am completely incompe-
tent. I thus consider it good fortune to have run across George
Fowler, who helped me out on short notice with an excellent
translation of the document.
Colleagues and friends at Syracuse and Miami have provided
rewarding diversions as well as productive intellectual exchange;
among them are Patricia Ehrkamp, Jim Glassman, Euan Hague,
Paul Kingsbury, Nicky Mousset-Jones, Heather Muldoon, Tom
Perreault, and Scott Salmon.
My mother and father have always supported my efforts,
no matter how odd they may have seemed at the time. More
recently, I have spent a lot of time with family in Peru. The list
of those I’d like to thank is long, but I would particularly like to
thank Emperatriz Velarde, as well as her sisters, Yony and Nina,
for their support and good humor as well as their fantastic
cooking.
Finally, thanks most of all to Jacqueline, for her love, patience,
and companionship.

Portions of this book are revised versions of essays that

appeared elsewhere. Parts of Chapter 3, “1968: Drawing the
Boundaries of Dissent,” appeared as “Dissent, Public Space, and
the Politics of Citizenship” in 2004 in Space & Polity, 8 (http://
www.tandf.co.uk) and as “Protest, Scale and Publicity: The FBI
and the H. Rap Brown Act” in 2003 in Antipode, 35(4); parts of
Chapter 4, “Wounded Knee: Native Sovereignty and Media Spec-
tacle,” appeared as “Protest, Scale and Publicity: The FBI and the
H. Rap Brown Act” in 2003 in Antipode, 35(4) and as “Contested
Boundaries” in 2003 in Political Geography, 22(4).
 Contents

1 Introduction: Power and Protest in a Media Age 1

2 Spaces of Dissent: Public Space and the Politics of Boundaries 11

3 1968: Drawing the Boundaries of Dissent 37

4 Wounded Knee: Native Sovereignty and Media Spectacle 67

5 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home 105

6 Free Trade and Fences: Globalization and the Politics of

Mobility in Québec City, 2001 135

7 Quarantining Dissent 163

References 177

Notes 189

Index 193

vii
 1
Introduction: Power and Protest in a
Media Age

Protest, State Power, and Media Spectacle

In a whole series of events in the past few decades, political pro-
tests have placed national identity and state authority in radical
question.
Consider three examples separated by time and place. In the
1960s, the Civil Rights movement changed the racial geography of
the American South. The legal apartheid of the Jim Crow South
tightly regulated who had access to which spaces. Where one
could work, where one could eat or drink, and where one could sit
on a bus were all structured by the cold logics of what W.E.B. Du
Bois metaphorically called the “color line.” Yet the color line was
more than metaphor and, as much as anything, was about the con-
crete boundaries that separated people and space. To dismantle
this system, activists needed to undo its very logic. To wit, the Civil
Rights movement creatively transformed everyday spaces—lunch
counters, bus seats, jail cells—into contested political sites.

1
2 • Boundaries of Dissent

Yet such political spectacles only mattered in the context of a

potentially sympathetic audience. In this sense, the Civil Rights
movement was not about concrete public spaces alone, but also
about access to the larger spatial spheres of mediated symbols.
The lunch counter sit-ins that began in Greensboro, NC, were
effective in large part because they dramatized that the quasi-
public spaces of a restaurant were effectively privatized in the Jim
Crow South. The point was made clear to television audiences
and news readers throughout the United States and beyond.
Likewise, the protests that took place throughout the South were
distinguished by their visibility far beyond the specific sites of
protest. The centrality of television to the movement was made
particularly clear in 1963 in Birmingham, AL, where confronta-
tions between protest marchers and an aggressive police force
directed by “Bull” Connor became big news.
Fast forward twenty-something years, to Beijing. Here, in the
spring of 1989, Tiananmen Square became the contested public
space in which questions of national identity and state authority
played out before satellite-connected 24-hour news networks.
The Square itself was a geographical and historical crystallization
of these dynamics. Long a traditional site of popular and student
protests, Tiananmen Square—the largest public space in the
world—has also long been an expression of state power. The dual
function was crystallized in the monuments to the glory of the
state and to the students themselves.
Finally, consider another commonly cited example of an armed
uprising in a marginal corner of Mexico. On 1 January 1994, a
poorly equipped and trained group of indigenous peasants seized
a series of key towns in the state of Chiapas. As Mexican politi-
cians were inaugurating both a new year and a new era of free
trade ushered in by NAFTA, the Zapatista movement exploded on
the global stage. That the uprising happened on the day NAFTA
took effect was no mere coincidence. Zapatista leaders were con-
cerned that the boundary-dissolving drive of the free-trade agree-
ment would put additional pressures on indigenous livelihoods
and the lands in which they were rooted. Equally significant, they
were concerned about the political process by which Mexico’s fate
 Introduction • 3

was decided. The seemingly intensely local issue of indigenous

land and livelihood was at once also about the place of the nation-
state within a wider global arena.
To ensure their concerns were understood within this broader
context, the Zapatistas made creative use of the latest communi-
cations technologies. They used same technologies associated
with the globalization of American consumer culture—the
Internet, 24-hour news, and so on—to subvert the relentless
march of an emerging McWorld (Barber 1992). As Harry
Cleaver argues, “Through their ability to extend their political
reach via modern computer networks the Zapatistas and their
supporters have woven a new electronic fabric of struggle” that
has effectively globalized their efforts and circumvented the
Mexican state’s attempt to contain the uprising as local and mar-
ginal (1998: 81). Such efforts to make the issues articulated by
the Zapatistas politically visible, in turn, rested on this move-
ment’s ability to speak in terms that were legible to a global pub-
lic. The struggle of indigenous peasants in rural Mexico,
movement spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos made clear,
should be understood as a part of a much broader—indeed
global—struggle on the part of marginalized peoples for justice
and, importantly, dignity. One of the Zapatistas’ slogans—“We
are here!”—highlighted the importance placed on political
visibility tied to identity. The Zapatista uprising thus constituted
a situation where, as Stuart Hall has put it more generally, “the
margins begin to speak” (1997: 53).
Within this context, geographers have suggested the spatiality of
the Zapatista movement goes beyond its use of global media vec-
tors and its articulation of novel connections between identity and
space. Paul Routledge, for example, argues that concrete public
spaces are of central importance to understanding the movement.
“The Zapatistas,” he argues, “have attempted to create public space
in order to render power visible” (1998: 244). They have done this
through a dialectic between the public—visible—spaces of the
regional urban centers and the impenetrable shelter of the Lacan-
don jungle. Their occupation of key public spaces, however, has
not been for its own sake, but with the intent of projecting a
4 • Boundaries of Dissent

political statement elsewhere. As Routledge argues, for quite prag-

matic reasons the Zapatistas were

more concerned with the occupation of time on the

information network than permanently securing control
of Chiapas’ major towns. Rather, their material occupa-
tion of space was symbolic, staged to gain access to [glo-
bal] media vectors (1998: 248–49).

To the extent that the Zapatistas have claimed public spaces in

the Mexican state of Chiapas as sites of protest, they have also
used the de facto private—invisible—spaces of the jungle as
sources of refuge and organization. Through this strategy, they
were able to turn a marginal corner of Mexico into a highly visi-
ble platform for the global public looking on. In turn, the Zap-
atistas’ transient occupations of public spaces in the provinces
spread to the heart of the nation, engulfing Mexico City’s public
spaces in solidarity protests. The Zapatistas are thus a political
movement that operates through the manipulation of various
kinds of boundaries: between the public spaces of the regional
urban centers and the private space of the jungle, between the
marginal place of rural Mexico and the central place of Mexico
City, and between the domestic concerns of Mexico and the glo-
bal bonds of solidarity beyond. Indeed, John Ross (2000) has
gone so far as to argue that other more recent high-profile anti-
globalization protests such as the so-called “Battle in Seattle”
could not have happened without the example set by the Zapatis-
tas, as well as the concrete connections they helped forge.
From the lunch counter of a Woolworth’s store in North Caro-
lina, to the vast central space of Tiananmen Square in 1989, to the
jungles and small-town plazas of Southern Mexico in 1994, activ-
ists used the time- and space-collapsing qualities of contemporary
media and communications technologies to greatly enhance the
visibility of their political claims. By claiming and reworking
important public spaces, and doing so before national and even
international audiences, contemporary protests occasionally shift
relations of power. In turn, states have been prompted to respond
 Introduction • 5

in sometimes novel ways to these visibly public expressions of

dissent. Such protests thus shed light on the larger geographical
dynamics of nation-states; the micro-geographies of the immedi-
ate settings of protests bound up in larger scale networks of sym-
pathy and power.

Larger Concerns
In this book, I focus on incidents that place national identity and
state authority in radical question. At one level, I present a gen-
eral examination of the politics of political dissent and state
power in the media age. At another, I examine these dynamics
through a specifically geographic lens. I am concerned, that is,
with how contemporary protest can be understood as a funda-
mentally geographic praxis.
Although this book deals with social movements, then, it is
not about social movements per se. Rather, it is about how move-
ments become public through the political spectacle of protest.
Likewise, as much as this book analyzes acts of resistance, it is
also crucially concerned with how such resistance is bound up in
larger networks and structures of power. In this sense, I will be at
pains to break down the often simple dualisms that all too often
pose power and resistance, social movement from state. Instead,
I focus on the complex valences of different structures of power.
Although I am concerned with general discourses and practices
that condition and shape what can be done and said, I am most
particularly interested in how the state is implicated in such
larger dynamics of power. How do states see public dissent and
how do they act to shape the conduct of legitimate dissent? What
effect does this have on the politics of citizenship?
Finally, although this book focuses on protest politics, it
should be clear that I use this substantive and narrative focus as a
lens—among many possible lenses—on broader questions of
contemporary power and identity, citizenship and marginality,
society and geographic space. Among other things, then, I am
also concerned with those events that lie on the other side of
the line that distinguishes legitimate protests from illegitimate
6 • Boundaries of Dissent

dissent. Examples are myriad, but they are most commonly

labeled “disorders” or “riots.” As we will see—and as a long
tradition of scholarship has shown—such a designation is rarely
innocent or obvious, but rather involves situated and politically
charged representations of power, identity, and geographic space.
As such, how those lines are drawn and policed in practice offers
important insight into the nature of democratic citizenship itself.
How do events in public space come to be understood as a pro-
test, or as something else? The discursive and performative
orders that distinguish a protest from both a riot and casual gath-
erings on a street are not matters of fact, but expressions of often
complex ideas about the relationship between dissent, order, and
democratic practice. Individuals and institutions bring these
complex normative orders to their understandings of how bodies
mingle in space.
An important concern that cuts across all of these issues is how
the relationship among these spaces is symbolically mediated.
How does media shuttle meaning back and forth across the
public/private divide, and with that intervene in the politics of
publicity and privacy? How in turn is that meaning circulated
across space, and with what effect on the politics of citizenship?

A Road Map
To analyze the geographic dynamics of power and identity char-
acteristic of contemporary protest, I present four case studies.
I limit these studies to North America for reasons both practical
and narrative. Each event illuminates different historical, politi-
cal, and geographical moments that nevertheless share certain
commonalities. Taken together, they are meant to tell a larger
story of modern power and governmentality. All of the cases I
examine lie somewhere on one side or the other of the fuzzy and
unstable line that distinguishes legitimate protest from illegiti-
mate dissent. They also deal with how the state manages such
political spectacles.
In Chapter 2, I present an argument of how to usefully study
these issues. Here I draw on recent developments in political and
 Introduction • 7

cultural geography, themselves strongly influenced by interdisci-

plinary work on cultural politics and political theory. I focus this
discussion on two interconnected literatures: that on publicity
and public space, and that on geographic scale and boundaries.
The first—publicity—deals with the social construction of citi-
zenship and how this ties to concrete spaces. Given the centrality
of public spaces to political protest—and, in the media age, of the
more abstract space of a mediated public sphere—careful analy-
sis of how they come to be, how they are regulated, and the pre-
cise nature of their connection to power and dissent is essential.
Nevertheless, I argue, it is not sufficient to focus solely on the
immediate sites of protest, nor only on the more publicly visible
aspects of protest, but also on the role of a variety of other poten-
tial practices. Moreover, such analysis needs to be fundamentally
spatial in orientation. The literature on boundaries and geo-
graphic scale allows for just this more complex and nuanced
understanding of how power and dissent is articulated in the
contemporary media age.
For the historical narrative and case studies I use to make this
argument, I begin in 1968. My focus in this chapter is the Civil
Rights era, a time in which citizenship was being dramatically
challenged in a variety of venues, including on city streets. No
issue better crystallized how power, identity, and space came
together in complex and contentious ways during this time period
than the so-called race riots that swept American cities. The ques-
tion of how different actors understood the broader significance
and root causes of the riots is important enough. Even more
important, however, is how those assessments shaped the concrete
actions of various state officials: the politicians who crafted laws
that attempted to criminalize a particular kind of political activity,
the government officials charged with implementing those laws,
and the military men who drafted plans to ensure domestic tran-
quility. In turn, critics often conflated these riots with more overtly
political statements like the antiwar protests that took place in
Chicago. More importantly, the response to these riots and pro-
tests both set the ideological terms by which dissent was later mea-
sured and created the legal tools by which it was countered.
8 • Boundaries of Dissent

In Chapter 4, I turn to similar issues, but played out in a very

different geographic and political context. Here we move from
city streets and congressional hearings to the marginal world of
the Pine Ridge Indian reservation to examine one of the most
significant examples of American Indian protest in the 20th cen-
tury. Here in 1973, at the famous historic site of Wounded Knee,
American Indian activists began an occupation that ultimately
lasted 71 days. The Wounded Knee occupation is significant for a
number of reasons. First, it took place at the end of a long period
of activism and political protest in the United States and else-
where that together constituted a significant intervention in the
dynamics of publicity and citizenship in democratic societies.
Second, it was a relatively early example of a televised protest
and what one commentator at the time, writing in TV Guide,
described as a “test-tube case of confrontation politics and its
symbiosis with the media.” The occupation was noted for its
spectacular symbolic politics, in which activists articulated, in
quite dramatic fashion, treaty rights and the sovereignty claims
for which they stood on a global media stage.
The Wounded Knee occupation also attracted the intense
interest of the federal government and led to one of the most sig-
nificant deployments of American state power in domestic space
in the 20th century. Significantly, however, senior Nixon admin-
istration officials hid much of the exact nature of the state force
deployed at Wounded Knee from public view. As a relatively early
example of a televised protest—and because of the large number
of FBI documents available on the event—the Wounded Knee
occupation sheds important light on the geographical dynamics
of contemporary mass-mediated protest and on how states act in
the context of such political spectacles. That a significant political
spectacle like Wounded Knee took place in a geographically mar-
ginal location also tells us much about the changing nature of
political protest in the media age.
In the remaining two case studies, I examine more contempo-
rary incidents. In Chapter 5, we move to Miami to examine an
incident that dramatized neither issues of American Indian terri-
torial sovereignty nor the racial and geographic boundaries that
 Introduction • 9

delineated the extremes of wealth and poverty in urban America,

but rather a set of international geopolitical issues that were at
once about the place of the home in that larger world. In late
1999 and early 2000 the U.S. media was gripped by the spectacle
of Elián González. At its most basic the case involved an interna-
tional custody dispute that pitted the child’s extended family
against his surviving parent: his father. Yet because the father
lived in Cuba and his mother died fleeing the country, the case
instantly took on the character of geopolitical spectacle. The
question of who would have custody of the child—and therefore
of where he would go, and who would decide—became a highly
contentious one. The role of the federal government in enforcing
its authority over such questions quickly became the issue. The
drama itself focused on the suburban house of Elián’s uncle,
where the boy stayed for the duration of his time in Miami. The
house served as a metaphor for the larger drama, reflected in the
protesters arrayed outside who—brandishing Cuban flags and
Catholic symbols—vowed to protect Elián and his new home
from the outside intrusion of the state and its illegitimate inten-
tion to remove the boy and send him back to Cuba. The army of
media personnel who covered this spectacle served to turn this
drama into one of national, even global, import. The very public
spectacle that took place outside the modest suburban home
revolved not only around the grand geopolitical demons con-
jured up by the Miami Cuban population, but also, at the same
time, around arguments concerning domesticity. The home also
served to mark off the private space of the domestic from the
intensely public space of the spectacle outside and pointed to the
deeply political, if often masked, nature of that distinction.
In Chapter 6, I discuss recent antiglobalization protests. The
antiglobalization movement came into public being in the United
States in late November 1999 in Seattle. There, on the occasion of
meetings of the World Trade Organization, activists dramatized
their dissent over the politics behind the vast abstractions of
neoliberal globalization. Yet beyond the complex ideological
stakes involved in the protests in Seattle and a variety of places
since, there were also issues of concrete tactics. Activists used
10 • Boundaries of Dissent

a variety of contemporary communications technologies—cell

phones and the Internet, most notably—to coordinate their
efforts to secure access to key public spaces. Likewise, various state
institutions also used creative means to bar or to otherwise con-
trol access to those same spaces. This chapter thus analyzes these
issues in the context of the antiglobalization protests, focusing in
particular on how they played out in and around Québec City
during the 2001 Summit of the Americas.
The argument I present in the following chapters involves, on
one hand, an assessment of the empirical events I am examining.
The highly mediated nature of contemporary protest is a signi-
ficant change in the geographical dynamics of power and author-
ity. Political dissent is now bound up in far larger worlds than
had previously been the case, and both activists and representa-
tives of the state need to have a suitably geographical sensitivity
to these changes. On the other hand, and perhaps more signifi-
cantly, I also present a larger theoretical argument about how
contemporary power and dissent ought to be studied. In this
sense, the argument I present in this book is about more than
simply protest spectacles, but also about larger issues of demo-
cratic citizenship, identity, and state power.
 2
Spaces of Dissent: Public Space and the
Politics of Boundaries

Walking in the Park

In May of 2003, protests swept through Peru with lightning
speed. President Alejandro Toledo had been elected the year
before, replacing quasi-dictator Alberto Fujimori, who had fallen
from power in 2001 when videos were leaked to the media con-
clusively demonstrating deep corruption at the highest levels of
government.
Toledo had made his mark on Peruvian politics in part by
leading massive protests against the corrupt regime and by elec-
tion promises of democratic reforms. Yet from the beginning, his
broadly neoliberal policies had met with stiff resistance, often
expressed in dramatic public protests. This time, however, the
protests involved a broad segment of Peruvian society. School-
teachers and health workers were angered by government salaries
slimmed down by austerity measures, and farmers were angered
by rising taxes and exorbitant interest rates. Just as importantly,

11
12 • Boundaries of Dissent

the protests were everywhere: in provincial towns and cities with

long-running animosities towards Lima, but also in the heart of
the capital city itself. In a twist of geographic irony, Lima’s cen-
tralizing power was also its vulnerability, as protesters began to
cut off all roads into and out of the city in late May.
Toledo’s response was itself ironic given his democratic preten-
sions: a declaration of a state of emergency on May 28. The decla-
ration—a tactic the Peruvian state used aggressively in the 1980s
and early 1990s to combat terrorism—removed basic civil rights.
Police could freely enter homes or detain people without a war-
rant. The right to privacy was now void; the state could freely
cross the boundary that sheltered citizens from unwanted state
intrusion. In addition, the declaration removed the right of
assembly. Public space was now dramatically less public; public
gatherings were illegal.
The state of emergency declaration was meant to open the
roads and to quell the protests. Although effective in the
former—largely through military muscle—the protests contin-
ued. Now added to the list of grievances protesters dramatized in
public spaces throughout the country was the state of emergency
itself. Calling the government’s show-of-force bluff, protesters
refused to cede public space to the president’s wish for order.
And yet, far from the venues of the most intense protests, I take a
walk in the local park. Even here I find evidence of these larger
dynamics between citizenship, state power, and public space.
The Parque Kennedy in Miraflores is a vibrant public space.
Like all public spaces, it has its structures of order: rules about
who is allowed where, how they should behave, and so forth.
Nevertheless, this space is used by a diverse array of peo-
ple—young and old, local resident and outsider, rich and
poor—for a diverse array of activities. The park serves as a place
to stroll, to make out, to read, to eat, to sleep, to transact busi-
ness, and to evangelize. It is also a place to dance. Every weekend,
a small amphitheater serves host to a large group of mostly eld-
erly dancers. They typically dance to the traditional Criolla (Cre-
ole) music of the Peruvian coast, but also to the music of the
Andes. The dance is always something of an event, with the
 Spaces of Dissent • 13

amphitheater packed with enthusiastic dancers and ringed with

almost equally enthusiastic spectators.
On this night, however, the amphitheater sits virtually empty
and silent. A sign announces that all public performances in the
amphitheater are cancelled because they would violate the provi-
sions against assembly that accompanied the declaration of state of
emergency roughly a week before. Despite the sign, the next night
the dancers return. An impromptu—technically illegal—dance
comes together organically when street musicians begin playing
in the amphitheater. There is a euphoria in the air that seems to
be a function of both the dance and the deliberate subverting of
state authority. As quickly as the public gathering comes
together, however, it falls apart. The musicians leave despite
pleadings from the dancers: perhaps fearing arrest, or perhaps
simply bored, or in search of better-paying opportunities
elsewhere.
As I approach the amphitheater the following Sunday after-
noon, I again hear music. The same musicians from the previous
week’s impromptu dance are once again performing for an
enthusiastic crowd. This time, however, the crowd is larger, and it
is daylight. A few minutes later, a tall police officer descends onto
the stage and demands that the musicians cease playing and leave
the space. The musicians, however, angrily protest and tell the
crowd that despite the wishes of el pueblo (the people) for the
music to continue, the police officer is enforcing the order
against public assembly. The crowd responds with jeers for the
police officer and encouragement for the musicians. After a few
tense moments, a compromise is reached: The officer allows the
musicians enough time to collect contributions from the crowd
and to play music while doing so, but must leave thereafter.
Despite the moment in which state power is confronted with
popular resistance, the music ceases, and the space formerly
occupied by the musicians is quickly replaced by a sign remind-
ing park users of the ban.
This is but one example of the larger dynamics among state
power, citizenship, and public space as they played out in Peru
during May and June of 2003. The contest between state authority
14 • Boundaries of Dissent

and antistatist dissent was dramatized in public spaces through-

out the country, but also through the strategic control of the
connections between them. The spatiality of the conflict was thus
quite complex and ranged between a diversity of kinds of spaces,
tied together across a variety of geographic scales: from the micro-
scale of bodies in the street to the meso-scale of regional eco-
nomic development within the nation-state, to the global scale of
debates about neoliberal globalization. Despite the declaration of
the state of emergency by President Toledo, protests continued
throughout the country and forced the government to negotiate
on the details of state policy under the pressures of neoliberalism.
And yet, even if contested, the declaration was successful in stop-
ping the music in the rather tame venue of the Chabuca Granda
amphitheater in the Parque Kennedy.
The example highlights a more general point: that the capacity
for states to deploy power, and for citizens to resist, varies widely,
as does the manner in which such power and resistance is given
form. There is, then, an uneven geography of state power and
antistatist dissent. Dissent—and the larger practices of citizen-
ship in which it is wrapped up—is performed in a variety of
ways, in a variety of spaces, with a variety of resources and pres-
sures. Although there is a tendency to focus on the most publicly
visible spaces of dissent, then, there is a need to look beyond to
other spaces as well. Similarly, although there is sometimes a ten-
dency among critical academics to “romanticize resistance,” as
Lila Abu-Lughod (1990) has put it, it is my contention that it is
also important to understand how the state works to shape the
geopolitical context in which dissent is articulated. In this chap-
ter, I take up these issues to present a theoretical and conceptual
framework that will allow us to more thoroughly analyze the
complex dynamics of contemporary political dissent in subse-
quent chapters.

Citizen, Public, Space

Spectacles of dissent—variously referred to as disorders, protests,
demonstrations, riots, and so forth—provide a lens on broader
 Spaces of Dissent • 15

geographic dynamics of citizenship. They provide insight not only

into the uneven distributions of rights and responsibilities,
identity and power, but they do so in part by making spatially
manifest often-intense disagreements about the nature of legiti-
mate dissent; of who is allowed to do what, where, with what kind
of symbolic and political effect and weight. My focus, then, is on
how such incidents can serve to make politically visible otherwise
latent tensions about the intersections of state power, citizenship,
and geographic space. Put simply, how do spectacles of dissent
dramatize relationships among citizens, the public, and the state?
How do citizens materialize their dissent in space? How do their
expressions of public dissent travel across space; how, in other
words, are they mediated? Finally, how do states work to actively
shape what Paul Routledge (1994) has referred to as the “terrains
of resistance” within which dissent is expressed?
To begin to answer these questions, we must begin with the
spaces of the city. The city has always represented both the tri-
umphs and the failures—and certainly the challenges—of demo-
cratic life. It is the place where diverse ideas and people are both
brought together and kept apart. It represents the most extreme
concentrations of wealth and poverty, power and marginality.
Largely for these reasons, the city is also the engine of significant
change and a lens on society itself. Behind this broad backdrop of
citizenship and the city, a myriad of venues we collectively call
public space occupy a central place. Streets, parks, plazas, and
other such spaces are the very media through which democratic
citizenship is played out. The changing way these spaces have been
used and imagined, as well as regulated, offers important insights
into how rights and responsibilities are understood, and with that,
democracy itself. For precisely these reasons, the public spaces of
the city have often served as the venues for the most intense—and
widely visible—spectacles of dissent.

Citizen and Public

1989 was a significant year in the world of politics and in the his-
torical geography of dissent. It was the year of the Tiananmen
16 • Boundaries of Dissent

Square democratization protests in Beijing and the subsequent

violent—and heavily mediated—reassertion of state authority, as
well as a wave of similar protests in Eastern Europe. Likewise,
1989 was the year in which one of the most important bound-
aries of Cold War Europe—the Berlin Wall—tumbled. Amid this
context, the publication of the English translation of Jürgen Hab-
ermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989)
helped crystallize a larger reorientation in Anglophone scholar-
ship toward a more complex view of citizenship and the public
sphere. Earlier traditions tended to view citizenship as formal
political rights granted by the state: the right to vote, to speak
freely, to assemble in space and move across it, and so forth. The
broader critical turn in the social sciences has shifted from this
view to citizenship understood as a set of practices enacted by
individuals and groups. In this view, citizenship is not simply
formally held, or not, but rather a social practice that brings
together complex identity politics and power dynamics.
Habermas provided both a philosophical argument and a his-
torical narrative that charted the changing architecture of the pub-
lic sphere. For Habermas, the public sphere offered a realm
of relative autonomy from the private spheres of the market and
the household, and a check on overaggressive state power. As he
put it,

the bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as

the sphere of people come together as a public; they soon
claimed the public sphere regulated from above against
the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a
debate over the general rules governing relations in the
basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of com-
modity exchange and social labor (1989: 27).

The modern public sphere thus provided an interactive forum

in which individuals could set aside their private differences
and interests to deliberate about important matters of
wider—public—concern, against the more narrow interests of
both state authority and the private economy. For Habermas,
 Spaces of Dissent • 17

then, a vibrant public sphere that allowed for the productive

exchange of often-contrary opinion was the measure of demo-
cratic citizenship. Where the state intruded too heavily in regu-
lating the conditions of public debate and interaction, or where
private market interests had too much influence in the public
sphere, democracy suffered.
Habermas’ normative argument for a relatively autonomous
public sphere was itself wrapped up in his reading of history and
of the historical geography of urban Europe. According to this
narrative, the modern citizen—and the public through which
it was constituted—emerged amid the spaces of the mercantilist
cities of early modern Europe. No longer the economic property
of feudal masters or the political subject of monarchy, the mod-
ern citizen was nominally free and independent, with the capac-
ity of independent judgment. The changing status of labor thus
created an important condition for modern citizenship and the
public sphere. Likewise, the increasingly elaborate geographies
of mercantile capitalism provide the enhanced traffic in ideas
and information necessary to the emergence of a literate public.
Among those changes was the emergence for the first time
of mass media. Inexpensive and widely available sources
of news—published in a common language—provided an
important medium for the constitution of modern national
publics (Anderson 1983).
Habermas thus placed the emergence of the modern public
and the public sphere amid a dynamic historical geography of
democratic capitalism. The diversity of people and things and
ideas that swirled together into the vortexes of these cities pro-
vided the material context for the modern public sphere, and
print media provided an important medium for the delibera-
tion and debate that characterized it. Yet Habermas also recog-
nized the central importance of other media through which the
modern public sphere was given shape. The spaces of city
streets, salons, coffeehouses, and so forth also figured in Haber-
mas’ narrative and provided the material setting of face-to-face
interactions that were also crucial to the debate and communi-
cative interaction central to public life.
18 • Boundaries of Dissent

If Habermas’ historical narrative begins with the emergence of

a relatively intact public sphere, it progresses to its gradual ero-
sion—indeed “disintegration”—under modern bureaucratic cap-
italism and corporate mass media. The boundaries between the
public and private have so blurred for Habermas that the public
sphere has lost its essential function as a check on private inter-
ests of all kind. As he wrote, under such conditions

the public sphere assumes advertising functions. The

more it can be deployed as a vehicle for political and eco-
nomic propaganda, the more it becomes unpolitical as a
whole and pseudo-privatised (1989: 175).

The increasingly mass-mediated character of the public sphere,

the heavy influence of private economic interests on that medi-
ated public sphere, and the increasingly clear fact of the degree to
which the state itself—as well as politics more broadly—is medi-
ated all provide the evidence for this decline of the public sphere.
As quickly as the translation was published, however, other
scholars picked up the argument and either elaborated on it or
radically critiqued it. Habermas’ notion of the public sphere as a
largely unitary realm of open accessibility whose bounds have
expanded and contracted over time tended to obscure an impor-
tant issue: that within the concept of publicity lies a contradic-
tion. Feminist political theorist Nancy Fraser put the matter
succinctly when she argued that the “discourse of publicity tout-
ing accessibility, rationality, and the suspension of status hierar-
chies is itself deployed as a strategy of distinction” (1992: 115).
In place of a unitary public sphere either expansive or limited,
Fraser argued instead for a notion of the public sphere as funda-
mentally fractured: crosscut by all manner of differences of both
identity and power. Rather than think in terms of a singular pub-
lic sphere, Fraser argued that it was far more productive—both
analytically and politically—to consider multiple public spheres,
interacting across intense differences and amid complex hierar-
chies of power. Contra Habermas, then, for Fraser the public
sphere was not a taken-for-granted world of rational talk, but
 Spaces of Dissent • 19

enmeshed in a thoroughly cultural politics. Such a cultural poli-

tics included the very distinction that defined publicity itself. As
she put it,

there are no naturally given, a priori boundaries here.

What will count as a matter of common concern will
be decided precisely through discursive contestation
(1992: 71).

Fraser’s critical intervention in debates about citizenship and the

public sphere pointed to a different set of questions from those
raised by Habermas. How are different kinds of publics consti-
tuted, through what kinds of material and representational work,
in relation to what distributions of power?

Public Space as Medium of Citizenship

The complexities and ironies of citizenship and publicity are tied
up in similar issues related to space. Practices of citizenship are at
once spatial practices. Isin (2002), for example, traces historical
practices of citizenship—of “being political”—and argues cities
function as “difference machines” that do not reflect pre-existing
identities, but actively create them. As he puts it,

the city is a difference machine insofar as it is understood

as that configuration that is constituted by the dialogical
encounter of groups formed and generated imminently
in the process of taking up positions, orienting them-
selves for and against each other, inventing and assem-
bling strategies and technologies, mobilizing various
forms of capital, and making claims to that space that is
objectified as “the city”(2002: 49).

In this vision, citizenship is differentially distributed to subjects

defined via groups; groups that only come into being through
encounters in the spaces of the city. The citizen—as that subject
invested with full rights—does not exist apart from relations
20 • Boundaries of Dissent

with its others: those less-than-citizens referred to variously as

strangers, barbarians, immigrants, the homeless.
Citizenship and the public sphere is thus played out in a myriad
of concrete spaces. From courtrooms and prisons, to school
classrooms and sports stadiums, to street corners and public
parks, citizenship is a practice that takes place in specific locales.
If cities function in general as difference machines that assemble
identities and invest them with rights, then it is urban public
spaces that provide important concrete settings in which citizen-
ship is enacted. Public space provides an essential role in the poli-
tics of citizenship precisely because it is in public space that
difference is both displayed and encountered. Consider, for exam-
ple, the rituals of public space, both everyday and spectacular,
from a stroll in the park to a military parade to a demonstration.
These performances are shaped by the normative frameworks that
define the boundaries of acceptable behavior in public space.
These frameworks are shaped not so much by formal rules, but by
collective expectations and evaluations—even imaginations—of
other peoples.
Public space, put simply, is a medium of citizenship: a mate-
rial space and representational forum through which bound-
aries of citizenship are drawn and redrawn. Public spaces are
tangible material locations and contexts, with volume, and
form, and texture. They are also settings in which diverse peo-
ple interact; where difference is both displayed and encoun-
tered. Public spaces are thus something like theaters of social
life. They are arenas both to see and to be seen. As Sue Ruddick
argues,

representation of public space is deeply implicated in the

process of othering: the way in which certain others are
represented in public spaces is not simply a byproduct of
other structures of inequity; it is deeply constitutive of
our sense of community—who is allowed in, who is
excluded, and what roles should be ascribed to “insiders”
and “outsiders”(1996: 146).
 Spaces of Dissent • 21

Public space—much like citizenship itself—is less a taken-for-

granted fact than a complex social production. It provides a
venue through which excluded groups can represent them-
selves—make themselves politically visible—before larger pub-
lics. For Don Mitchell,

public space is a place within which a political movement

can stake out the space that allows it to be seen. In public
space, political organizations can represent themselves to
a larger population. By claiming space in public, by creat-
ing public spaces, social groups themselves become public
(1995: 115).

For Mitchell, it is precisely the bodily materiality of public space

that is so crucial to its function as a space for representation. It
provides a platform from which to claim rights, organize represen-
tation, and project them to larger publics. Public space, he writes,
is ideally “an unconstrained space within which political move-
ments can organize and expand into wider arenas” (1995: 115).
While emphasizing the grounded materiality of public space,
then, Mitchell’s reliance on the phrase “expand into wider are-
nas” points to the ways that the politics of public space is at once
a politics of scale. If public space provides a setting through
which the politics of identity and citizenship are constituted, the
mediated character of public space links it to the social produc-
tion of scale as well. For Ruddick, in the same way that public
space provides a medium of citizenship, so does scale. As she
writes, “[s]cale . . . can become a medium through which identi-
ties are constituted; the constitution of a public space at a partic-
ular scale can change the scale at which social identities are
constructed, enabling groups to draw and redraw the boundaries
defining who is included and excluded” (1996: 140–41). The very
notion of “insider” and “outsider” is in fact a geographic meta-
phor (Sibley 1995) that involves a politics of scale. The commu-
nity of insiders is a bounded space that might be drawn at the
scale of a neighborhood, a city, a nation-state, or even larger
22 • Boundaries of Dissent

civilizational identities of the sort that has become fashionable to

emphasize after 9/11.

Public Space, Scale, and the Politics of Dissent

Spectacles of dissent of the sort I analyze in this book bring
together issues of identity and power. They involve claims to
rights and claims to identity. As such, they provide a lens on
larger dynamics of citizenship. If we gain insight into the politics
of citizenship in part by examining how they are played out
through the media of different kinds of spaces, how might such a
perspective inform analysis of the politics of dissent? My starting
point is that in the same way that studies of identity and citizen-
ship can be opened up by not assuming bounded and stable
objects, but rather inquiring into how boundaries of difference
and distinction are operationalized in practice and relationally,
so too can the study of the geography of dissent be enhanced by
studying how different kinds of spaces are bound and unbound
in the context of such crises. My analytical entry point is thus a
rich and growing scholarship on boundaries, scale, and publicity.
Scale has been a subject of significant interest and debate
within geography for the past decade or so. Precisely as economic
globalization was reconfiguring the landscape of capital and
labor, and the end of the Cold War was accompanied by a signifi-
cant redrawing of geopolitical boundaries, geographers sought to
revamp theories of scale. In place of earlier traditions that viewed
scale in idealist terms as simply an interpretive lens or a set of
inert spatial containers—local, regional, national, global—this
new scholarship on scale argued that scale was a grounded social-
production. As Andrew Herod argued,

scale is, arguably, geography’s core-concept, for only

through its resolution can we negotiate the boundaries
between difference and similarity. It is scale which allows
us to differentiate geographical landscapes, to delimit
inclusion or exclusion in such social constructions as
 Spaces of Dissent • 23

home, class, nation, rural, urban, core, and periphery

(1991: 82).

Like space itself, scale is not a thing, but rather a social relation-
ship that involves drawing, redrawing, and transgressing various
kinds of spatial boundaries. Scale is not simply there, but is
actively produced. As Neil Smith put it, “the continual produc-
tion and reproduction of scale expresses the geographical contest
to establish boundaries between different places, locations, and
sites of experience” (1992: 64).
From this perspective, then, there is a politics of scale. In the
same way that there is a representational politics involved in
defining the boundaries between public and private (Staeheli
1996), so too is there in defining boundaries across scale: the
authentically local or national against the foreign, or the scale of
the home against the world beyond (Marston 2004). Likewise, in
the same way that the representational politics of the public
sphere are grounded in a more concrete set of dynamics in public
space, so too are a representational politics of scale grounded in
more concrete efforts to either contain or expand the geogra-
phies of connection that constitute a given political movement,
governmental architecture, or economic network.
Boundaries are thus embedded in complex hierarchies of power.
Politics revolve not just around the transgression of a boundary,
but rather in the reconfiguration of the relationships between
different kinds of boundaries. Smith’s concept of “jumping scales”
operationalizes this perspective on the politics of scale. Within
Smith’s framework, different actors deploy power by seeking to
define—or to transcend—the scope or extent of a set of social
relations. Scale is a bounded space; a temporarily frozen set of
sociospatial relations. It provides an analytical lens on how differ-
ent kinds of spaces and spatial relationships provide interacting
media through which different agents either press or inhibit signi-
ficant social change. With respect to the geography of dissent, then,
in this book I will be more interested in how the complex bound-
ary politics of scale work in the context of different kinds of spatial
media. Certainly the concrete spaces that provide the immediate
24 • Boundaries of Dissent

setting for spectacles of dissent—the streets, plazas, and parks

where bodies assemble in space—will provide an important focus,
but so too will other kinds of spaces.

Mediated Spaces
The limitations of Habermas’ account of the historical devel-
opment of the public sphere go beyond his conceptual under-
standing of the relationship between publicity and difference,
however, or his reading of history. Picking up where Fraser left off,
Staeheli has suggested the problems with dominant social scien-
tific accounts of the public sphere are that they almost entirely
miss the inherent spatiality of publicity and of citizenship. First,
scholars often assume a thoroughly uncomplicated relationship
between the social construction of publicity and privacy, and their
mapping to space. From this perspective, the boundaries between
public and private are clear and unwavering; public space is simply
where public actions take place. Against this, Staeheli
argues—following Fraser—that the distinctions between public
and private are socially constructed and that there is a politics
behind the very distinctions. More than this, however, there is no
neat correspondence between the content of people’s actions and
the spaces in which they occur.
A second problem is of representation. In privileging the
concrete spaces of bodily interaction—the traditional public
space—the problem of difference and representation is simply
deferred elsewhere (Barnett 2003). The problem of representa-
tion is itself wrapped up in the problem of mediation; that
communication does not travel across any space transparently.
Although the “end of public space” thesis that flows from Haber-
mas’ narrative tends to be drawn in part around the argument
that the public sphere is increasingly mediated—and thus that
the concrete spaces of bodily interaction have declined in con-
temporary importance—this occludes two significant points that
are as much empirical as they are conceptual or theoretical. First,
even the grounded bodily interactions of the material public
spaces of the city are mediated interactions, shaped by all manner
 Spaces of Dissent • 25

of discourses about who is to occupy space and how. Second, and

conversely, it confuses the medium for the social practice, tending
to ascribe an almost ideal quality to print and electronic media
that obscures not only the active and creative ways that individu-
als and groups use different media—one can consider the simple
way that activists of all stripes use phone and e-mail communica-
tions to organize more grounded political activities—but also the
political economy of communications. Communication, put
simply, is work. It involves the active organization and transmis-
sion of meaning and information across space.
Champions of the “end of public space” thesis would surely
point out that the problem with the increasingly mediated pub-
lic sphere is precisely its political economy; that the “mass” in
mass media refers to the very fact of cultural production under
multinational capitalism. Perhaps. Yet such a perspective fails to
explain history. It fails to explain why, for example, an activist
black counter-public sphere emerged in the American South
after World War II despite dominant white control of commu-
nications media, nor how contemporary antiglobalization
activists are able to exploit the very technologies of communi-
cation that are associated with globalization itself. On the other
hand, it fails to explain the degree to which the state itself is
fully mediated.
Research in social movement theory on framing explicitly
takes account of the communicative aspects of social movements
and of the larger public worlds in which they are projected. Yet
my focus is somewhat different from this movement-based one. I
am not so much interested in just how dissenting actors rationally
frame their dissent, but also in how various meaning-carrying
media serve as virtual spaces through which relationships
between citizens, publics, and state are constituted. Put differ-
ently, how do various actors seek to constitute the public in ways
that serve to position their political project as just and legiti-
mate—as “public”—and others as not? More broadly, how do
different kinds of spaces become active media through which
boundaries between publicity and privacy are drawn in practice,
and with that the distinctions of citizenship itself?
26 • Boundaries of Dissent

In contemporary mass-mediated protests, communications

networks provide a particularly important medium of contest.
Indeed, arguably every significant protest movement over the
past few decades—from the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s,
to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, to the Zapatista upris-
ing in 1994—have been heavily shaped by communications
media. Adams (1996) suggests that in assessing the connections
among scale, communications, and politics it useful to distin-
guish between the “content” of media and the “context,” and
explores how “subordinated groups reach beyond the boundaries
of place through communication media to substantiate their
political claims, create openings for new ideas of scale and new
scales of connection, and thereby challenge the social hierarchies
embedded in pre-existing territorial contexts” (1996: 420). Using
the example of the American Civil Rights movement he writes,

Many observers, including significant portions of the

Black community, initially thought that to attack so small
a piece of the segregation system as a bus seat or a “White
only” stool at a lunch counter could not make a differ-
ence. The tactic was effective not because of the territory
it claimed, but because news of the cruel response it
provoked became emblematic of racial oppression when
carried on the media and aroused the sympathy of dis-
tance referenced publics (1996: 435).

Both a public bus and a lunch counter were public by virtue of

their nominal accessibility to “the public.” Yet the Civil Rights
movement highlighted that the boundaries that defined such
spaces offered highly differential access based on race. By trans-
gressing the racial norms of behavior associated with these
spaces, activists challenged not just the specific spaces in ques-
tion, but an entire social order. Such tactics, Adams shows, were
effective to the degree that these spatial statements could be
translated elsewhere. Through a strategic geography of protest
aimed in large part at securing media attention, activists engaged
a larger world of distant publics. Moreover, this was a political
 Spaces of Dissent • 27

movement that engaged in a politics of scale that not only undid

the racial logics of local public spaces, but also “produced a last-
ing change in Southern territorial practices, and a 30-year swing
toward federalism” (Adams 1996: 436). Whether a given event is
covered, in what venues, before which mediated publics, with
what meaning-laden representations, with what influence are all
central questions in the way that communications mediates the
scale politics of political dissent.

Law and Public Order

More broadly, public spaces dramatize larger social orders. How
we behave in public, how we expect others to behave, and how
we imagine public space tells us much about our ideas about
social order itself. “As a legal entity, a political theory, and a mate-
rial space,” Mitchell argues, “public space is constructed through
a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, order and disorder, ratio-
nality and irrationality, violence and peaceful dissent” (1996:
155). More than simply a setting for difference, then, public
space is that complexly interwoven setting where the relationship
between citizen and state, power and resistance, identity and
marginality come together—in particularly visible ways—in and
through space. Public space is where legitimate citizens take part
in legitimately public activities and, in so doing, reaffirm their
relationship to a state that defines those very boundaries:
between the legitimate and the illegitimate, the properly public
and private.
In this sense, the regulation of public space is bound up in the
regulation of the nation-state as a whole. This is particularly
apparent when considering the relationship between public space
and law. Law is perhaps the most obvious codification of struc-
tures of citizenship. It represents a heavily formalized set of codes
that determine the boundaries of inclusion in a community and,
with it, establishes a hierarchy of rights. Law determines who is
allowed to do what, under what conditions, where. Because “law
making is power making,” as Benjamin put it, it is “an immediate
manifestation of violence” (1978: 295). Citing Benjamin, Mitchell
28 • Boundaries of Dissent

argues that “law making . . . may be an immediate manifestation

of violence . . . [but it] is also a means for dominant interests to
avoid violence by maintaining social order and control” (1996:
295). Put differently, power always involves a dialectic between
visible and invisible, public and private, latent and active violence.
As a crystallization of power, law itself embodies this dialectic.
For Mitchell, there is a fundamental tension in the very notion
of public space. Violence “is considered within the law to be fully
transgressive of the boundaries of appropriate behavior in public
space.” Yet the history of public space shows that it is often “only
by being violent that excluded groups have . . . forced the liberal-
ization of public space laws” (Mitchell 1996: 156). In crafting the
boundaries of acceptable behavior in public space through the
medium of law, then, the state also plays a heavy role in defining
public space itself.
But as Mitchell explains, this dialectic of violence is itself
bound up in a dialectic of scale. If, as he shows, laws always have
specific histories and geographies, law is also by definition uni-
versalizing: “Law seeks to enact a set of codes that are placeless
and timeless, that are, in the name of justice, free from the vari-
ability of local contingency” (1996: 172). By definition, law “must
be transferable from one context to another.” It is, put simply, an
abstraction that seeks to regularize the bounds of proper and
improper behavior across an expanse of space. In this sense, law
is essential to the ongoing production and reproduction of the
nation-state.
The geography of law is complex, however, given form and
shape through various kinds of boundaries. Although public space,
for example, is as much as anything a legal category, enforced
through the weight of state power, it in turn is wrapped up in other
legal boundaries. Boundaries delineate legal territories at larger
scales through the mechanism of jurisdiction. Like all boundaries,
though, the boundaries of jurisdiction are simultaneously material,
practical, and discursive. As Richard Ford argues,

Territorial jurisdiction produces political and social iden-

tities. Jurisdictions define the identity of the people that
 Spaces of Dissent • 29

occupy them. The jurisdictional boundary does more

than separate territory; it also separates types of people:
native from foreign, urbanites from country folk, citizen
from alien, slave from free (1999: 844).

Through these boundaries, law thus structures identity itself in

the series of categories it ritualizes: citizen vs. alien, criminal vs.
law-abiding public, independent citizen vs. object of state inter-
vention. Like scale more broadly, for Ford “territorial jurisdiction
. . . is simultaneously a material technology, a built environment,
and a discursive intervention” (1999: 855).
At the same time that law involves the constant drawing and
redrawing of social boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, so too
are these dynamics often explicitly spatial. As Nick Blomley
shows (1994), much of the story of the relationship between law
and geography can be told by reference to scale and boundaries.
Modern law is fundamentally linked to the modern state and to
its centralizing and territorializing practices.

The construction of that which is deemed law thus rests on

the definition of a violent world of nonlaw. The inscription
of a frontier—which may be figurative, temporal, and
spatial—is integral to this process (Blomley 1994: 124).

The territory beyond law is that which is beyond the state. Law is
thus a crucial mechanism through which states intervene in the
dynamics of dissent and sets the very boundaries by which it
is measured. If communications provide one kind of spatial
medium through which the politics of dissent are played out,
then law provides another.
In entering into this interpretative politics, states also shape
the contours of dissent. In general terms, states set the normative
boundaries of legitimate dissent and the objects of intervention.
Primarily through the mechanism of law, states determine who is
invested with what rights, and with that determination intervene
in identity itself. Legal discourse and state practice constitute all
manner of subjects through these mechanisms: from welfare
30 • Boundaries of Dissent

mothers to immigrants and would-be terrorists, to prostitutes

and the homeless. Most fundamentally, then, in the management
of conduct, state practices specify the contours of who is allowed
to do what, where.

Reading the Riot

This book examines relationships between public dissent and
state power, and draws on a larger body of scholarship about
power and resistance, identity and otherness, law and disorder,
citizenship and marginality (Brown 1997; Hubbard 2001; Mitchell
2003a; Sharp et al. 2000). Although there is a rich body of scholar-
ship on the complex spatial dynamics of protest politics as resis-
tance (Adams 1996; Miller 2000; Routledge 1994, 2003), less
thoroughly studied—or theorized—is the view not from resistant
groups challenging authority through their occupation of space,
but rather from the authority that views such occupations as ille-
gitimate [1]. As part of a broader pattern of “contentious politics”
(Martin and Miller 2003; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001), riots
present often radical challenges not only to state-imposed author-
ity, but also to state-centered discursive orders. As such, they can
provide a lens on larger structures of citizenship.
Riots are one kind of dissent in public space, with an important
place in the history of social change and in the development of
the modern state. Riots have typically challenged state-imposed
order, either by directly defying state authority—as in, say,
the 19th century draft riots in the United States (Headley
1873)—or by providing alternative normative orders of the sort
that E. P. Thompson famously discussed (1971), and often in
serving as vigilante justice of sorts (Gilje 1996). Riots are, in short
and by definition, beyond the law. As such, riots also have a long
place in legal tradition. In such tradition, riots were in essence
what officials of the state claimed them to be. One riot act from
1771 Pennsylvania described a riot as

any persons, to the number of twelve, or more, . . . unlaw-

fully, riotously, and tumultuously assembled together, to
 Spaces of Dissent • 31

the disturbance of the public peace (An act for preventing

tumults and riotous assemblies 1771).

On the occasion of such disturbances, a representative of the

state was dispatched to the scene to read the riot act, in excruciat-
ing detail. Once complete, all of those within the immediate area
had an hour to return to the private spaces of their homes. In
essence, the state temporarily removed the most basic of liberal
citizenship rights—that of assembly—from an expanse of (typi-
cally urban) space.
In an era of protest permits and mass-mediated curfew decla-
rations, the practice of reading the riot act seems rather arcane.
Yet the practice of withholding rights to particular public spaces
in particular times in the interest of preserving state-imposed
order is still with us. So too are the politics of riots. What pre-
cisely constitutes a riot is often in the eye of the beholder and
wrapped up in larger identity politics. Writing in the late 1950s,
for example, George Rudé argued that the most typical English
usage of the word “mob” was as a generic term that applied to
crowds engaged in a wide range of activities—from strikes to
political protests—who were typically “frequently assumed, with-
out further investigation, to be the passive instruments of outside
parties and to have no particular motives of their own other than
loot, lucre, free drinks, or the satisfaction of some lurking crimi-
nal instinct” (1959: 1–2). For Rudé such interpretations symboli-
cally denied citizenship to those disrupting norms of public
order by virtue of their presumed inability to maintain the
bounded and self-interested behavior of the proper citizen.
Action was not intentional and reflective, but rather impulsive
and guided by outside interests, thus rendering it illegitimate.
Discourses of community, scale, and citizenship thus intersected
in hegemonic readings of public dissent.
A generation of scholars has followed Rudé in challenging this
perspective, arguing that riots and other disorderly public events
are neither particularly unique nor inscrutable. Instead, they
reveal the complexities of power and identity, citizenship and
marginality, law and (dis)order. In so doing, they offer insight
32 • Boundaries of Dissent

into social and historical change more broadly. The interpretive

politics that distinguish a riot from a protest from a gathering on
the street are seldom clear or uncontested. Even where there is
broad agreement that a given event is, in fact, a riot, there may be
vastly diverging interpretations of the meaning of the event in
question. Indeed, the events to which the colonial antiriot act
was designed to respond were subsequently interpreted by histo-
rians and others as the beginnings of the American Revolution.
Riots are perplexing in large measure because they upset stan-
dard norms about the practice of dissent in public space. As one
study of reactions to the riots of the 1960s put it,

the riots were not orderly gatherings that proceeded dur-

ing the daytime along fixed and highly visible routes
selected well in advance. To the contrary, they were with-
out leaders and outside the law. The rioters did not march
past a single spot or assemble in a special place; nor did
they identify themselves to newsmen or sign their names
to public statements (Hill and Folgelson 1969: 6).

Riots are thus events that take place in public space, but which
conform to none of the ordered logics of the more acceptable
performance of a protest. For critics, riots typically are in part
illegitimate because they make no political sense. They appear
random and without logic. Yet this assessment of political and
moral legitimacy is itself conditioned on a spatial interpretation.
Protests are spatially concentrated. They establish a clear demar-
cation in space—one unlikely to be breached—between those
performing dissent and those observing the spectacle from a dis-
tance, whether public bystanders or prime-time television view-
ers. To the degree that a protest march moves through space, it is
along a clearly defined path: one set out beforehand, and thus
without surprise. Finally, the legitimate protest takes place before
the clarifying light of day, where all the ordered ritual of its per-
formance could be clearly seen by all.
Contrast this with the riot, where bodies are diffuse in space,
where their movement through space is unpredictable and poten-
 Spaces of Dissent • 33

tially chaotic, where there exists no movement leader to articulate

a legible political statement before a larger public, and where the
confusion and ambiguity of it all is greatly enhanced by the fact
that the spectacle generally occurs at night [2].
Public unrest like riots also presents challenges for social scien-
tific explanation. In his work on the Zoot Suit Riots that took
place in Los Angeles in 1943, Eduardo Obregón Pagán (2000)
argues that scholars all too frequently rely on general historical
explanations—that, for example, the violence was a product
of per vasive white racism, fanned by sensational news
accounts—and in the process miss more complex spatial expla-
nations. Instead he shows that the conflict emerged out of quite
grounded encounters in public space that brought together race,
class, and masculinity in tense ways. Similarly, Marilynn Johnson
(1998) argues that research on riots is burdened by limitations
around gender that are both conceptual and methodological. In
the first, scholars often assume that the active agent of riot vio-
lence is male, and that women typically do not participate. Meth-
odologically, historical research often relies on arrest records as a
proxy for active riot participation. However, arrest records them-
selves reflect the biases of the officers.
Riots are thus political spectacles that periodically open up cri-
ses of representation. They commonly elicit contentious debates
about the nature of political representation. Citizenship—as
either normative right or abdicated responsibility—is presented
for critical scrutiny before the glare of the public spotlight.
Secondly, and consequently, the crisis of political representa-
tion—in essence, of who state power serves, and who it victim-
izes—is also inseparable from a crisis of symbol: namely of how
to discursively order such spectacles, events that are interpreted
as both beyond the law and beyond the bounds of normality that
allow for easy sense-making and truth claims.
Such episodes—and in particular how they are interpreted and
in turn managed—are useful diagnostics of power (Cresswell
2000). They can tell us much about the existing contours of citi-
zenship, of who has the power to do what, to represent truth in
what ways, with respect to what kinds of distributions of identity
34 • Boundaries of Dissent

and subjectivity. Riots are a useful lens on citizenship precisely as

they represent in some sense the breakdown of citizenship. They
are also useful lenses on the geography of citizenship because these
issues are always articulated spatially. The unsettled boundaries of
dissent that accompany interpretation of riots and other such epi-
sodes of public dissent reveal how those boundaries—including a
variety of geographic boundaries—are otherwise ritualized in
everyday practice.

Conclusions
Spectacles of dissent—protests, demonstrations, riots, and so
forth—bring together citizenship, law, and public space in com-
plex and dynamic ways. My question is less about why particular
spectacles of dissent happen than about how different actors
marshal various kinds of resources to press their claims in and
through space. Public space provides the most concrete and
bodily medium of dissent. However, in the same way that we
need to avoid black-boxing who and what is public, we also need
to avoid taking for granted that the concrete geographic settings
of public space are the only meaningful analytical entry point for
studies of protest. Indeed, my argument in this book is that a
narrow focus on simply the publicly visible manifestations of dis-
sent as they take place in public space is increasingly limiting in
today’s protest landscape[3]. To put this differently, we need to
consider exactly what public space is in the contemporary satel-
lite-connected, Internet-enabled, globalized world in which we
now live.
Although urban public spaces have been and continue to be
the primary geographic venue of protest politics, it is hard not to
recognize the degree to which the dynamics of protest have
spilled far beyond the boundaries of the city. On one hand,
examples like the Zapatista movement show that high-profile
political spectacles can take place in locations far removed from
urban public spaces. The instantaneous communications of
CNN and the Internet greatly expands the geographic realm in
which protest events can potentially insert themselves. On the
 Spaces of Dissent • 35

other hand, protesters frequently travel great distances, across

international boundaries even, to access specific protest sites.
There is thus a dual sense in which the geographies of contempo-
rary protest politics have changed.
The past decade has witnessed renewed interest in boundaries
across the social sciences and humanities. In part, they represent
a metaphor for something else: the nature of identity, the distri-
butions of power, the distinctions of citizenship. Boundaries as
deployed in the context of contemporary critical social theory
provide a conceptual language to talk about all of these issues in
more flexible and dynamic ways than other metaphors of terri-
tory or place or space. They call attention not to the content of
objects, but to the edges that define them.
I advocate here a focus on boundaries, however, that is rather
more broad than the largely linguistic focus of poststructuralist
literary theory and philosophy. Boundaries are both discourses as
well as tangible material things that divide people and things in
ways both violent and nurturing, constraining and enabling,
spectacular and mundane (Kirby 1996). The framework I present
in this book focuses on dissent as a fundamentally spatial prac-
tice. Rather than simply asserting yet again the importance of a
geographic perspective, however, I use an analytical focus on
boundaries and scale to critically analyze how a spatial perspec-
tive sheds important light on the dynamics of contemporary pro-
test, and with it the nature of democratic citizenship itself.
Of necessity, then, it also means carefully avoiding—to the
degree possible—fetishizing space as an object with an inert and
autonomous existence. Space is but one aspect of social life more
broadly. As such, in the following chapters, I adopt a largely anti-
disciplinary perspective, drawing on the innovations not only in
geographic theory, but also in cultural and political theory, as
well as social history.
Spaces of dissent are one media through which citizenship is
constituted. Bringing together theories of public space with theo-
ries of boundaries and geographic scale can offer a more nuanced
understanding of both the geography and the politics of dissent.
Likewise, conceiving of public space less as just a thing than as a
36 • Boundaries of Dissent

networked web of intersecting spaces and spatial relation-

ships—from the normalizing space of the law to the symbolic
spaces of different kinds of communications media to the roads
and highways that move people and things across space—can
provide richer insight into how power is both normalized and
contested. Although I am thus interested in offering a more com-
plex view of the spatiality of dissent, I am also interested in a
more complex view of the politics of dissent.
Indeed, American political history has often hinged on the
intersections of scale, law, and citizenship. In the early republic,
both the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, Blomley argues,
had quite clear—and irreconcilable—perspectives on the rela-
tionship between the local and the national as they intersected in
the state. For the Federalists, the local was the site of narrow and
particular interests, and the setting most likely to be dominated
by entrenched, antidemocratic elites. For the Anti-Federalists, by
contrast, the local was the site of authentic democratic practice.
“Localized political life,” Blomley writes of this vision, “was now
recast as virtuous and ontologically necessary” (1994: 118). The
federalizing state was thus, for the Anti-Federalists, threatening
to the very principles of democratic life understood fundamen-
tally as embedded in the local.
This political calculus of scale runs throughout American his-
tory. As the next chapter suggests, perhaps at no time was this
more explicit than in the 1960s, as questions of race and citizen-
ship were cast with explicit reference to geographies of scale and
boundaries. When conservatives argued for “states’ rights” they
did so to blunt social change in local places so as to preserve what
they regarded as their organic character. That character, in turn,
was defined with reference to a public—a “Silent Majority”—that
had not been public enough. In the next chapter, we examine
how various actors shaped the dynamics of citizenship and scale
in the late 1960s.
 3
1968: Drawing the Boundaries of Dissent

The streets are yours. Take ’em.

— H. Rap Brown (in U.S. Senate 1967a: 33)

[M]en must fear the law to respect it. The Good Book
says that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and
the fear of the law is the beginning of good behavior.

— T. W. Davidson, lawyer from Houston

(in U.S. Senate 1967a: 9)
1968 was a momentous year in the history of contemporary
political dissent. Significant public spaces around the world
became the contested sites in which questions of power and iden-
tity played out before national and international audiences.
These confrontations pitted protesters—often students—against
the cold machinery of the state: police officers, military troops,
tanks.

37
38 • Boundaries of Dissent

In May, the public spaces of Paris became the stages on which

activists dramatized issues of alienation and marginalization.
The movement began with students at Naterre University pro-
testing conditions there, but quickly drew in students from the
Sorbonne as well. University administrators responded to the cri-
sis by calling in the security forces, which only served to heighten
the tensions. The conflict culminated in the “Night of the Barri-
cades,” where activists closed off sections of the medieval Latin
Quarter by sealing its narrow and winding streets with barri-
cades. Just as the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune had done
nearly a century earlier, protesters asserted their rights to French
society by asserting their rights to city spaces. On the other side
of Cold War geopolitical Europe, activists called for democratic
reforms in Prague. Again, significant public spaces, such as
Wenceslaus Square, became the sites in which dissenters drama-
tized their concerns.
And then . . . Chicago. The events as they came together on the
streets of Chicago began long before the Democratic Convention.
Activists from around the country had been planning massive
demonstrations for months. Organizers had traveled across the
country to solicit support for the antiwar protest. For activists,
Chicago was the stage to dramatize antiwar dissent. In late July,
organizers applied for permits for two demonstrations: one a
march to Grant Park, and the other from there to the Chicago
Amphitheater, which would be the site of a massive rally. In addi-
tion, organizers also requested permission to use various city
parks—among them Grant and Lincoln Park—as places to sleep
and to assemble more informally. In short, protest organizers
insisted on both broad access to city public spaces, as well as spe-
cific access to the protest platform of the amphitheater. Although
they recognized potential difficulties with their demands on the
city’s public spaces—their planned march through the streets
would, for example, thread its way through black and working-
class neighborhoods that might not take kindly to the intrusion of
middle-class white protesters and large numbers of police offic-
ers—they still believed that the political stakes were too high to
cede strategic spaces to the ordered status quo.
 1968 • 39

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley could not have held a more

contrary view of the meaning of the city and its public spaces.
Daley privileged order above all else. He articulated this perspec-
tive in public statements such as, “No one is going to take over
the city. … We’ll permit them to act as American citizens and in
no other way” (in Farber 1988: 122). It was also reflected in
concrete decisions by Daley and his deputies. They effectively
rejected, for example, all of the permits requested by the protest
organizers, citing security concerns among others.
The conflicting perspectives came to a head in particular over
access to two parks: Lincoln Park and Grant Park. Officials in
part rejected the permit to sleep in Grant Park because they felt
it would sully what the Deputy Mayor called the “city’s living
room” (Epstein 1970: 198). The metaphor seems particularly
telling: a space both central and for display, but also a private
space for a bounded community. Despite their lack of permits,
activists assembled in the park anyway, with people like Tom
Hayden declaring that “Lincoln Park is our territory” (in Farber
1988: 175). The first night, Chicago Police Commander Robert
Lynsky ordered his officers to aggressively clear the park, believ-
ing that not doing so “would be interpreted by the demon-
strators as signs of weakness and would only lead to further
confrontation” (in Farber 1988: 174). The police cleared the
park without serious incident, but the next day similar tensions
exploded in Grant Park. The incident began a period of violent
conflict between protesters and police, which was dramatized in
the media.
The conflict over the right to dissent in Chicago was a familiar
one that had played out in myriad locations in the previous years.
On one side were advocates of social change who made their
claims in and through public space. The whole point, of course,
was to upend the everyday orders of public space, and with it
society itself. Disorder was a necessary tactic to a greater purpose.
On the other side were those suspicious of or hostile to the dis-
ruptions that such public dissent implied. To allow dissent was by
definition to allow disruption of everyday order and to open up
the possibility of anarchy.
40 • Boundaries of Dissent

Yet if the conflicts at issue in Chicago reflected long-standing

tensions over citizenship and dissent in a democratic society,
there were two factors that made Chicago somewhat unique.
First, the police charged with enforcing local state authority did
so with massive, almost theatrical, violence. Not only were the
protesters beaten—sometimes viciously—but so too were inno-
cent bystanders, including news reporters. All of this opened up
interpretive questions of exactly what to name the events in ques-
tion. Was it a protest? A demonstration-cum-riot enacted by
what Daley referred to as “a lawless violent group of terrorists”
(in Farber 1988: 203)? Or was this instead an event that suggested
a vastly different understanding of the causal agents behind pub-
lic violence; a “police riot”?
The second, and closely related, factor that made Chicago
unique was the intensely mediated nature of the events. If it was
hyperbole to suggest that the whole world really was watching the
events that took place on the streets of Chicago—as protesters
chanted to television cameras—virtually everything was captured
by network news cameras and broadcast on evening news pro-
grams. In a way not unlike the impact of prime-time news footage
of Vietnam on public opinion about the meaning of otherwise
distant violence, the coverage of Chicago greatly enhanced the
profile of the event and lent it an immediacy that made the issues
all the more intensely felt.
In some sense, 1968 marked a turning point in which protest
became global. A common experience of consumerism, bureau-
cratization, and Cold War militarism helped create the concrete
conditions for significant protest movements with common
goals. At the same time, the new world of television news linked
these protests in symbolic terms as well. Yet although there was
much that linked these protests across national boundaries, it
was also the case that they were particularized by their place
within a world carved up by nation-states. As much as many pro-
tests shared a common set of symbols and concerns, they also
took place within unique contexts of national identity and state
power. In this chapter, I situate my discussion by focusing on
how various actors intervened in the dynamics of publicity, scale,
 1968 • 41

and protest in 1968. I do this by analyzing how public debate

about the meaning and significance of urban unrest—incidents
referred to variably as protests or riots, depending on the political
ground on which one stood—was expressed in state policy. In
particular, I examine the historical geography of the Federal Anti-
riot Act. The law emerged as a response to ghetto riots spurred by
what its sponsors conceived of as deviant black men, but which
government prosecutors first used to prosecute high-profile and
mostly white New Left activists in Chicago, and later—as we will
see in Chapter 4—most extensively used to manage a crisis in a
space quite far removed from the city spaces for which its authors
originally designed it.

Riots, Citizenship, and the City: J. Edgar Hoover and the

Rabble-Rousers
The events of Chicago must be placed in larger context. Ameri-
can cities, according to Monkkonnen (1981: 539), have his-
torically been characterized “as violent, noisy, chaotic, and
disorderly.” Such notions of disorder, he further points out, have
in turn been linked to understandings of specifically urban public
spaces; urban because cities “are characterized by relatively inten-
sive use of public space by people of all classes,” and public
because it is only in public that such disorder is made visible—as
he says “open to observation”—by the public. But if there is a
general history of viewing the city as a site of disorder, there is a
more specific history, and indeed geography, by which particular
cities are understood in specific times as disorderly in specific
ways. The re-emergence of the city as a site (and sign) of disorder
in the 1960s was particularly intense. Yet it also took on a partic-
ular form, however, in which unrest in particular cities was
understood by many to be symptomatic of a larger national
problem. In turn, this national problem also raised concerns
about a larger, and more sinister, geopolitical problem.
In the Civil Rights era, activists dramatically challenged
the politics of American citizenship in a variety of venues,
including on city streets. No issue better crystallized how power,
42 • Boundaries of Dissent

identity, and space came together in complex and contentious

ways during this time period than the so-called race riots
that swept Amer ican cities. In 1967 alone, the Kerner
Commission—charged by President Johnson with studying the
riots—found 164 “disorders,” eight of which they classified as
“major,” characterized by

1. Many fires, intensive looting, and reports of sniping

2. Violence lasting more than 2 days
3. Sizeable crowds
4. Use of National Guard or federal forces as well as other
control forces (National Advisory Commission on Civil Dis-
orders 1968: 113)

The Commission classified an additional 33 incidents as “seri-

ous.” In short, the Commission found that roughly 25 percent of
disorders reported in the first 9 months of 1967 were severe
enough to categorize as riots. According to a Senate subcommit-
tee, the riots resulted in a reported 83 deaths and 1897 injuries.
Damage estimates in the most severe riots initially ranged as high
as $25 million in Detroit and $500 million in Newark and only
later dropped to $10.2 million and $45 million, respectively
(National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 1968: 115).
With respect to the geography of the disorders, the Commis-
sion found that the majority of the most severe disorders were
limited to major urban centers—though not with any particular
regional pattern—and localized for the most part in black ghet-
toes. The Commission found the riots to have emerged in most
cases amid what it referred to as “an increasingly disturbed social
atmosphere, in which typically a series of tension-heightening
incidents over a period of weeks or months became linked in
the minds of many in the Negro community with a reservoir of
underlying grievances” (National Advisory Commission on Civil
Disorders 1968: 6). This “reservoir of grievances” included unem-
ployment and poor housing tied to a reorganization of the eco-
nomic geography of capital and the social geography of race and
class: the in-migration of poor blacks—many of them migrants
 1968 • 43

from the South—into inner-cities, and the out-migration of

whites and middle-class blacks, as well as capital. Yet the most
serious grievances the Commission identified—and the most fre-
quent catalysts of unrest—were policing practices. Indeed, the
Commission cited otherwise routine encounters between police
and black residents as the most common proximate cause of riots.
The Kerner Commission’s conclusions were controversial and
were hardly the only word on the riots. In 1968, these riots were a
common topic of discussion in American magazines, news-
papers, and television shows, as was the status of the nation’s cit-
ies. The sheer volume of coverage of this issue in news reporting,
commentary, and letters to editor suggests that, as a phenome-
non that was taken to represent a larger national problem or
threat, the riot as a marker of urban disorder was troubling for
many [4].
The interpretive politics surrounding the riots were staked out
around a variety of metaphors. Some commentators, for exam-
ple, drew comparisons between the riots and carnival, in which a
catharsis accompanied the upending of everyday life. In survey-
ing the damage of a major riot that hit Detroit in 1967, Mayor
Jerome Cavanagh characterized participants in the riots there as
“filled with a carnival spirit. … Rioting has become a lark, a joke.
There’s a sense of euphoria in the air” (Newsweek 1967a: 19).
Much of what Newsweek referred to as the “carnival gaiety” of the
riots revolved around looting, which involves the transgression of
a number of boundaries, spatial and otherwise. The most basic
transgression involved ownership itself. Marx’s notion of the
“fetish of the commodity”—in which objects are invested with an
independent existence and character—itself is a spatial relation-
ship. Store windows separate the pedestrian on the street from
the object of intended desire inside. Looting, as the Situationists
argued in response to the Watts riots (Situationists International
1965), literally shatters that spatial relationship and the social fic-
tions they argued structure it.
Others argued not that the world of civilization was turned
upside down in the carnivalesque riot, but rather that civilization
was completely evacuated from ghetto spaces. In touring the
44 • Boundaries of Dissent

devastation of Newark, for example, New Jersey Governor Rich-

ard Hughes argued that “[t]he line between the jungle and the
law might as well be drawn here as anywhere in America” (News-
week 1967b: 22). In their rhetoric, law-and-order politicians and
citizens constructed ghetto spaces as, on one hand, largely passive
victims of outside forces. On the other hand, politicians and
other public figures rendered the passivity of the ghetto before
the onslaught of these outside forces as a function of a socially
and morally bankrupt subject population. Ghetto residents were
seen here as capable of managing neither their own conduct nor
that of others. Citizenship thus became a responsibility abdi-
cated, by force of either will or nature. Law-and-order politics
thus located responsibility for the riots in a variety of sources,
from communist and other Left ideologies to federal government
programs designed to ameliorate ghetto conditions. Yet they
invested no figure with as much causal significance as the “out-
side agitator.”
The concern about urban riots led many—politicians, aca-
demics, the public (or more precisely, a public)—to demand
answers. The question of how different actors understood the
broader significance and root causes of the riots is important
enough. Even more important, however, is how those assess-
ments shaped the concrete actions of various state officials: the
politicians who crafted laws that attempted to criminalize a par-
ticular kind of political activity, and the government officials
charged with implementing those laws. In response to broad
concern about riots, President Johnson established a National
Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, whose task was both
to understand the “origins of the recent major civil disorders in
our cities” and, more importantly, to make recommendations on
“methods and techniques of averting or controlling such dis-
orders” in the future (U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study
Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities
1976: 491).
To this end, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover appeared before the
Commission to discuss the role of a new kind of radical in these
disorders: what he referred to as “rabble-rousers.” As Hoover
 1968 • 45

argued to the Commission, these individuals represented a new,

highly mobile threat. By taking advantage of contemporary
communications and transportation technologies, these rabble-
rousers—who, as he put it, “initiate action and then disap-
pear”—were largely responsible for the unrest plaguing American
cities. To keep close tabs on just such “subversives,” Hoover had
established the Rabble-Rouser Index in 1967, a list that specified
who these people were and where they lived. Hoover understood
these subversives in explicitly racial terms: as “racial agitators and
individuals who have demonstrated a propensity for fomenting
racial discord” (U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Govern-
mental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities 1976:
511). The politics of race also encompassed a politics of space and
scale, as FBI instructions specified that “only individuals . . . of
national interest be included on this index.” And “[p]articular
consideration,” instructions continued, “should be given to . . .
those . . . who travel extensively.” From this perspective, Hoover
placed the problem of the nation’s cities at the foot of a new kind
of individual: mobile and unattached to particular locales, these
outsiders freely moved across state boundaries, stirring up trouble
where it had not previously been. Like the public bandits of the
Depression years, Hoover again resurrected the mobile criminal
as necessitating state intervention in the interest of protecting the
public [5].

The “Outside Agitator” and the Duties of Citizenship

Hoover’s perspective reflected a broader understanding of the
changing political geography of dissent in the United States. In
this section, I explore how various government officials made
sense of the crisis of citizenship presented by the “race riots” that
wracked American cities and with this crisis set the ground for
particular kinds of government intervention. Although this is
a rather broad subject, I focus on one particular aspect here:
namely, how conservative politicians worked to place responsibil-
ity for the riots in the hands of a conspiracy of individuals, con-
structed as both deviant black men, but also as criminal outsiders.
46 • Boundaries of Dissent

Moreover, I argue, in doing so, those articulating this law-and-

order rhetoric made arguments about the status of both the ghet-
toes and the citizens who inhabited them.
The arguments presented by law-and-order critics hinged on
notions of citizenship, law, and public space. Here public
space—and by extension society itself—was normatively envi-
sioned as safe and orderly. As one political pamphlet entitled In
Support of the Law and an Orderly Government put the matter:

Under the guise of Right of Assembly minority groups

have been permitted to assemble on public streets to
block traffic, at entrances to buildings to prevent entrance
of others, and to disrupt whole communities with total
disregard for the rights of others (Congressional Record
1968: 9181).

In this interpretation, the rights of citizens were being trampled

by a variety of less-than-citizens who were turning public spaces
into spaces of danger and chaos.
As they sought to respond to this crisis of citizenship and of
government, conservative politicians relied on similar notions of
order and public space. One of the more vocal Southern law-
and-order Democrats was Robert Byrd of West Virginia. On the
occasion of unrest associated with the 1968 sanitation workers
strike in Memphis, Byrd interpreted Martin Luther King’s role in
the following way:

Martin Luther King fled the scene. He took to his heels

and disappeared, leaving it to others to cope with the
destructive forces he had helped to unleash. And I hope
that well-meaning Negro leaders and individuals in the
Negro community in Washington will now take a new
look at this man who gets other people into trouble, and
then takes off like a scared rabbit (Byrd 2004).

For Byrd, citizenship involved the responsible conduct of one’s

own behavior in conformance with the rule of law. King violated
the duties of citizenship both by transgressing the bounds of
 1968 • 47

acceptable behavior in public space, but also by geographically

avoiding the consequences of such a transgression. This is the
essence of the outside agitator argument: that individual inciters
enter localities from elsewhere, spark unrest that otherwise
would not occur, and then disappear, leaving local communities
to deal with the aftermath.
In the more formal venue of a student newspaper editorial,
Byrd had earlier offered a more comprehensive perspective on
the politics of public dissent (1967), attempting in the process
to make sense of a contradiction. On one hand, various law
enforcement officials had argued strongly for the outside agitator
thesis. On the other, prominent officials such as Hoover himself
had argued the riots were spontaneous events without significant
outside influence. Byrd sought to split the difference by arguing a
more subtle outside influence. The cause-and-effect relationship
for Byrd was not a direct one of bodies in space, but rather a
larger context shaped by the circulation of ideas and images.
Byrd cited as influences a variety of essentially moral failings of
society: the decline of family and public religion, the tolerance of
criminality, and a decadent culture. All of these influences pro-
vided the context of tolerance that allowed and even encouraged
transgressions of law as evidenced in the riots.
Yet Byrd also went on to “especially cite,” as he put it, another
factor that did explicitly link the outside agitators to the ghetto
riots: the influence of the media in granting them “unwarranted
publicity” that both amplified their words and circulated them
across space, investing them with causal force. “The incredible
over-emphasis given these new revolutionaries in the news has car-
ried their influence—distorted beyond proper proportion—into
the remotest corners of the land” (Byrd 1967). Whether Byrd
argued the indirect media-based perspective, or the more direct
bodily perspective he used to critique King, the ultimate argu-
ment was the same: that public unrest in place was a product of
outside influence, and thus illegitimate.
Byrd was prominent in Congressional debate on the subject of
political dissent and frequently introduced commentary into the
record, both by himself, as in the editorial example above, and by
48 • Boundaries of Dissent

others with whom he sympathized. One such piece of opinion

was delivered in a speech before the West Virginia State Bar Asso-
ciation by then-president William C. Beatty. Beginning with the
assertion that “the greatest current threat to free expression in the
country is the so-called doctrine of civil disobedience” (1967),
Beatty went on to discuss the connection between democratic
rights of speech and assembly in public space on the one hand,
and order on the other. First, he argued, the moral boundaries of
law were absolute and clear. The notion—central to the Civil
Rights movement—that unjust laws ought to be transgressed was
thus illegitimate. Second, Beatty connected this to an argument
about assembly and speech. As he put it,

Civil disobedience is neither non-violent nor peaceful.

Massing and marching and blocking streets from intended
use is not peaceful assembly. Interfering with the function
of public universities is not academic freedom, nor is the
use of despicable four letter words by bearded youth in
public gatherings. Trespass and destruction of property is
certainly not freedom of expression. But all of these things
are mob action tailor-made for those few malcontents
who desire a total breakdown of organized society (1967:
34346).

For Beatty, then, the dissent of the day transgressed a number of

normative boundaries. Speech that ought to be rational and dis-
embodied too easily spilled into action, action too easily dis-
rupted the “intended use” of public space—intended, that is, for
the use of a public constituted by Nixon’s famous “Silent Major-
ity”—and the content of speech itself too easily took on a deviant
character when articulated by “bearded youth” uttering “four-let-
ter words.”
Like Byrd, Beatty’s argument ultimately rested on a notion of
citizenship fundamentally different from that articulated by the
dissenters in the streets. Citizenship in this vision was not a bun-
dle of rights always imperfectly granted by the state, but a set of
duties and responsibilities to be performed [6]. As he put it,
 1968 • 49

“[t]his country cannot accept a doctrine which allows a citizen to

pick and choose the obligations of citizenship he will practice”
(1967). To admit the notion that law—and by extension citizen-
ship—was socially constructed was to invite anarchy. The under-
standing of public space was similarly bluntly commonsensical.
This line of argument—in which a duty-based understanding
of citizenship and a “raceless” identity politics (Goldberg 2002)
was used to interpret events in public space—was quite common
in interpreting the significance of the riots. Indeed, Hoover
argued a similar point when he said in an interview that “[w]e
are living in an age when too many citizens are thinking about
their rights and privileges and too little about their duties and
responsibilities” (Beatty 1967). Here the duties and responsibi-
lities to which Hoover was referring were those owed ultimately
to the state as the bearer of the “public good.”
Responsible citizens, critics charged, would not willingly
engage in public protests, much less riots, without being coerced
or otherwise incited to do so. The collective violence that erupted
in city after city was thus not a legitimate expression of general-
ized black rage, but rather the influence of a conspiracy of indi-
vidual malcontents who incited actions that otherwise would not
have occurred. Along these lines, one South Carolina editorialist
wrote that “the minority does not rise up spontaneously to
parade, to demonstrate, and eventually to riot, without the aid of
professional agitators” (O’Connor 1967). From this perspective,
the moral lines that distinguished a parade from a demonstration
or a riot were unclear at best, and the influences that moved the
empirical phenomena from one to another not easily contained.
This editorial, entitled “The North Meets the Outsider,” made
clear the professional agitators in question were not only illegiti-
mate by virtue of their “vocation” and politics, but also by virtue
of their geographic origin. Authentic politics in this vision—which
included authentic collective anger, presumably—was the prov-
ince of the local. By placing agency elsewhere—in the bodies of
deviant outsiders—critics sought to occlude any potential politi-
cal meaning such events might elicit. The author’s point in the
editorial was that in the same way that Southern cities had
50 • Boundaries of Dissent

previously been disrupted by the “outside agitators,” Northern

cities were now also the victims of these same individuals. If the
North saw itself as above sectional finger-pointing, then it was
only consistent to argue that the previous performances of dissent
in the South were equally illegitimate. The editorial thus con-
cluded that “[w]e sympathize with our northern brethren in their
time of trial, but we find the methods by which they meet that
trial unworthy of solid government and sound sense” (O’Connor
1967).
Law-and-order critics typically articulated the deviant outsider
theme with reference to a national geography that opposed North
and South, Big City from Small-Town America. Much of these
arguments, of course, were wrapped up in the spatial politics of
segregation that divided both the political space of the nation and
the public spaces of Southern towns and cities. At times, however,
the geography of identity politics was writ significantly larger.
Far-right organizations like the John Birch Society depicted the
unrest in U.S. cities as evidence of Communist conspiracy.
The film Anarchy USA (Griffen 1965) was one product of the
conspiratorial Cold War geopolitical inflection of the outside
agitator thesis. The film opens with images of a young man
speaking before a crowd in Watts about moving out of the
ghetto and going after white people, and then quickly cuts to
an image of a black preacher in a church. The juxtaposition
seems to suggest little difference between the two. The com-
mentary then discusses unrest and riots elsewhere, explaining
that “anarchy … was something we read about in our news-
papers that was always happening in other countries. … It
could never happen here.”
The film then shows a series of news images of riots in the
United States, culminating in a stream of images and commentary
about Watts. The narrator explains the devastating impact of the
violence in Watts and says that “the spectacle of American soldiers
shooting it out with American civilians was even more shocking
than the rioting itself.” The film then presents viewers with an
image of a newspaper headline that reads “Anarchy, USA,” and the
observation that “this time it wasn’t a foreign country. This time it
 1968 • 51

was Anarchy, USA.” Noting the odd confluence of unrest in time

and space, the narrator says that “it was as though an unseen hand
had given the signal.” The remainder of the film then presents an
argument that a conspiracy of outside influence was responsible
for the riots and that Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King
were bearers of such subversive influence.
An only somewhat more subtle editorial from Decatur, GA,
focused on Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader
Stokely Carmichael as an outsider not only by politics and geo-
graphic origin, but by origin of birth. Opening with the provoca-
tive statement that “[s]ome years ago a man wandered up from
the country of Trinidad” (Congressional Record 1967a), the
author writes that Carmichael “goes around the country preach-
ing his doctrine of sedition, hate, insurrection, anarchy, murder,
and arson.” For this editorialist, Carmichael’s deviance was not
only because he was a black militant who seemed not to know his
place, but because he was born elsewhere.

Reading the Riot Act: The H. Rap Brown Act and the
Politics of Scale

[T]he most serious domestic crisis facing America today

is the ominous threat of riots and mob violence that
hangs like a pall over many of our cities. We believe that
the vast majority of the people share this opinion. … The
majority of the committee has responded to this crisis by
ordering a bill which will give added protection to roving
fomenters of violence, such as Stokely Carmichael and H.
Rap Brown.

— U.S. Senators James Eastland and Strom Thurmond

(U.S. Senate 1967b: 15)

The enactment of this bill would cramp the style and

make subject to criminal prosecution the Stokely Car-
michaels, the Martin Luther Kings, the Floyd McKissicks,
52 • Boundaries of Dissent

and others of their kind who preach anarchy and disobe-

dience to the law.

— Congressman O. C. Fisher of Texas

(Remington 1973)
Perhaps the most fascinating geopolitical irony surrounding
response to the riots was that of conservative Southern Con-
gressmen who, while on one hand lambasting the illegitimate
extension of federal authority over “states’ rights” that sur-
rounded civil rights measures, argued on the other for aggressive
federal intervention to protect local communities against the
threat of unrest. Representative William Cramer (D, FL)—one
of the primary sponsors of the Federal Antiriot Act that emerged
out Congressional debate on the issue of riots—argued for
vigorous federal action to counteract the “outside agitators.” As
he put the matter, “more police officers and even improved riot
control will be of little value when the Stokeley Carmichaels and
H. Rap Browns and other professional rabble-rousers who are
inciting these riots escape the jurisdiction of these local authori-
ties and hide behind the protective shields of state borders”
(1968).
Brown and Carmichael were the two men most frequently
cited in Congressional debate as responsible for the riots that
devastated city after city in the “long hot summers” of 1967 and
1968. Brown and Carmichael were charismatic, often polemical,
leaders. Their politics reflected a turn in the Civil Rights move-
ment away from the more accommodationist stand of Martin
Luther King—and the nonviolent tactics that went along with
it—towards a more militant black nationalism. Their focus was
not on being granted the full rights of citizenship by a white
majority, but rather to carve out a separate black public sphere in
which black identity and citizenship were defined on their own
terms. Brown argued, for example, that “[i]ntegration was never
our concern” and that it was “impractical” (1969: 56). In his
memoir Die Nigger Die! Brown illustrated his point with refer-
ence to the spatial politics of famous Civil Rights movement
struggles. “I resented somebody telling me I couldn’t eat at a
 1968 • 53

certain place,” he wrote, but “[i]t wasn’t that I wanted to eat

there” (1969: 56). Likewise, he argued that “[i]f I had a free
choice I’d sit in the back of the bus” because “[t]hat’s where the
heater is.” Their focus was not on the creation of an integrated
society with integrated spaces—restaurants, movie theaters, bus-
ses, and public streets—but rather on what Brown explained as a
desire to let “white folks know that they could no longer legislate
where we went and what we could do” (1969: 56).
It was not just what Brown and Carmichael said that mattered,
however, but where. When Brown, for example, said, “The streets
are yours. Take ’em,” he did so not on the static space of an edito-
rial page, but rather on a platform in a ghetto in Cambridge, MD.
Moreover, he did so just before the neighborhood erupted in a
riot. Brown’s speech—or rather a tape recording and transcript of
it—made its way into testimony before the Senate Judiciary Com-
mittee as it was evaluating the appropriate federal response to
riots such as that which took place in Cambridge. It was intro-
duced by Cambridge Police Chief Bryce Kinnamon and played
before the committee. The speech opened with Brown answering
Langston Hughes’ question, “What happens to a dream deferred?”
with the claim that,

Detroit answers that question. Detroit exploded. New

York exploded. Harlem exploded. Dayton exploded. Cin-
cinnati exploded. It’s now time for Cambridge to explode,
ladies and gentlemen (U.S. Senate 1967a: 31).

According to Kinnamon’s testimony, upon finishing the speech,

Brown led a group through the streets of Cambridge towards the
business district, along the way “instructing them to burn and
tear Cambridge down, to shoot any policeman who tried to
interfere” (U.S. Senate 1967a: 31). As Kinnamon recounted, a
riot began shortly thereafter. “I am confident,” he concluded to
the committee, “that his speech was the sole reason for our riot”
(U.S. Senate 1967a: 38).
For conservative law-and-order senators, examples like this were
proof enough that the dynamics of dissent had fundamentally
54 • Boundaries of Dissent

changed for the worse and that strong federal intervention was
needed in response. The result was the Federal Antiriot Act. Its
sponsors sought to write the logics of the outside agitator thesis
into law as a way to assert federal authority over the conduct of dis-
sent in local public spaces. They did this by reworking the legal-
spatial logics of the crime of incitement to riot, making what had
historically been a local crime into one of national scope. The law
targeted anyone “who travels in interstate or foreign commerce or
uses any facility of interstate or foreign commerce, including, but
not limited to, the mail, telegraph, radio, or television, with intent”
to incite, organize, participate in, or in any way contribute to a riot
(Antiriot Act 1968). The law, then, applied to explicitly public and
collective expressions of either real or threatened violence. It
applied to that realm of politics where the legitimate “protest” is
marked off from the illegitimate “riot.” And it worked its legal
leverage precisely by blurring the distinction (itself blurred in real-
ity) not just between the legitimate protest and the illegitimate riot,
but between actual, bodily travel and the “facility of ” such travel:
the less tangible spaces of connection created by the television and
radio signal and the telephone line.
How, then, did the authors of the H. Rap Brown Act envision
the connection between individual intent and collective actions
in space as they were played out in these riots? There were really
two aspects to this question. The first involved assessment of
what might be a called a micro-politics of bodies-in-space. This
issue turned on one of language: What constitutes a riot? Histori-
cally, riots have typically been defined as three or more people
“tumultuously” assembled in public space, involving violence
against either people or property. Those responsible for the riot
were in fact the actors who perpetrated the violence. The cause-
effect relationship was a direct one and one localized in space.
The second issue involved a macro-perspective that linked
thought and (bodily) action across space. Incitement to riot
begins the abstraction process whereby speech can have indirect
causal force. One can thus be prosecuted even if not directly
involved in violent acts merely by establishing a relationship
between public speech uttered by one actor (or group of actors)
 1968 • 55

and actions enacted by another. This abstraction is at once spatial

in nature, as intentional thought located in one place is projected
with causal force to another.
Congressional debate around the definition of riot began with
the traditional definition. The problem this presented for a fed-
eral antiriot law was how to establish a clear link between speech
on one side of a political boundary and action on the other.
Typically, incitement involved a quite localized spatial stage and
almost immediate temporal cause-effect relationship. Someone
stood up before a crowd and uttered inflammatory speech that
could be directly linked to subsequent actions by others. To argue
for an expansion of both the spatial and temporal scale of riot
incitement was thus to fundamentally change the legal logics of
the crime itself. Proponents of the bill thus sought to relax the
narrowly drawn causal requirements.
Johnson’s Attorney General Ramsey Clark argued that local
laws were sufficient to the task of prosecuting instances of riot
incitement and also cautioned that the blurred legal language of
the proposed law raised constitutional questions. Without a
clearly established connection between the intention to incite a
riot and the overt actions to do so, the law could be used to blunt
all manner of political speech and activity that had only very
indirect relation to unrest and violence. Clark thus suggested an
alternative definition that defined a riot in traditionally narrowly
drawn terms but also limited it further by specifying it to cover
groups of 20 or more bodies in space.
Despite Clark’s warning, the bill’s sponsors pushed it through
Congress with the broader definition intact, attached as a rider to
the famous Civil Rights Act of 1968. The political irony was strik-
ing, and Strom Thurmond—one of the most fervent supporters
of a federal antiriot law—ultimately voted against it because it
would mean voting for the extension of federal authority over,
among other things, housing (Epstein 1970). Byrd supported it
only grudgingly, feeling the housing provisions were too strong
and the antiriot provisions too weak. The Federal Antiriot Act
was signed into law in April of 1968, with its authors defining
riot as
56 • Boundaries of Dissent

a public disturbance involving (1) an act or acts of vio-

lence by one or more persons part of an assemblage of
three or more persons, which act or acts shall constitute a
clear and present danger of, or shall result in, damage or
injury to property of any person or to the person of any
other individual or (2) a threat or threats of the commis-
sion of an act or acts of violence by one or more persons
having, individually or collectively, the ability of immedi-
ate execution of such threat or threats, where the perfor-
mance of the threatened act or acts of violence would
constitute a clear and present danger of, or would result
in, damage or injury to the property of any other person
or to the person of any other individual. (Antiriot Act
1968).

Like the traditional legal definition, a riot could consist of as few

as three people. The antiriot law also included the typical “clear
and present danger” qualifier so dominant in 20th century public
forum law. The doctrine was designed to preclude government
intervention into regulating speech. It was not enough to show
the mere advocacy of violence, no matter how extreme. Rather,
the legal test was whether speech led to actions that constituted a
clear threat to the integrity of the state itself.
Also discussed during the hearings preceding passage of the
act was the possibility it might be used to temporarily detain
people during the course of a riot situation. One U.S. District
Judge from Texas, for example, wrote to the Committee urging

that the act be amended to require that anyone caught

under or apprehended in the act of “inciting a riot,” that
the bail bond be in such an amount as to make sure that
the accused be confined until such a time as the danger of
riot has passed in whatever locality the riot may be immi-
nent (in U.S. Senate 1967a: 8).

The act itself never included such language, but it was clearly
envisioned by some as providing additional legal leverage to
detain people during the course of unrest so as to help quell it.
 1968 • 57

The degree to which some perceived the act as a response to

black militants was reflected in an alternative name attached
to the legislation: the H. Rap Brown Act [7]. Supporters of
the bill routinely named Brown and Carmichael—as well as
moderate Civil Rights leaders like King—as the primary insti-
gators of the riots, as well as the targets of the legislation. Then
House Republican leader Gerald Ford was referring to these
men when he said of the antiriot law, “If it does nothing but
shut up the loudmouths, it will be helpful” (Congressional
Record 1967b).
For many quite beyond black militants like Brown and Car-
michael, the act was interpreted as a threat. Labor unions expressed
concern that it would limit their organizing activities. The newslet-
ter for the International Woodworkers of America, for example,
published an editorial entitled “Antiriot Bill Dangerous” that
expressed concern about the “built-in danger of this bill to the
trade union movement.” The editorial painted a hypothetical sce-
nario in which a labor organizer crossed state lines to advise a local
union on a strike that later turned violent. Under such a circum-
stance, the editorial argued, the organizer could be prosecuted
under the antiriot law. Obviously responding to such concerns, the
authors of the act made a point of noting that it excluded the
“legitimate objectives of organized labor,” with the caveat that they
be “orderly and lawful.” The authors of the act were also careful to
ease the fears of those concerned that the act constituted a further
undermining of states’ rights already eroded through the Civil
Rights years. The act made clear here that transgression of local
and state law would remain the province of their respective legal
authorities.

The Chicago Eight

In practice, the Justice Department first used the H. Rap Brown
Act in United States v. Dellinger et al. to prosecute individuals
involved in the events of Chicago, 1968. In the aftermath, critics
chastised the Chicago police and Mayor Daley for their handling
of the events. Yet many others supported them, blaming both the
58 • Boundaries of Dissent

dissenters as well as the media for broadcasting protesters’ per-

spective [8]. Chicago became something of a political Rorschach
test for ideas about dissent and public space. Although the federal
antiriot law was in force during the summer of 1968, Clark
refused to prosecute anyone under the statute. The following
year, the newly elected Nixon administration focused blame
instead on the movement leaders. The violence on the streets
of Chicago would not have occurred if the organizers had not
willfully violated the law and challenged police to enforce it.
Moreover, relying on the new law, they argued that the defen-
dants’ incitement of the riot was a product of their reliance on
connections and resources that stretched far beyond Chicago
itself. Their crime was thus federal.

Mobility, Public Space, and the Antiriot Act

Chicago’s ultimate meaning was resolved in part in the high-
profile legal trial U.S. v. Dellinger. The trial was partly a political
show that the Justice Department used to dramatize its interest in
shrinking the boundaries of dissent. It provided an object lesson
for the public about the limits of legitimate dissent. It was also
the first significant use of the federal antiriot law. By targeting
high-profile New Left leaders—in this case the group that
became known as the Chicago Eight—the government hoped to
deter future unrest.
The trial was a spectacle from the beginning. The defendants
were repeatedly reprimanded by the judge for their courtroom
behavior. Abbie Hoffman blew kisses to the jury on the opening
day of the trial and when asked while on the stand for his place of
residence, he replied, “Woodstock Nation.” Bobby Seale—the
only black defendant—repeatedly asserted his right to represent
himself in the trial and was ultimately ordered bound and gagged
for his repeated outbursts, including calling the judge a racist.
The defendants were ultimately convicted of violating the anti-
riot law and each sentenced to 5 years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
Much of the defense argument centered on the connection
between citizenship, law, and space. Although the issue at stake
 1968 • 59

was at its core about the limits of free speech in a democratic

society, the defense team interpreted much of this issue with
reference to the geographic conditions under which speech is
uttered and invested with persuasive force. Speech does not exist
in a vacuum, but rather establishes relationships among and
between speaker(s) and audience. These relationships, lawyers
argued, were fundamentally spatial relationships.
The legal brief submitted by the defense team for its appeal of
the conviction included an extended analysis of the dynamics of
scale and dissent, and of the manner in which the antiriot law
attempted to intervene in these dynamics. “[A]t no time in the
history of the nation,” the defense team argued, “has legislation
been enacted so bluntly and directly for the overt purpose of
limiting freedom of speech and belief unhampered by concern
for constitutional limitation” (Kinoy, Schwartz, and Peterson
1971: 41).
One focus of the appeal revolved around free speech and
public space. What rights did the defendants have to assemble in
Lincoln and Grant Parks if they had no legal permits to occupy
these spaces? The issue was an important one because the plain-
tiffs argued that the activists’ presence in the parks was illegal
and that in forcibly removing people from those spaces, the
police were merely enforcing the law. Here the defense drew on a
1965 ruling by the Supreme Court in Shuttlesworth v. Birming-
ham. That case had involved a Civil Rights march that took place
without a permit. The court concluded that under conditions in
which good faith efforts to obtain a permit were thwarted with-
out reasonable explanation, citizens had a right to access those
public spaces anyway. By drawing on this ruling, the defense
sought to legitimize the activists’ place in the parks and there-
fore to argue that any resulting violence was a product of the
Chicago police’s trampling of their constitutional rights of
assembly.
As fascinating as this legal issue was, it was only indirectly
related to the Antiriot Act per se, which was more substantially
focused on the relationship between mobility and assembly.
There, the defense argued the law was unconstitutional because
60 • Boundaries of Dissent

of its overbroad definition of the crime in question: the riot. The

brief painted the issue in sinister terms:

The logical consequences of this astounding definition of

“riot,” a definition absolutely unique in either the com-
mon law or statutory history of the offense known as
“riot,” are frightening to contemplate. The harsh reality of
contemporary American political life reveals that there
is not a single manifestation of mass popular political
expression which could not today fall within the broad
prohibitory sweep of this extraordinary definition of
“riot”(Kinoy, Schwartz, and Peterson 1971: 68).

Their concern was that the law failed to mandate explicit per-
sonal involvement in the violent unrest, or at least a direct rela-
tionship between intentional speech by an individual and violent
action by others.
The defense then linked this definitional issue around the
antiriot law to its spatial implications. The defense recognized
that the broad definition of riot was necessary to the very logic
of the bill in defining the crime as federal. The Chicago Eight
were convicted of violating the Antiriot Act because of their
intent to incite a riot upon crossing state lines. Yet intent under
those circumstances could only be inferred based on their local-
ized actions in Chicago. The Justice Department lawyers, for
example, introduced testimony about public speeches made by
the defendants in Chicago advocating violence as evidence of
such intent. They never made any explicit connection between
actions of the defendants and the subsequent actions of others.
Moreover, such evidence alone failed to establish a federal juris-
diction.
Ultimately, the defense argued, by broadening the definition of
riot the authors of the Antiriot Act sought to shrink the bound-
aries of legitimate dissent by shrinking the geographic realm in
which activists could freely move. In particular, they focused on
the essential spatiality of that fundamental precept of democratic
society: freedom of expression. Free speech is inseparably linked
 1968 • 61

to freedom of assembly, which in turn is closely linked to mobility

rights. “The nexus between the right to travel and freedom of
expression,” the defense team argued, “lies in the very nature of
expression itself.” (Kinoy, Schwartz, and Peterson 1971: 99) Again,
the defense relied on Supreme Court precedent to make this argu-
ment, in particular Aptheker v. Secretary of State and Shapiro v.
Thompson. The first case involved a political radical whose pass-
port was revoked by the State Department to preclude his travel
outside the United States. The Court ruled that the State Depart-
ment’s actions in this circumstance constituted a violation of the
defendant’s constitutional rights: that they punished political ide-
ology rather than criminal acts. The brief quoted Justice Douglas’
concurring opinion:

Free movement by the citizen is of course as dangerous to

a tyrant as free expression of ideas or the right to assembly
and it is therefore controlled in most countries in the
interests of security. … This freedom of movement is the
very essence of our free society, setting us apart. Like
the right of assembly and the right of association, it often
makes all other rights meaningful—knowing, studying,
arguing, exploring, conversing, observing, and even think-
ing. Once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights
suffer, just as when curfew or home detention is placed on
a person (in Kinoy, Schwartz, and Peterson 1971: 99).

For the defense, mobility, speech, and citizenship were fused.

They found support for this perspective in another Supreme
Court ruling in Shapiro v. Thompson, where Justice Brennan
wrote:

This Court long ago recognized that the nature of our

Federal Union and our constitutional concepts of personal
liberty unite to require that all citizens be free to travel
throughout the length and breadth of our land uninhib-
ited by statutes, rules, or regulations which unreasonably
burden or restrict this movement.
62 • Boundaries of Dissent

It is worth noting at this point that this case involved a rather dif-
ferent circumstance in which a woman was denied state benefits
because she was a new resident, having previously moved from
another state. I will return to the tensions between different legal
framings of mobility in Chapter 6. Still, in this case, the defense
argued that the Court’s ruling reaffirmed that freedom of mobil-
ity was an implicit constitutional right.
The defense sought to show that the definition of riot written
into law was overbroad to the degree that it could be easily used
to punish thought rather than action, and that the effect was to
limit constitutionally protected political activity by placing
undue restrictions on the right to freely move. Moreover, move-
ment under the antiriot law included not only the movement of
bodies across space, but also the virtual movement of ideas and
symbols across the airwaves. In an increasingly mediated world,
such a law placed yet further restrictions on political activity. The
public, put simply, is by definition somewhere else. As such,
some kind of medium needed to facilitate the movement of ideas
across space. “In a society where distances are large and access to
the public media is essential to the effective communication of
ideas,” the brief continued, “freedom to move quickly from one
part of the country to another is an essential ingredient of the
effectiveness of First Amendment guarantees” (Kinoy, Schwartz,
and Peterson 1971: 99–100).
The defense thus argued that essential political activity has
always been bound up in worlds more expansive than the local.
The geopolitical calculus behind the antiriot law, they argued,
was an old one inseparably fused with “the concept of ‘outside
agitator’” (Kinoy, Schwartz, and Peterson 1971: 100). The very
concept reflected an effort by those resistant to social change to
close the gates around the local and to label as illegitimate such
public dissent. Digging back in history, the brief explained that
“so-called ‘outside agitators’”

have performed an indispensable function in our nation.

From the Boston Tea Party to the streets of Selma, Ala-
bama, their freedom to express their ideas, to seek change
 1968 • 63

and responsiveness on the part of government to the

needs of the people, and to travel to every corner of
the nation to do so, has long been the cornerstone of con-
stitutional protections (Kinoy, Schwartz, and Peterson
1971: 103).

The nation itself, in other words, was founded by “outside agita-

tors.” “[F]reedom of expression,” this argument concluded, “can
know no boundaries, and people must be free to move across
state lines and to use the facilities of interstate commerce for the
purpose of speech, discussion, and ‘agitation’” (Kinoy, Schwartz,
and Peterson 1971: 106).
In this sense the Federal Antiriot Act attempted to keep people
in their proper (and quite circumscribed) place by making use of
existing political boundaries. “Unlike any other federal criminal
statute which purports to meet and correct a social evil, the ‘evil’
here contemplated by those who drafted this legislation was ‘free-
dom of movement’ itself ” (Kinoy, Schwartz, and Peterson 1971:
100). That such a politics of scale and publicity was understood
in explicitly racial terms is clear enough from the testimony of its
sponsors. The geographic problem the Antiriot Act was crafted to
address was the public expressions of dissent by black Americans.
Such dissent was waged over and in America’s urban public
spaces.
Ultimately, the defense argued that the antiriot law would
limit constitutionally protected political activity. As they put it,

as long as this statute stands no American can be confi-

dent that he or she can even participate in, no less orga-
nize, any mass demonstration involving controversial
opposition to any policies of the government without fear
of prosecution under the act (Kinoy, Schwartz, and Peter-
son 1971: 73).

The case of U.S. v. Dellinger seems to suggest just such an inter-

pretation, as the instance in question involved an explicitly
political event, and the defendants were high-profile political
activists.
64 • Boundaries of Dissent

Containing Dissent
The H. Rap Brown Act was borne of a particular historical-geo-
graphical moment, one that put the nation-state itself—at least
in the perception of many—at some peril. Such larger peril, in
turn, was based on concern about a variety of people forcefully
putting themselves in places they did not belong. The H. Rap
Brown Act was thus a legal and spatial tool to control the public
spaces of urban America. In more specific terms, the law, both in
design and practice, was used to control dissent by New Left
groups precisely by regulating the spatial field in which they
moved. In crafting the bill, its authors proved themselves
astute—if reactionary—interpreters of the spatial politics of the
day: If a bunch of rabble-rousing communists and anarchists
were striking at the very heart of the nation through their appro-
priations of public spaces, and if those actions depended on
much wider nets of connection, the state should use federal
authority—its command of national space—to cut those connec-
tions and thus circumscribe the realm of protest politics.
The hope of such a policy was that protest itself would wither
away. Activist and Chicago Eight defendant David Dellinger later
argued that the passage of the Antiriot Act was largely successful
in limiting dissent. It “cut down,” he argued, “the number of per-
sons ready to commit themselves to antiwar organizing in the
newer, more effective vein, particularly persons with regular jobs,
family responsibilities, and more likely outreach to Middle
America” (1975: 56). For Dellinger, the Antiriot Act effectively
raised the stakes involved in confrontational protest politics, thus
eliminating more mainstream activists from the performance of
public dissent.
The antiriot law was not the only governmental product of
1968 and the concern about urban unrest. Like the H. Rap Brown
Act, Operation Garden Plot had been drafted by military planners
in 1968 to contain urban unrest. The plan specified general strate-
gies such as the deployment of large numbers of troops, a focus
on protecting life rather than property, and the establishment of
curfews that allowed for the easy identification and control of
deviant citizens, rabble-rousers, and so on. Garden Plot also
 1968 • 65

included specific plans targeted to each prospective trouble spot

(U.S. News & World Report 1968). These plans were drawn up
based on detailed on-the-scene geographic research. Given the
context out of which the plan emerged, it is no surprise that the
focus was squarely on urban America. The first deployment of the
plan, howe ver, was not in the spaces for which it was
intended—Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark—but in a decidedly
marginal space, which we turn to in the next chapter.
 4
Wounded Knee: Native Sovereignty and
Media Spectacle

On 27 February 1973, approximately 200 American Indian

Movement (AIM) activists and local residents began an occupa-
tion—ultimately to last 71 days—of the village of Wounded
Knee, SD, within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Indian Reser-
vation. Within a short time, the Wounded Knee site was sur-
rounded by an impressive show of government force: FBI agents
and specially trained federal Marshals equipped with high-tech
hardware provided, it was only later revealed, by the U.S. Army.
Just as importantly, a virtual army of both domestic and interna-
tional television and print reporters also surrounded the site.
As the site of a famous massacre of approximately 300 American
Indian men, women, and children at the hands of U.S. soldiers in
1890, Wounded Knee was a particularly charged geographic sym-
bol of the violence that accompanied American westward expan-
sion and state building (Brown 1971). By claiming this famous
historical site, the occupiers sought to raise awareness of American

67
68 • Boundaries of Dissent

Indian issues. More specifically and immediately, they sought to

bring attention to, and ultimately remove, what they claimed was a
corrupt reservation political structure. The occupiers were partic-
ularly concerned with the political rule of new Pine Ridge Tribal
Chairman Richard (Dick) Wilson, whom they accused of corrup-
tion and of aggressively stifling political dissent. Such relatively
modest goals, however, were tied into the far grander issue of
treaty rights, the boundaries that spatially defined those rights,
and the claims of sovereignty for which they stood. As such, the
occupation questioned the very basis on which the most powerful
nation-state in the world existed. The Wounded Knee occupation
thus placed American state authority and national identity in radi-
cal question.
To make this point in clear language, on 10 March the Wounded
Knee occupiers declared a new state: the Independent Oglala
Nation (ION). Activists now declared the boundaries that defined
this contested site “borders,” whose status was to be aggressively
maintained by a “border patrol.” With dramatic images of Indian
“warriors” occupying their bunkers to protect this territory
(Figure 4.1) gracing the pages of major national magazines like
Newsweek and Time (Newsweek 1973; Time 1973a, 1973b) and the
screens of prime-time television, the Wounded Knee occupation
was an early example of the power of mediated protest. Wounded
Knee was what one commentator at the time referred to as “a test-
tube case of confrontation politics and its symbiosis with the
media” (Hickey 1973: 8) and what critics referred to as an example
of “guerrilla theater.” Writing in The Nation, for example, Des-
mond Smith (1973: 806) lamented that Wounded Knee consti-
tuted “an example of a new and expanding strategy of political
manipulation that neatly circumvents the ordinary process of gov-
ernment [and] makes a direct and powerful appeal to the public
through the mass media.” Through AIM’s successful “media
coup”—in which reporters from all of the major news organiza-
tions in the United States, as well as a significant foreign contin-
gent, quickly rushed to the scene of the story—Wounded Knee
became “[o]vernight … the national headline and Washington
found AIM’s media gun pointed at its head” (Smith 1973: 808).
 Wounded Knee • 69

Fig. 4.1 Activists guarding perimeter of Wounded Knee occupation site. (Photograph
courtesy of UPI/Corbis, used by permission.)

Because of this, the occupation also attracted the intense inter-

est of the federal government, which responded with one of the
most significant deployments of American state power in domes-
tic space in the 20th century. For the White House, the Wounded
Knee occupation was an issue of national concern. Although
senior Washington officials tried to “low-key” the incident,
as Attorney General Richard Kleindienst put it early in the occu-
pation (Felt 1979: 268), they recognized their authority and
responsibility to exert that authority in the “national interest.”
Particularly as media coverage and public attention raised the
profile of the occupation, senior Washington officials insisted on
a policy of restraint. In spatial terms, this policy was manifested
in a strategy of containment. Rather than forcibly remove the
occupiers, federal forces worked to limit the movement of peo-
ple, things, and images back and forth across the boundary that
defined the occupation site. Yet just as the conduct of the drawn-
out occupation was fluid and changeable, so too was the status of
the various boundaries that constituted the spatial form of this
political spectacle. The contentious manner in which questions
of authority and power on the Pine Ridge Reservation played out
70 • Boundaries of Dissent

during the occupation was particularly apparent with respect to

the various roadblocks and perimeters that determined who and
what had access to Wounded Knee.
In this chapter, I analyze the complex geographical dynamics
of this political event. By drawing, in particular, on the large col-
lection of FBI documents made publicly available in the years
since the occupation, I explain the actions and motivations of
various state officials as they worked to manage a significant
challenge to their authority. As a relatively early example of a
televised protest—and because of the large number of docu-
ments available on the event—the Wounded Knee occupation
sheds important light on the geographical dynamics of contem-
porary mass-mediated protest and on how states act in the con-
text of such political spectacles. This chapter focuses in particular
on how the issues of power and authority at the root of the con-
flict were played out over a series of boundaries that constituted
this contested geographic space: what one government official
referred to as a “protest platform.” Such analysis, I argue, allows
insight into not just this important historical event, but also
broader issues of contemporary political protest and state power.

Mapping a Disorder, Containing Wounded Knee

The Wounded Knee occupation presented U.S. officials with a
relatively new kind of political spectacle. Authority for govern-
ment forces at Wounded Knee ultimately rested in Washington
with the Attorney General formally, but only in close consulta-
tion with key Nixon White House staffers. In his memoirs, one of
these staffers, Bradley Patterson, explained the general conditions
that prompt White House involvement in domestic disorders.
For the most part, he noted, the White House does not intervene
in domestic crises, which are generally the province of local
authorities. The White House may intervene in domestic crises
“when they affect federal laws,” however, and “especially when the
perpetrators act under the banner of a cause which evokes wide-
spread public sympathy—in America and overseas” (Hoffman
1973; quoted in Patterson 1988: 72). What distinguished these
 Wounded Knee • 71

events for Patterson was their sheer spectacle: their scale-leaping,

boundary-blurring use of mediated space. “The use of force may
be threatened, and sometimes employed,” he continued,

but the confrontation is staged rather than waged, and it is

mob leaders rather than marching armies who are raising
hell. There is an element of guerrilla theater in such face-
offs; the substantive cause or historical grievances may
often be displaced or overwhelmed by the sheer drive for
publicity for its own sake. The players then become actors
on a world stage. Lenses, microphones, and newswires
project the leaders’ “demands” and all the on-scene devel-
opments to an intercontinental audience. … Because of
nationwide—in fact worldwide—attention … such crises-
as-theater … escalate to White House control (ibid.).

Through new media technologies, activists changed the very

nature of the political event. Protest now had the potential to
become a theatrical drama. That dramatic quality, as well as the
fact that the state was implicated in the drama, required active
intervention to shape the public conduct of dissent.
Patterson’s case study for just such acts was the Red Power
Movement and what he called its “three-act drama”: the takeovers
of Alcatraz Island in 1969, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)
headquarters in Washington in late 1972, and a few months later,
Wounded Knee. All three takeovers took place under the Nixon
administration, and the same administration officials handled all
three at the White House level. All three “acts” also involved highly
public spectacles of Indians occupying symbolic sites in order to
make demands vis-à-vis the state. The Wounded Knee occupation
was the final act of the drama. With Wounded Knee, what Patter-
son referred to as the “crisis-management machinery” of the state
was above all managing a media spectacle in which the state’s legi-
timacy itself was on center stage. Patterson noted that during the
occupation a “Harris poll is published, disclosing that 93 percent
of those questioned are following the Wounded Knee events and
that 51 percent favor the Indian occupation.” Patterson also noted
72 • Boundaries of Dissent

the public looking on was not only national, but global. “Just how
far-flung is the attentive public becomes clear,” he suggested, “in a
memorandum from the U.S. Information Agency”(Hoffman
1973; in Patterson 1988: 79), which stated that

if Indians are killed, we can surely expect sharp and wide-

spread foreign condemnation of this U.S. Government
action. It would be a particularly unpropitious time, giv-
ing Arab governments an excuse to fog up the terrorist
issue.

Wounded Knee represented—certainly for AIM, but also for the

state itself—a challenge to federal authority. This challenge
placed the legitimacy of the American state at issue on a global
stage.
The occupation also raised similar issues for the state vis-à-vis
a domestic public. In an article published in Time during the
conflict, for example, one unnamed “administration official”
claimed the occupation represented “an arguable case of treason”
(1973a). “If we treat it like spitting on the sidewalk,” he contin-
ued, “then the whole fabric of the country goes down the drain.”
For this official, the occupation of Wounded Knee was thus a
political question only to the degree that it confused what for
him was the more important conclusion: that it was a defiance of
federal authority as codified unambiguously in law. Failure to
deal firmly with such defiant illegality would only invite further
such challenges in the future. As such, the state must use the
occupation as an object lesson for the American public.
For White House officials like Patterson, however, the reality
was far from unambiguous. Wounded Knee presented the state
with an event that left open the question of where and how the
line between political protest and illegitimate dissent was prop-
erly drawn. Because of the intense public attention in this
occupation, and the broad public support for it—support that
fundamentally understood Wounded Knee as a political
event—Patterson’s crisis-management machinery was dealing
with both a law enforcement problem and a political problem.
 Wounded Knee • 73

Further, it was largely the media that served to publicly blur this
distinction in practice. The state was thus also dealing with a
public relations problem, which translated into a policy of
restraint. The spatial expression of this policy of public restraint
was a strategy of containment.

Defining a Protest “Platform”

The occupiers made claim to the Wounded Knee site through a
range of tactics. AIM leaders knew their presence at Wounded
Knee would continue only so long as they had the attention of
“the public.” Just as importantly, however, the occupation was
constituted by a quite concrete reconfiguration of space. Teams
of occupiers built bunkers and roadblocks of their own, both of
which marked the boundary that delineated the space of the
occupation. In a strategy at once symbolic and practical, road-
blocks were constructed out of rusted and burned-out cars.
The occupiers also used decoys, likely drawing on techniques of
guerrilla warfare learned by veterans in Vietnam, to give the state
a much-exaggerated impression of the weaponry available within
Wounded Knee. At the same time, the occupiers and their sup-
porters used various strategies to transcend those boundaries.
The occupation could not be maintained without the ability to
move people and things, ideas and images, back and forth across
the boundary that defined the occupation site. One critic writing
at the time in The Nation suggested that AIM’s creation of a kind
of semipermeable boundary influenced media coverage; as he
put it, the occupiers “totally controlled the village of Wounded
Knee, keeping the federal government out, but (by means of back
trails) selectively allowing the press in”(Smith 1973: 808).
If AIM and its supporters worked to make Wounded Knee
highly public and to extend its visibility as widely as possible, the
state worked to contain the site and to minimize its visibility.
Although ultimate authority for federal forces at Wounded Knee
rested in Washington, in the hands of Attorney General Kleindi-
enst, his Deputy Attorney General Joseph Sneed was responsible
for day-to-day “policy formulation and decision making at the
74 • Boundaries of Dissent

executive level” of the Justice Department during the occupation

(SAC San Francisco 1973). The specific instruments available to
Sneed included two separate divisions of the Department of Jus-
tice. The FBI’s role during the occupation (and indeed, before)
was to handle investigations of federal crimes. Within U.S. law,
the federal government has jurisdiction on reservations for
serious violations of law: murder, rape, and so on. The activists’
burglary of the trading post and their seizure of hostages gave
the FBI authority for criminal investigation. The U.S. Marshals
took primary responsibility for establishing and maintaining
the perimeter around Wounded Knee and the roadblocks that
formed that perimeter.
Sneed himself, as he later explained to an FBI interviewer, “did
not travel to Wounded Knee at any time [during the conflict], but
conducted business pertaining to Wounded Knee at his Washing-
ton, D.C., office”(SAC San Francisco 1973). Although he had nei-
ther been to Wounded Knee, nor was involved in negotiating with
the occupiers, Sneed explained to the interviewer that he retained
two mementos of the experience: the first a document authored
under his supervision called the White Paper on Wounded Knee,
and the second “a map of the occupied area with lines of demarca-
tion which he retained as a souvenir” (SAC San Francisco 1973).
The map encapsulated in graphic terms the essence of the occupa-
tion. The White Paper, in turn, explained the map.
As the White Paper recounted, Sneed’s initial spatial strategy
was to contain the Wounded Knee site through the use of road-
blocks and patrols as means to define an impervious perimeter.
In the same way that the occupiers used a range of tactics to
make use of various boundaries to further their ends, so too did
federal representatives. They did this by limiting the flow of
people, things, and symbols across the boundary established by
the federal perimeter. If food and supplies could not make it into
Wounded Knee, nor media images out, the standoff would end.
Or such was the intent behind this strategy.
The result, however, was rather different than intended.
Despite being surrounded by federal forces, the occupiers refused
to accede to government demands. With the public attention on
 Wounded Knee • 75

the occupation and the failure of negotiations, on 10 March

federal officials decided to change spatial strategy and remove the
roadblocks. According to the White Paper, there were two factors
behind the strategy shift. First, the Justice Department recog-
nized the materiality of the boundary, or more precisely, its
immateriality. “The roadblocks,” as they put it, “had not proven
effective in halting the flow of men and supplies in and out of
Wounded Knee.” FBI Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Richard
Held expressed concern that “because of the terrain it is entirely
possible all of the Indians could slip out of Wounded Knee dur-
ing the night and by tomorrow morning no one would be in
Wounded Knee.” Although he admitted this would pose no
insurmountable problem in the long-term—that the FBI “could
eventually locate the Indians”—such a “situation would be tre-
mendously embarrassing” to the FBI and the U.S. government
(Gebhardt 1973a). Likewise, federal attempts to exclude the
media from Wounded Knee proved ineffective and led to the per-
ception of censorship. With a large perimeter (20 km in circum-
ference), officials recognized that it was impossible to completely
seal access to Wounded Knee. The decision to remove the road-
blocks was thus based on the quite-straightforward hope on the
part of the Justice Department that “by lifting the roadblocks …
those inside Wounded Knee would come out and that the siege
would be broken and that would be the end of that episode”
(United States v. Dennis Banks 1974: 15,987).
A second, perhaps more important, factor was that the federal
roadblocks had entered into the symbolic politics of the conflict.
As explained in the White Paper, more than a question of dull
practicality, the federal roadblocks “seemed to serve as a symbolic
center for the occupiers’ militance” (Department of Justice
1973a: xix). In later trial testimony, Sneed further explained,

The whole occupation had a dramatic quality about it,

and we felt that attempting to withdraw our roadblocks
would—even if it failed—manifest a certain degree of
flexibility on our part, which would not be lost upon the
public (United States v. Dennis Banks 1974: 16,014).
76 • Boundaries of Dissent

The Justice Department was aware, through its keen attention to

media coverage and opinion polls, not just that the conflict was
being played out before a mediated public, but that it was losing
this aspect of the conflict. Government actions were thus based
on a calculation of how they would play on this very public
stage.
In a particularly clear example of the more complex symbolic
politics involved, Sneed was asked whether federal government
actions with respect to its roadblocks were guided by the pre-
sumption that “certain options might permit the view or increase
the view … that the so-called occupation of Wounded Knee
might be viewed or justified as an exercise of Indian self-determi-
nation on Indian land.” (United States v. Dennis Banks 1974:
16,012). In response, Sneed explained,

We were always aware of the dramatic quality of the occu-

pation of Wounded Knee for Indians as well as Americans
generally, and it’s quite clear that it was necessary to dem-
onstrate to the world as much restraint as we possibly
could, while at the same time fulfilling the mission that
had been assigned to us (United States v. Dennis Banks
1974: 16,013–16,014).

Early in the occupation the Justice Department became aware

that the use of the federal perimeter to draw a line around the site
of the occupation—both to mark that space as a site of disorder
and rebellion and to quite literally contain it—helped to create
the very spectacular space it was trying to close down. The Mar-
shals and FBI agents who imposed and regulated this boundary
were now wrapped up in a politics of publicity in which the
state’s own legitimacy was on stage.
Despite FBI concerns that the occupants would slip through
the perimeter at nightfall, leaving federal forces an empty occu-
pation site, AIM leaders were also interested in preserving the
symbolic space created through these roadblocks and perimeters.
An FBI report about an interview with one AIM representative
in New York City noted his argument that the
 Wounded Knee • 77

worst blow to Indian cause would be for all law enforce-

ment officials to leave Wounded Knee and abandon efforts
to subdue Indians there. Reasons are once pressure is off,
government will do nothing to help Indians and Indians
would look foolish occupying something no one cared
about (Acting Director FBI 1973a: 3).

For all the symbolic spectacle of the event, both the activists who
seized Wounded Knee and the federal officials trying to end the
occupation recognized that a central aspect to the conflict was in
the control of material space. “Wounded Knee,” the Justice
Department surmised, was now “a platform, a form of guerrilla
theater” (Department of Justice 1973a: xxiv). This “platform” was
certainly created and maintained by AIM and by the media,
which projected its message everywhere. Yet, Sneed and other
senior officials believed, they themselves also had a hand in creat-
ing the platform. The solution to this spatial problem was to
dissolve the boundary that helped define the protest platform.
With full confidence in the intelligence and law enforcement
capabilities of the state, officials knew they could easily arrest
people later. Before giving the order for the removal of the road-
blocks, negotiators checked with one of the AIM security people
to see if the move would elicit the desired effect. They were
informed that the strategy would indeed work and that people
would leave Wounded Knee once the roadblocks were removed.

A Declaration of Independence: Turning Perimeters into

“Borders”
We no longer have a perimeter to defend—we have a bor-
der.

— Wounded Knee occupier (Anderson, Brown, Lerner,

and Shafer 1974: 57)
For government officials, the end of the occupation seemed
in sight as they removed federal roadblocks on 10 March.
78 • Boundaries of Dissent

Much to their consternation, however, the end was quite far off.
Upon hearing news of the removal of the federal roadblocks,
AIM leader Russell Means later recalled,

Everyone was ecstatic … [but] I was very worried, and I

almost panicked. When I could be heard, I said, “Look, it
isn’t over. Don’t leave, because if you do they’ll arrest you.”
Many of the Oglala people said they felt they needed to go
home and check on their wives and husbands and chil-
dren. I kept saying, “Wait! They’re going to arrest you
all!”(Means and Wolf 1995: 270–71).

Means’ plea was initially ineffective, and many left with the
removal of the federal roadblocks. Yet Means and many others
stayed. As he continued,

People were streaming out of Wounded Knee, but the next

day even more began to pour in. They were men and
women who had driven night and day from every corner
of America, mostly from other Indian nations, but also a
few whites, Asians, and blacks. Altogether, about 200
Oglalas went home, but in their place came about 150
other Indians. Most of the whites and some Indians were
from Vietnam Veterans Against the War, including guys in
wheelchairs who had been crippled or had lost limbs
(Means and Wolf 1995: 271).

Not only had Means and other occupiers refused to leave with
the removal of the federal roadblocks, but they and their sup-
porters brought in more people and supplies in order to buttress
the occupation materially and bodily.
It was in this context that the occupiers declared an independent
state. As Means’ explained, “We still hadn’t forced the government
to enter into real negotiations about treaty rights”(Means and
Wolf 1995: 271). To do just that, in response to the removal of the
federal roadblocks, the occupiers issued their declaration of the
Independent Oglala Nation. The perimeter around Wounded
 Wounded Knee • 79

Knee was now declared a “border,” whose integrity was main-

tained by a “border patrol.”
This point was made clear on 11 March, when four postal
inspectors, upon hearing news reports of the end of the siege,
approached the village to ascertain the steps needed to re-estab-
lish mail service (Dewing 1995). There four Indians guarding
their new “border” met them and took them into custody,
believing them to be “spies.” The postal inspectors were shortly
thereafter joined by two ranchers who decided to pass through
the village upon rumors that the occupation had ended. Means
took advantage of this opportunity to make clear the status of
the boundary around Wounded Knee. “Without a confrontation
to focus public attention on Wounded Knee,” he later recalled,
“the government could ignore us.” The new hostages/prisoners
allowed just this sort of spectacle. Displaying them before news
cameras, Means announced his intention to deal harshly with
any other “foreign” intruders who crossed the “border” that
defined the ION’s sovereign space (Smith and Warrior 1996:
218).
With the arrests of the six hostages and the obvious failure of
the occupiers to leave, Sneed ordered the federal roadblocks rein-
stated on 12 March. The standoff dragged on for another two
months, with a contest over boundaries continuing to be central.
The federal roadblocks themselves, in particular, remained a sub-
ject of government strategy, as well as political contention. Chief
Marshal Wayne Colburn told reporters that “[w]e’re planning to
change their lifestyle” (Smith and Warrior 1996: 219). Federal
forces tightened their perimeter and cut phone lines, electricity,
and water service to Wounded Knee.
As federal forces tightened their perimeter, they also subjected
media personnel to increasingly tight regulation. “AIM lives on good
press coverage,” as BIA Superintendent Stanley Lyman observed at
the time, “even as it lives on food” (1991: 129). On 21 March,
the government instituted a policy that barred media access to
Wounded Knee after 4:30 p.m. each day. Whether intentional or
not is unclear, but the exclusion of media from Wounded Knee at
night “prevented them from observing the nightly meetings and
80 • Boundaries of Dissent

firefights”(Anderson, Brown, Lerner, and Shafer 1974: 122). At the

same time, government media handlers dramatically limited which
media personnel were allowed any access at all. Press access was reg-
ulated through government-granted press passes. Now passes were
only issued to media personnel from major networks. The alterna-
tive press was increasingly barred from the area. Ultimately, the
major networks themselves were barred.
In the two weeks after the declaration of the ION, federal
forces increasingly limited the flow of food and medical supplies
to Wounded Knee, and the occupiers grew increasingly hungry.
Likewise, with the exclusion of the media from Wounded Knee,
the flow of images out of the site was also dramatically reduced.
AIM leader Dennis Banks explained the effect in a meeting
within Wounded Knee:

They’re stopping all the news media. They let in our law-
yers when they want to. They let in a little bag of groceries
when they want to. If we fail to correct that kind of policy
somebody is going to get shot. They’re steadily trapping us
into a situation that’s going to be very dangerous (Ander-
son, Brown, Lerner, and Shafer 1974: 116).

The state’s intensified containment of Wounded Knee was

designed to force a negotiated end to the occupation. For the
occupiers and their supporters, as well as media personnel, access
into and out of Wounded Knee was now limited to that which
they could manage covertly.

A “Legal Assault” and a “Citizens’ Roadblock”

To address the state’s increasingly tight control of the occupation
site, on 22 March a group of lawyers announced the formation of
the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee. Respond-
ing to what they referred to as “a legal reign of terror operating in
the midst of a para-military encirclement of the Wounded Knee
community,” the Committee promised “a massive legal assault
against the federal government [and] its hired guns operating
 Wounded Knee • 81

with armed personnel carriers [APCs] and helicopters.” This

effort would continue, they announced, “until South Dakota
begins to look more like America and less like war-torn South
East Asia” (Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee
1973). To this end, the Committee’s first action was to file suit
against the government, with the intent to dissolve the boundary
established by the state around the Wounded Knee site. Without
food and supplies, the occupation could not continue. The
Committee’s legal strategy was thus to request judicial assistance
to force federal forces to loosen their blockade. In response, on
25 March South Dakota Federal District Judge Andrew Bogue
issued a temporary order that directed that six carloads of food
and supplies, along with lawyers, be allowed through the road-
blocks into Wounded Knee each day for the remainder of March
(Anderson, Brown, Lerner, and Shafer 1974: 124).
At this point the Justice Department’s frustration was evident,
particularly so with the FBI. Mark Felt explained bluntly in a
memo to FBI Acting Director Patrick Gray that the court order
meant that “the situation at Wounded Knee has deteriorated
beyond our control” and suggested that “we cannot continue to
justify our present strike force and propose to withdraw all agents
from roadblocks” (Felt 1973a). Felt had been opposed to the
White House-directed strategy of containment from the begin-
ning of the occupation (1979). Particularly bothersome to Felt,
and to other FBI officials, was that FBI personnel were ordered to
guard the roadblocks, which he believed beneath the agency.
Equally significantly, however, FBI officials argued for more
aggressive action to end the occupation, something that Judge
Bogue’s extension of federal judicial authority over the conflict
appeared to cast in doubt.
As much as Felt and other senior government officials were
bothered by Judge Bogue’s court order, the tribal government was
perhaps even more frustrated. Although the Wounded Knee con-
flict tended to be represented as one that pitted the Indians
against the U.S. state, it was also significantly a battle among Indi-
ans. Although this battle was about identity and the politics of
Indianness, it was equally about issues of power and authority,
82 • Boundaries of Dissent

and the reservation as the space over which that battle was waged.
Who had what authority over this space?
Like Washington officials, Pine Ridge Tribal Chairman Wilson
recognized the seizure of Wounded Knee as a challenge to his
authority. Unlike those officials, however, he was little concerned
with exercising restraint before wider publics. Drawing on a
conspiratorial Cold War geopolitical discourse, Wilson and his
supporters represented the occupation as part of a sinister global
conspiracy that placed the reservation under threat from outside.
For the most part, they focused their attention on AIM as consti-
tuting this invading force. Although also drawing on an Ameri-
can nationalist discourse, Wilson and supporters defined the
issues dramatized on the Pine Ridge Reservation in ways that
served to justify their control of this local space. Wilson and sup-
porters represented the reservation as the authentic preserve of
those who supported the tribal government. Those aligned with
AIM, by contrast, were represented as “outsiders.” “[W]e don’t
have too many AIM people around here,” the secretary to the
tribal court explained during the occupation. “Most of the ones
in Pine Ridge are outsiders,” she continued, “and we hate people
coming in from the outside telling us what to do” (Time 1973c).
For Wilson and supporters, federal negotiators were far too
accommodating to the occupiers. More importantly from Wilson’s
perspective, perhaps, the decision-making of senior Washington
officials did not include him. These conflicts came to a head
around the subject of the federal roadblocks. Already frustrated
with what he saw as the excessive restraint of federal forces at
Wounded Knee, Wilson was infuriated by the ruling by an off-
reservation federal judge to allow food and supplies into the occu-
pation site. In response, the tribal government and the right-wing
vigilantes aligned with it established roadblocks of their own in
direct, and quite deliberate, violation of the court order. The logic
on which this “tribal roadblock” was established was clearly articu-
lated in two documents. The first, a 16 March tribal court order,
put into legal terms the geopolitical discourse of Wilson’s regime.
Declaring a “state of emergency,” the court ordered the expulsion
of all outsiders who, as the order put it, “are hindering the interests
 Wounded Knee • 83

of the Pine Ridge Reservation” (Oglala Sioux Tribal Council 1973).

In turn, they demanded federal assistance in enforcing the order.
On 19 March Wilson and the tribal government sent a letter to
senior Washington officials in both the Department of Interior
and the Justice Department (Wilson, Eagle Bull, and Nelson
1973). “We can no longer condone the attitude of the Department
of Justice,” the letter explained,

or the fact that they do not wish to tarnish their image in

the eyes of the American public by using necessary force in
bringing the Wounded Knee situation to an end. … We
now request, insist, and demand, that the Department of
Justice revert to its basic role as a law enforcement agency
and do whatever is necessary to implement the provisions
of [the Tribal Ordinance] … and bring an end to this civil
disorder and state of emergency caused by the occupation
of the Wounded Knee site by this militant and seditious
group.

The letter asserted tribal government authority over Pine Ridge

and argued that the Justice Department should be placed at its
service.
Even if the Justice Department agreed to assist Wilson, it had
little control over a federal judge. In response to the 25 March
Federal District Court order a few days later that allowed pre-
cisely the outsiders the tribal government worked to keep out not
only to cross reservation boundaries but to enter the Wounded
Knee site itself, Wilson and supporters acted quickly to enforce
their control of reservation boundaries. The logic was explained
in a newsletter distributed to supporters. Addressed to “fellow
Oglalas and fellow patriots,” the newsletter explained in the
following way the context as it stood in late March and how
the “good citizens of the Pine Ridge Reservation” planned to
respond:

The time has come for all good citizens of the Pine Ridge
Reservation to lay aside their petty differences and squabbles
and unite. Unite against the American Indian Movement
84 • Boundaries of Dissent

and their planned takeover of our reservation. What has

happened at Wounded Knee is all part of a long-range plan
of the Communist Party. …To combat this unpleasant nui-
sance we are confronted with, Oglalas, we are organizing an
all-out volunteer Army of Oglala Sioux Patriots. We need all
able-bodied men over the age of 18 years. The supporters of
AIM come in all shades and the National Council of
Churches are very vocal because the Liberal Press and the
T.V. News media is right at their elbow. …Since the Ameri-
can Indian Movement at Wounded Knee is supported by
non-Indians, we are enlisting the help of all non-Indian resi-
dents of the Pine Ridge Reservation (Wounded Knee Legal
Defense/Offense Committee Records 1973).

At once nationalist and localist in orientation, the newsletter

made clear who properly belonged on the reservation and who
did not. Anyone who supported or was sympathetic to the occu-
pation was marked as an outsider. Wilson rejected even the fed-
eral judicial authority represented by the court order with an
assertion of tribal sovereignty. When AIM lawyers approached
Wilson’s roadblock with the injunction, he told them, “That does
not apply here in Indian country” (Newsweek 1973).
With the “tribal roadblock”—also called the “citizens’ road-
block” by reservation supporters—such geopolitical discourse
was given spatial form. Beginning on 26 March gun-toting
volunteers and members of a private security force called the
Guardians of the Oglala Nation—referred to as the GOON
squad—assembled, beyond the federal roadblocks, on the key
road leading to Wounded Knee. Their immediate strategy was to
control who had access into and out of Wounded Knee and to
ensure the food and supplies allowed into the site by Judge Bogue
never arrived.
Wilson’s establishment of the tribal roadblock put him into
direct conflict with both the Justice Department and the federal
judicial system. This placed federal forces on the scene who
enforced federal authority in an awkward position. Despite defy-
ing federal authority, officials initially allowed the tribal roadblock
 Wounded Knee • 85

to stand. Although those operating the roadblock were threatened

with arrest on a few occasions, “[n]o federal forces were used
against them” (Dewing 1995: 98). As the conflict dragged on over
the next month, and Wilson supporters continued to erect their
roadblock and otherwise interfere with federal forces at Wounded
Knee, the issue of who had what authority on the reservation was
again raised with respect to the tribal roadblock. On 23 April
members of the tribal roadblock detained federal representatives
of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service (CRS).
BIA Superintendent Lyman explained the conflict over CRS per-
sonnel:

These are people who, as [tribal secretary] Toby Eagle Bull

informed us, are not federal employees but are here under
contract to the government. Their purpose is ostensibly
to communicate with the people of both sides, but they
have endeared themselves to AIM and are disliked by the
local people displaced from Wounded Knee. The govern-
ment wants them treated like part of the Justice Depart-
ment and insists that they be allowed to enter the
occupied area. The tribe and the men on the roadblock do
not regard them as such and refused to allow them to pass
(1991: 109).

The official in charge of U.S. Marshal personnel at Wounded

Knee, Chief Marshal Colburn, had little patience for such selec-
tive respect for federal authority. On instructions from Sneed to
dismantle the tribal roadblock, Colburn angrily confronted road-
block members and subsequently arrested 11 of them. As an FBI
report on the event explained, “There is no longer an Indian
roadblock” (Anderson, Brown, Lerner, and Shafer 1974: 189).
Colburn’s dissolution of Wilson’s instrument to reassert his
authority over the reservation was rather short-lived, however.
That same night, in fact, Wilson’s men again erected the roadblock.
Once again the Marshals dismantled it. The next morning, on 24
April, Wilson, accompanied by a large group of supporters, went
to the tribal roadblock area to confront the Marshals. Colburn was
86 • Boundaries of Dissent

unwilling to back down and threatened to use tear gas to disperse

the crowd if necessary. Amid this tense circumstance, according to
one FBI report on the incident, “SAC Held [then] arrived on the
scene and calmed a heretofore volatile situation” (Federal Bureau
of Investigation 1973).
Another FBI document, a memo from Felt, discussed more
fully the conflicts over the tribal roadblock (1973b). The confron-
tation, Felt argued, was “a tempest in a teapot”: a “head-butting
contest between the Oglala Sioux on one side, and the Marshals
Service and the Community Relations people on the other side.”
In describing the confrontation this way, Felt was attempting to
place the FBI as the dispassionate observer, dedicated to preserv-
ing law and order and unconcerned with such trivialities. What
is evident in Felt’s description of the conflict between Indians
operating the tribal roadblock and U.S. Marshals attempting to
remove them, however, is the contention among different organi-
zations within the state, even within the Department of Justice.
Claiming insufficient personnel and that “they had no responsi-
bility for containment or protection”—a duty specified to the
Marshals—Felt instructed agents on the scene “not to take any
action involving physical force to prevent these Indians from
moving back into position” at the roadblock. When the Deputy
Attorney General subsequently instructed the FBI to take over
such responsibility for “containment and protection in the area of
[the federal] roadblock … [and] take every possible action to
insure that the Oglala Sioux roadblock is not re-reestablished,”
Felt (obviously splitting hairs) then explained to the SAC at
Wounded Knee that this “would not include responsibility for
physically preventing the re-establishment of the [tribal] road-
block several miles away” (1973b).
Felt’s reluctance to fully implement the orders from above
reveals a more complex story about the FBI’s position with respect
to the politics of the occupation. In further discussing the instruc-
tions of Deputy Attorney General Sneed with the SAC at Wounded
Knee, the latter explained that he would be willing “to move in and
replace the Marshals and control the situation,” provided that both
Chief Marshal Colburn and members of the Community Relations
 Wounded Knee • 87

Service be removed from Wounded Knee. The request was then

relayed to Acting Director Gray, who suggested it to Sneed. Sneed,
however, refused to approve the request. He did, however, agree to
remove Colburn from the scene of the immediate controversy over
the roadblock.
It was in this context that “SAC Held arrived on the scene”—in
rather dramatic fashion, no less, by helicopter—“and calmed …
[the] volatile situation” (Anderson, Brown, Lerner, and Shafer
1974: 193). The FBI’s actions with respect to the tribal roadblock
were thus hardly as dispassionate and politically neutral as their
reports suggested. BIA Superintendent Lyman explained exactly
how the FBI stepped into the situation:

The end result was that the FBI, who had been directed
to maintain responsibility on [the federal] roadblock, …
quietly extended their jurisdiction down the road just a
little bit to include the site of the citizens’ roadblock.
There the FBI set up their own roadblock and invited the
Indians into it (1991: 112).

In essence, the FBI’s political position was to side with the tribal
government. On the other hand, and inseparably, the FBI was in
a head-butting contest of its own with other divisions within the
Department of Justice: both the Community Relations Service
and, more significantly, the U.S. Marshals [9]. This point was
clearly illustrated in the directions of FBI Acting Director Gray
that, as Felt explained, the SAC at Wounded Knee was “to take
over from the Marshals and take every possible step to control
the situation, and at the same time avoid confrontation” (Felt
1973b).
The conflict over the roadblocks—and the confusion—continued
the next day (25 April), however. At a press conference, a reporter
asked Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard Hellstern—the
Justice Department’s then-senior official at Wounded Knee—why
Indians continued to operate roadblocks that were determining
who had access to Wounded Knee. Unaware of the FBI’s actions,
Hellstern replied “there are no Indians on that roadblock”
88 • Boundaries of Dissent

(Lyman 1991: 113), to which reporters explained they had seen

them with their own eyes. As Lyman recounted, “Hellstern was so
concerned about this that he left the press conference and went
upstairs” to confirm the information. Hellstern had given the
orders to Chief Marshal Colburn to dismantle the tribal road-
blocks, even if it required tear gas (Anderson, Brown, Lerner, and
Shafer 1974: 193). After returning to the press conference with
the information that the roadblock in question was “an FBI road-
block; it is ours” (Lyman 1991: 113), Hellstern, along with senior
Justice Department official Kent Frizzell and Colburn, went to
the roadblock to see the situation firsthand. Lyman explained
what they found upon arriving:

When they arrived at the roadblock they were met by a 17-

or 18-year-old Indian boy armed with a double-barreled
shotgun. He rapped on the window of the car and said,
“Roll down the window.” Here were individuals of author-
ity and responsibility, men accustomed to giving orders
and making challenges; now they were being inspected and
challenged themselves. The Marshal bounded out of the car
with what some said was an M-1 carbine, others an M-16.
The Marshal with his rifle and the Indian kid with his shot-
gun faced each other at gunpoint (1991: 114).

As Wilson later put it at a news conference, “We came this

far from shooting Frizzell and Colburn” (Smith and Warrior
1996: 255).

State Power, Privacy, and Scale at Wounded Knee

If the Wounded Knee occupation had solely played out before
network television cameras and simply revolved around the
question of who had what visible control of the space around the
occupation site, events might have turned out differently than
they did. Instead, the Justice Department, in conjunction with
the U.S. Army, used two tactics that significantly contributed to
their ability to contain the event, but went little noticed in the
 Wounded Knee • 89

press. The public invisibility of these deployments of state power

was, in fact, precisely by design and accounted in large part to
their success. It also helps further illuminate the dynamics of the
occupation and with it the larger concerns of this book.

The H. Rap Brown Act at Wounded Knee

A fact little reported at the time in the media, nor commented
on significantly in the academic literature since, was the state’s
wide-scale use of the H. Rap Brown Act as a tool to contain the
Wounded Knee conflict. “With hundreds of people facing sub-
stantial prison terms,” one group argued at the time, “the govern-
ment is now preparing the second massacre of Wounded Knee,
the one it hopes will take place in the courts. The weapons this
time are the conspiracy and federal anti-riot laws” (Wounded
Knee Information and Defense Fund 1973). “The Thurmond
rider,” another noted, “is coming into increasing use as a weapon
to crush dissent,” with “the takeover-protest at Wounded Knee”
resulting in “the most massive use of the Federal Antiriot Act yet
seen” (National Committee Against Repressive Legislation 1973).
Although the FBI had been investigating AIM members for
antiriot violations prior to Wounded Knee, their efforts were
stepped up with the occupation. Evidence suggests that the FBI
began with a fairly limited target of investigation. Early instruc-
tions tended to focus on the transport of firearms across state
lines. Yet other instructions, particularly beyond the first couple
of weeks of the occupation, reveal a broader strategy of targeting
any and all support. The timing appears not to have been a coin-
cidence. The mediated spectacle of Indians occupying Wounded
Knee against the might of the U.S. state had brought national and
international attention as well as tangible support. Protests were
taking place throughout the country in support of the occupiers,
and people—schoolchildren even—were sending food and sup-
plies to Wounded Knee to express their support.
The FBI tended to represent this support in quite sinister
terms. On 16 March, FBI Acting Director Gray sent a letter to
Attorney General Kleindienst, the substance of which he also
relayed to Nixon Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman.
90 • Boundaries of Dissent

This letter explained the national context of support as it related

to Wounded Knee and began with an observation about “the
increasing buildup of support around the country for the
Indians.” Gray continued by explaining the geography of this
support:

This support, in addition to generally peaceful demonstra-

tions, which have been held in approximately 18 cities, is
primarily manifested by an increasing number of reports
of travel by dissident Indians and others to Wounded Knee
for the purpose of aiding the Indians there. If this buildup
of support at Wounded Knee continues, and reports indi-
cate it is increasing, it could represent a serious danger to
the security of Federal authorities and law enforcement
personnel on the scene (Acting Director FBI 1973b).

Particularly striking was the connection Gray drew between

mobility and threat. The Wounded Knee occupation was not a
strictly local concern, and for the FBI to effectively deal with this
fact, its field of vision needed to extend far beyond the occupa-
tion site itself.
Illustrating continuities with its efforts to subvert the Civil
Rights and antiwar movements in the previous decade (Churchill
and Vander Wall 1988; O’Reilly 1989), the FBI seemed particu-
larly attentive to any kind of coalition across racial boundaries.
“Black extremists and revolutionary white groups and individu-
als,” one teletype explained, “have recently taken active parts in
demonstrations around the country in support of the American
Indian takeover at Wounded Knee.” Given this context, Gray
issued instructions “to alert all offices to this growing involve-
ment” and to collect information regarding “all instances of sup-
port, financial or otherwise” (Acting Director FBI 1973c). In
particular, Gray suggested agents look to use the legal-geographic
tool of the Antiriot Act to preclude such a politics of connection.
According to American Indian scholar and AIM activist Ward
Churchill, the FBI’s expanded use of the H. Rap Brown Act came
around 20 March (Churchill and Vander Wall 1988: 424n77). A 22
 Wounded Knee • 91

March letter from Sneed explained quite clearly the logic on

which the expanded use of the act rested. The Department, Sneed
explained, was “desirous to prevent subversive elements from sup-
porting the militant Indians” at Wounded Knee and instructed
the FBI “that arrests be made at distant points where there is
probable cause Federal law has been violated” (Assistant Attorney
General 1973a: 2). In the words of the FBI’s Acting Director, “The
object” was “to make lawful arrests as far from Wounded Knee,
South Dakota, as possible” (Acting Director FBI 1973d: 2).
And the FBI did just that. During the period of the occupation,
more than 50 arrests were made in states throughout the country
(Fishlow 1973). The strategy was quite simple: Where probable
cause was established that a group of individuals appeared intent
on offering support to the Wounded Knee occupants, agents were
to monitor and carefully track their movements and arrest them,
as one FBI report put it, “once [the] vehicle crosses the state line”
(Portland 1973). Bail was also often set high to immobilize poten-
tial supporters. When they could not establish probable cause,
Gray instructed his agents that “these groups are to be put under
physical surveillance 24 hours a day” (Acting Director FBI 1973d:
1–2). “[I]n no way was there any indication of activities illegal in
themselves,” one critical press report noted at the time, “and in
every case the only ‘overt act’ was getting on a federal highway and
crossing a state line. As it was, they never did anything but travel”
(Fishlow 1973: 12).
While continuing to investigate and arrest people throughout
the country for violations of the H. Rap Brown Act through the
rest of March and into April, however, the FBI encountered prob-
lems. First, the strategy was not entirely successful. Despite use of
the act and other measures designed to limit movement into
Wounded Knee, it remained impossible to completely seal access
to the site. One FBI report noted that members of Vietnam
Veterans Against the War (VVAW) had been successful in bring-
ing supplies to Wounded Knee, a feat accomplished by minimiz-
ing visible travel. The report, itself the product of undercover
investigation, revealed that “supplies would be transported [to
Wounded Knee] by separate passenger vehicles rather than using
92 • Boundaries of Dissent

a van or truck which law enforcement agencies could surveil”

(St. Louis 1973: 1).
A second problem was a legal one. The 25 March federal court
order to allow food and supplies to the occupiers had challenged
at least the spirit of the strategy. But the FBI appears to have been
unperturbed. A teletype from Gray, dated 27 March and distrib-
uted to FBI offices nationally, made mention of the court order,
yet explicitly stated that “the court order is not being interpreted
as preventing enforcement of [the antiriot law] in instances where
individuals undertake interstate travel to render personal or mate-
rial support to the occupiers of Wounded Knee” (Acting Director
FBI 1973e). The expanded use of the antiriot law appears to have
violated at least the spirit of the court order, because both the
roadblocks and the Antiriot Act were designed to achieve the same
purpose: to limit support for the occupation. Nevertheless, the
FBI continued to investigate and arrest people.
If there was a latent legal tension evident between the federal
court order and the FBI’s use of the H. Rap Brown Act, by mid-
April this tension was made overt. On 16 April, five people
arrested for Antiriot Act violations filed suit against the FBI in a
federal district court in Portland, OR, claiming “false arrest and
conspiracy to deprive us of our constitutional rights” (Richmond
1973). The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sponsored
the suit, using it as a vehicle to challenge the constitutionality of
arresting and prosecuting individuals under the Antiriot Act
and “to deter others [agents] from such acts” (Remington 1973).
At issue, the ACLU explained, was a Supreme Court interpreta-
tion of “a constitutional right to travel ‘uninhibited by statutes,
rules, or regulations which unreasonably burden or restrict this
movement.’” The ACLU then linked this argument about the
“right to travel” to that of the freedom of speech. If the architects
of the Antiriot Act sought to keep people in their place by erasing
the distinction between thought and deed, body and symbol, the
virtual and the material, while collapsing the social into the indi-
vidual—and in so doing, turned the resulting legal geography to
a decidedly reactionary end—the ACLU intended to keep these
distinctions alive.
 Wounded Knee • 93

The grand legal confrontation never happened, however, and

both suits were ultimately dropped. Yet for some senior FBI offi-
cials, the lawsuit raised concerns about the legality of their
actions. Referencing the Portland suit, Felt explained to Gray that

the FBI … is perhaps in an untenable position in arresting

individuals far removed geographically from Wounded
Knee based on the information that those individuals are
en route to Wounded Knee for delivery of material to the
dissidents there who are defying federal authority. Because
of the very nature of this situation we necessarily are oper-
ating on probable cause that is extremely vulnerable to
challenge (1973c).

Felt raised broader concerns about the manner in which the FBI
deployed the Antiriot Act. The FBI, after all, was responsible for
investigating and arresting violations of the act. Further, it was
just these FBI personnel who were now being sued by citizens
arrested with this strategy. Continuing, Felt urged,

We should closely re-examine our position with regard to

the arrests of individuals based on information that they
are en route to Wounded Knee, particularly as in the Port-
land case where the individuals are hundreds of miles
from their alleged destination.

FBI Acting Director Gray also expressed frustration and concern

over the “extensive expenditure of manpower and that some of
the cases … are being dismissed,” and asked Deputy Attorney
General Sneed “to advise if it desires this Bureau to continue to
vigorously investigate each and every possible violation of the
antiriot law statute in connection with the Wounded Knee situa-
tion” (Acting Director FBI 1973f).
In reference to Felt’s concerns regarding the Portland suit, the
Assistant Attorney General explained to Gray on 16 April “that to
avoid further exposure to civil actions, we will, if circumstances
permit, attempt to secure arrest warrants … prior to making any
apprehensions” (Assistant Attorney General 1973b). Responding
94 • Boundaries of Dissent

to concerns about personnel and less-than-vigorous prosecution,

Sneed instructed Gray to “continue to vigorously investigate each
and every possible violation of the antiriot law statute in connec-
tion with the situation at Wounded Knee” (1973). It “is the
Department’s intention,” he explained, “to vigorously prosecute”
such violations.
A third, but closely connected, problem presented itself the
next day. In the early morning hours of 17 April, three small air-
craft, operating from a “small remote airfield,” successfully
evaded the FBI’s national security net and air-dropped food and
supplies on Wounded Knee (Zimmerman 1976). The perimeter
established by the state around the site, of course, offered little
resistance to such aircraft, and because it entered the Wounded
Knee area at daybreak, federal forces were caught by surprise.
This event highlighted, as the Justice Department put it, the
“unique investigative problem” of the “numerous small aircraft
… which can operate from small remote airfields” (Department
of Justice 1973b). In order to address their concern about small
aircraft that could slip under the eyes of the state, the Justice
Department opted for a change in strategy with respect to its use
of the H. Rap Brown Act. In response to the airdrop, and in the
wake of the filing of the Portland lawsuit, the Department of
Justice prepared to go public with its strategy, which until then
had been effective largely because it had been kept relatively pri-
vate. On 19 April, the Department issued a news release with the
following warning:

Persons who carry food, medical supplies, ammunition,

or any other supplies to South Dakota by land or air for
the use of the riotous occupiers of Wounded Knee are
subject to federal prosecution (Department of Justice
1973b).

The reasoning behind the release was not, interestingly enough, to

warn potentially ignorant citizens of unwittingly violating federal
law. Rather, the intent was to enlist the support of what the release
referred to as “the average law-abiding citizen” in “furnishing
 Wounded Knee • 95

information concerning persons and groups moving in aid of

the militants at Wounded Knee.” As it had done so often in the
past (Churchill and Vander Wall 1988; O’Reilly 1989), the state
cleanly distinguished the deviant citizen, and sought to use “the
public”—constituted by legitimate, “law-abiding” citizens—as a
supplement to the imperfect resolution of its intelligence gaze. All
of this was designed to limit the movement, and hence power, of
the “militants” and “revolutionaries” moving across the nation
with reckless abandon. By “going public,” the Justice Department
hoped a more informed public could help to better implement its
strategy of arresting people at “points far removed geographically
from Wounded Knee.”

State Violence and Publicity: Operation Garden Plot

Another consequence of the 17 April airdrop was that it sparked
a firefight. One woman explained:

Ten bundles were pushed from the planes and floated

down on colorful parachutes. … [I]t turned out to be
food airlifted to us by people in the antiwar movement
who enclosed a letter of support and praise. We gathered
the bundles and took them to Security where the letter
was read and the food was distributed, with laughter and
tears, eating cashews, prunes, chocolate, and ham—it was
the first fresh food we had seen in a long time. As we
walked back to our bunker to sack out, we heard shots
from the APCs on the surrounding hills. Apparently they
thought the bundles contained rifles and ammo so they
broke the cease-fire and started a firefight. All around us
bullets were hitting the ground and we flattened. … That
firefight lasted all day (Anderson, Brown, Lerner, and
Shafer 1974: 176–77).

During the firefight a man named Frank Clearwater was hit in

the head by a bullet that ripped through the wall of the church.
His wife, Morningstar Clearwater, recounted:
96 • Boundaries of Dissent

I was in Wounded Knee when my husband got shot—I had

gone to get some food at the church. He was at the little
white church, laying down on a mattress. And the shot
came on the right hand side of the big white church and
the next thing I knowed, my husband was shot in the head,
laying on the mattress, and he was almost dead (Anderson,
Brown, Lerner, and Shafer 1974: 176–77).

None of this, however, was covered directly on the nightly net-

work news. News personnel were instead given information at a
government press conference in Pine Ridge that the firefight was
sparked by Wounded Knee occupants’ unprovoked gunfire at an
FBI helicopter that had gone to inspect the occupation site after
the airdrop [10]. The government’s exclusion of the press from
the scene of the event in question, of course, made it impossible
for reporters to have known exactly what happened.
Although the White House early on established a policy of
restraint, the FBI adopted a more aggressive stance toward the
occupation from the beginning. Consistent with the geopolitical
lens through which it had historically viewed such dissent, the
FBI understood Wounded Knee in particularly stark terms, argu-
ing that “the problem at Wounded Knee is a military one which
requires a military solution” (SAC Minneapolis 1973: 3). A
12 March memo reported that the four SACs at Wounded Knee
“unanimously urge that the U.S. Army put down the insurrection
immediately since not equipped or trained to invade an armed
community” (Gebhardt 1973b). Further, without “such action
being taken by Federal Government,” the FBI believed, “other
takeovers throughout the U.S. will logically result.”
The FBI thus strongly pushed for deployment of the U.S.
Army’s Domestic Disturbance Plan, code-named “Operation
Garden Plot.” Like the H. Rap Brown Act, Garden Plot had been
drafted in 1968 to contain urban unrest. The plan specified
general strategies such as the deployment of large numbers of
troops, a focus on protecting life rather than property, and the
establishment of curfews that allowed for the easy identification
and control of deviant citizens and rabble-rousers. Garden Plot
 Wounded Knee • 97

also included specific plans targeted to each prospective trouble

spot (U.S. News & World Report 1968). Military planners based
these plans on detailed on-the-scene geographic research. Given
the context out of which the plan emerged, it is no surprise that
the focus was squarely on urban America. The first deployment
of the plan, however, was not in the spaces for which it was
intended—Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark—but in a decidedly
marginal space. Wounded Knee, suffice it to say, was not the
subject of advance military research and planning.
Upon news of the occupation, the White House triggered the
plan. A division of the Army was put on alert, and an advisor was
sent to Wounded Knee to make a firsthand evaluation of the
scene. The person responsible for military advising at Wounded
Knee and for assessing potential military involvement in the inci-
dent was Colonel Volney Warner, the Chief of Staff of the Army’s
82nd Airborne Division. Based on this evaluation, he was to
report a recommendation back to Washington. His assessment of
the situation was unequivocal: strongly urging against deploy-
ment of military troops based on his belief that, contra FBI argu-
ments, the occupation represented no threat to national security.
In his view, it essentially constituted a local, if quite public, law
enforcement issue. A then-classified memo explained:

The name of the game is not to kill or injure the Indians.

An Army involvement resulting in loss of life and injury
would reflect badly on the Army. … Because of the isolated
geographical location, the seizure and holding of Wounded
Knee poses no threat to the nation … [though] it is con-
ceded that this act is a source of irritation if not embarrass-
ment to the Administration in general and the Department
of Justice in particular (New York Times 1975).

Army observers at the scene—discreetly dressed, per explicit

instructions, in civilian clothes to avoid drawing attention to the
military’s presence at the site of a domestic disorder—were
extremely reluctant to dedicate their troops, in what would be a
very public show of force.
98 • Boundaries of Dissent

Despite the pleading of senior FBI officials, the politics of

deploying the military within domestic space were precarious. The
Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878, had long set strict boundaries
on the deployment of the military in domestic space. In his later
memoirs, Felt (1979: 268) recounted a phone conversation with
Attorney General Kleindienst about using Army troops. “The
White House,” Kleindienst explained to Felt, “wants to low-key
this incident and there’s no way we are going to use the Army.”
Military troops could only be deployed at the explicit request of
the President or the Congress. As potentially problematic as such
deployment was anywhere in the U.S., it was even more so given
that the space in question was the subject of political controversy
precisely over the nature and status of sovereignty. Deploying
federal troops in the ambiguous, quasi-sovereign nations of Native
America was thus a rather delicate proposition, a point that Army
and White House officials were well aware of.
Although military involvement at Wounded Knee appears to
have restrained the use of force, it did so in complex ways. On 28
March, military advisor Colonel Warner contacted the Attorney
General’s office in Washington with his proposed battle plan to
forcibly retake Wounded Knee. Because of his continued argu-
ment against involvement of military troops, Warner’s proposed
plan specified the use of Marshal and FBI personnel. Instead of
tangibly and publicly dedicating its troops, the Army quietly pro-
vided both tactical and logistical support, as well as hardware and
supplies to the FBI, Marshal, and BIA personnel at Wounded
Knee [11]. Kleindienst, however, refused to approve the plan,
explaining “he did not want another Kent State” (Bates 1973).
While Kleindienst rejected the plan to retake Wounded Knee,
the area around the site remained heavily militarized. Later trials
revealed that during the occupation the Army furnished 16
APCs, 400,000 rounds of ammunition, 100 protective vests, one
reconnaissance fighter, three helicopters, 120 sniper rifles, and
20 grenade launchers (Garbus 1974). This equipment was trans-
ported to the reservation by military vehicles, then “dropped off
at various points miles away from Wounded Knee, transferred to
 Wounded Knee • 99

civilian vehicles and then driven to the scene of battle by military

men wearing civilian clothes” (Garbus 1974: 454).
The result was predictable. Throughout April, in particular,
Wounded Knee was subject to increasingly intense fire from
federal positions. As Vietnam veteran and Wounded Knee partici-
pant Roger Ironcloud put it, “We took more bullets in 71 days
than I took in two years in Vietnam” (Garbus 1974: 454). Another
Vietnam veteran at Wounded Knee suggested more concrete
parallels with Vietnam (Anderson, Brown, Lerner, and Shafer
1974: 195):

All you have to do is look around the hills here and you
can see about 12 armored personnel carriers that are
nothing but APCs that didn’t make it to Vietnam. The
men carry the same weapons that are used in Vietnam:
The M-16, the M-79 grenade launcher is here, they have
starlight scopes that were used for spotting people in the
jungle at night time, they have infra-red sensors, trip flares
out here in the woods to prevent our foot patrols from
coming in. They use helicopters. So the similarities are
more than just obvious.

And as public a war as Vietnam was, he continued, it also had

aspects that were deliberately sheltered from public scrutiny.
“Some of us,” he explained, “went into Laos in civilian clothes to
do operations of a military nature for the CIA. And we always hid
from the American public and the press what was going on”
(Anderson, Brown, Lerner, and Shafer 1974: 196).

Dimming the Media Spotlight and Concluding the

Occupation
By late April, officials again discussed use of force. On 22 April,
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Hellstern (1973) sent a memo
to his superiors in Washington, urging a “police action” to forc-
ibly regain control of Wounded Knee. Among his reasons for
100 • Boundaries of Dissent

urging the action was an assessment of geographies of scale and

of publicity. First, Hellstern noted the changing composition of
occupiers and that this also changed the identity issues at stake in
the occupation:

The occupants of Wounded Knee are now composed of

about 85 whites and 85 Indians. Very few regular residents
remain. Therefore, the justification for restraint, particu-
larly in terms of the aggrieved local populace, is no longer
a real factor (1973: 2).

Wounded Knee now consisted largely of outsiders, which Hell-

stern seemed to be arguing would make aggressive action more
acceptable to “the public.” Closely tied to this was a second point
about Pine Ridge power and authority:

If the Government does not move quickly, we are going to

encounter very real problems in dealing with white ranch-
ers, the dispossessees of Wounded Knee, and others on the
Reservation who want the confrontation ended. We may
end up fighting the wrong people (Hellstern 1973: 2).

Finally, Hellstern noted two other important factors relating to

the issue of containment and publicity. First, because of the
exclusion of the media from the site, “[v]ery little press is out
here now and a police action would have very little on-the-scene
coverage” (1973: 2). Second, in Hellstern’s view, it was the right
time to move because college students were still in school:

The Government should not only move before the college

year is up, but should move quickly enough to stabilize
the Reservation in the aftermath of the elimination of
Wounded Knee before the college year is up. This is the
only way to avoid real summer problems at Pine Ridge
(1973: 2).

For all of these reasons, Hellstern advised aggressive action.

 Wounded Knee • 101

In the last week of April, officials laid plans for the forceful end
of the occupation. On 25 April, Colburn (1973) explained to Sneed
that Colonel Warner had informed him that “all items requested
from the Department of Defense in support of my plan to seize
Wounded Knee are now pre-positioned at Ft. Carson, Colorado,
and can arrive at Pine Ridge six hours after notification.” Should
the decision be made to retake Wounded Knee, government forces
were ready. Nevertheless, he continued, “[i]n view of recent White
House guidance, execution of the plan does not appear imminent.”
Colonel Warner’s battle plan to forcibly retake Wounded Knee was
subsequently leaked to the press and outlined in a New York Times
story on 30 April. The story described the plan as a part of a
broader “last ditch effort to end the confrontation without further
violence” (New York Times 1973). If negotiations failed, a govern-
ment source reported, the Army’s plan would be utilized. Consis-
tent with the plan Warner had proposed in late March, military
troops would not be used. Instead the Army would provide Mar-
shals with necessary hardware and support [12]. To prepare for
deployment of the plan, the Justice Department brought in more
Marshals, while the Army provided additional ammunition and
supplies and an armored helicopter that was equipped to flood the
Wounded Knee site with tear gas (New York Times 1973). Impor-
tantly, however, there was no mention in the story of Colonel
Warner himself, and the only explicit reference to the military was
to the Army helicopter.
Although the 17 April airdrop had provided the occupiers with
desperately needed food and supplies, they could hardly last for-
ever. On 25 April, Frank Clearwater died. The next day, federal
forces barraged Wounded Knee with what until then had been an
unprecedented amount of government firepower: tear gas and
flares, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. A number of
occupiers were injured in the firefight, some seriously. Addition-
ally, another man, Buddy Lamont, was killed by a bullet the next
morning.
These latest events effectively ended the occupation. There was
“a new seriousness after Buddy’s death,” a reporter from the
alternative press wrote in her journal:
102 • Boundaries of Dissent

Food’s very short—most of the cooking is done outside

now. The electricity was shot out during the firefight, so
no lights and no running water. We’re using kerosene
lamps and hauling water from the old windmill (Ander-
son, Brown, Lerner, and Shafer 1974: 222).

Lamont’s death, Dewing (1995: 120) summarizes, “marked the

end of armed resistance and initiated negotiations that finally
achieved a settlement.” The occupation site was now so tightly
contained that the firefight and its aftermath were left undocu-
mented by the major television networks, and Lamont’s death
“barely found its way into the news” (Dewing 1995: 120).
The occupation ended, finally, on 8 May, with a whimper
more than a bang. The NBC news reporter who announced the
occupation’s close that night did so, in fact, from a vantage point
quite far in the distance. As he explained, media personnel
remained barred from the site. At a press conference on the
same day, Hellstern explained to these reporters the end of the
occupation:

The environment down in Wounded Knee has changed

substantially in the last three weeks. We’ve made a con-
certed effort to really isolate the community down there
from the outside world.

Such isolation included not just people, food, and supplies, but
also the media that brought the event to distant publics. Indeed,
the spectacle of Wounded Knee was quite effectively—violently
even—contained.

Dissent and the Boundaries of Power and Resistance

The state’s intensified—and increasingly violent—containment of
the Wounded Knee site successfully brought the occupation to a
close a short time later, on 8 May. The contested nature of power
and authority over the space of the reservation and its relationship
to the U.S. nation-state during the course of the Wounded Knee
 Wounded Knee • 103

occupation was reflected in an equally complicated set of concrete

boundary contests. In large part these contests revolved around
the question of who had access to what spaces and on what terms.
Such access was regulated through various kinds of boundaries.
We can see this clearly in the various roadblocks and bunkers
that different actors erected to regulate the space of the conflict.
Both federal forces and the Wounded Knee occupiers themselves
sought to effect control over the occupation through these con-
crete spatial tactics. AIM’s efforts to reassert a more radical notion
of sovereignty—to harden the line that defined the reservation
itself—were also dependent on tactics that blurred that line in
practice. Their use of the media is one example of how their
claims to Wounded Knee were dependent on larger connections.
By seizing this site and using it to project their claims widely and
to make the occupation intensely public, the Wounded Knee
occupiers hoped to press the state both into restraint and also
toward some measure of agreement regarding their demands.
Together the occupiers and federal forces served to create
what Deputy Attorney General Sneed referred to as a “protest
platform.” The occupation presented federal representatives
with a new kind of political crisis in the Wounded Knee occu-
pation. Sneed’s decision to remove the federal roadblocks on
10 March and the occupiers’ subsequent declaration of an inde-
pendent state shows that the status of these boundaries was
fluid. The removal of the federal roadblocks was recognition of
the unique circumstances of this highly mediated protest event.
The declaration of the ION was a similar recognition on the part
of AIM leadership of the relationship between a politics of sym-
bols and their grounding in the concrete boundaries that
defined the spatial form of the occupation. Although it seems
unlikely the occupiers had any real hope of creating an indepen-
dent state, the move had the dramatic effect one would expect
by raising before the public the centrality of treaty rights to the
conflict and the inseparable issue of boundaries. Far from dis-
solving the boundary that defined the occupation site, in other
words, the removal of the federal roadblocks resulted in the
reinforcement of this boundary.
104 • Boundaries of Dissent

Wilson’s tribal government was clearly unhappy with the ongo-

ing status of this “protest platform” and wanted to use force to dis-
solve it. Frustrated with the restraint demanded by Washington,
and enraged by the decision of an off-reservation federal judge to
usurp his authority, Wilson instead asserted tribal sovereignty and
established a roadblock of his own in direct defiance of the federal
government. How federal officials responded to Wilson’s defiance
of their authority sheds interesting light on the internal dynamics
of the state as they were expressed at Wounded Knee. Although FBI
officials like Felt were charged with carrying out orders from
above, they were often unhappy with these orders. Politically, key
FBI decision-makers both in Washington and on the scene in
South Dakota were more sympathetic to the aggressive position of
Wilson. They were also occasionally engaged in their own bureau-
cratic conflicts with the U.S. Marshals. For whatever reason, the
FBI ultimately refused to forcibly dismantle the tribal roadblock,
and in so doing offered tacit support for it.
If Wounded Knee was a mediated spectacle, then, it was also
much more than that. In part the Wounded Knee occupation dra-
matized a larger story about American Indian identity and its
relation to American nationalism. The diverse practices by which
different actors asserted their authority over this contested site
also tells a story about the politics of sovereignty itself and how it
is given shape through boundaries. Indigenous sovereignty claims
sit in uneasy tension with dominant state-centered normative
orders.
 5
Elián González and the Geopolitics of
Home

In 2000, South Florida was ground zero for the most bizarre of
political spectacles. The presidential election in November saw
the unprecedented occasion of an electoral limbo so bitterly con-
tested that it took the Supreme Court to intervene, as partisans
fought over “hanging chads” and ballot recounts. It also saw the
Republican party using the tactics of confrontational protest
politics to press their claims. As bizarre as the Florida election
was, however, the battle over Elián González was stranger still,
though no less instructive of the contentiousness of U.S. politics
at the dawn of the 21st century. At one level the story was simple
enough: A mother and child are traveling in a boat that capsizes
in a storm. Stranded at sea, the mother is claimed by the ocean,
while the child survives long enough to be rescued by a passing
fishing boat, on a national holiday (Thanksgiving Day) no less.
It would seem quite obvious, based on these simple facts, that the
child would be reunited with his surviving parent: his father.

105
106 • Boundaries of Dissent

As Attorney General Janet Reno later put it, “The law is very
clear. Clearly, a child who has lost his mother belongs with his
sole surviving parent” (2000).
Life is rarely so simple, however. For what immediately became
the issue was the geographic story here: that the mother and child
were crossing not just any expanse of water, but the 90 miles
between Cuba and the United States. At some point, then, they
crossed a threshold, into that ambiguous twilight zone where
everyday notions of time and space do not hold: 1999 could have
just as easily been 1969, with conservatives quickly attempting to
reinstate the clean logics of Cold War geopolitical distinctions
and to place the boy firmly on the side of freedom, justice, and
the “American way.” One commentator described the spectacle
surrounding the boy as “a weird cross between a Cold War show-
down and a soap opera, the Bay of Pigs Meets All My Children”
(Newsweek 2000a). Lines were drawn between good and evil, as
well as us and them, certainly, but also quite literally with respect
to the “here” and “there” of a geographic morality play.
The case of Elián González conjured up age-old ghosts of
Cuban political battles. For the Miami Cuban Right, the issues at
stake were sharply divided into freedom and totalitarianism. To
return the child to Cuba was not only to consign him to the tyr-
anny of a communist state, but in so doing to contribute to its
survival by validating it as a legitimate member of the community
of states. Yet the broad contours of the geopolitical discourses of
the Miami Cuban community were refracted through two further
discourses. On one hand, the international orientation of the con-
flict intersected with a domestic discourse about the tyrannical
federal state. This theme in turn resonated with the mainstream
American Right, who saw in the incident yet another example of
an overaggressive state trampling on the freedom to dissent.
There has been much written about the case, but my interest
in this chapter is with its spatial inflection. My focus is on how
the conflict over Elián was played out in and between three pri-
mary spaces. First, I analyze the abstract space of law. Here my
interest is in how the legal aspect of the conflict centered on dis-
courses of citizenship and a politics of boundaries. How, put sim-
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 107

ply, did the two sides in the conflict justify their arguments about
what place the boy should call home? I then turn to Miami to
examine how the conflict played out in the city’s public spaces.
Again, we return to the themes of the intersection of a politics of
citizenship and a politics of space. Finally, I examine how the
very public spectacle of the case was also tied to the private
spaces of the home where Elián stayed. Indeed, much of the pub-
lic spectacle played out in and around the private space of the
home. How, then, did the home serve as site around which all of
these questions swirled?

Child or Citizen?
The Book
On either side of the Florida Straits, the politics of the Elián case
revolved around stark Cold War discourses that opposed good
from evil, freedom from tyranny, the nurturing family from the
dominance of the state. Beneath these grand discourses, however,
one finds familiar themes of citizenship, identity, and space. In
the remainder of this chapter, I first analyze the legal debates that
swirled around the Elián case and then move on to how these
were played out in various spaces.
The legal debate pitted those who appealed to the uniformity
of the rule of law against those who sought to bend it to the exi-
gencies of geopolitical context. Liberal law is based on an abstract
notion of citizenship that regularizes rights and duties across
individuals and across space. The citizen enshrined in law, how-
ever, is not just any subject. Law has historically made all manner
of exceptions to the law of equivalence on which it is based. In
the United States, blacks could not vote until the 19th century,
and women not until the 20th century. Gays and lesbians still fail
to enjoy the legal benefits of straight married couples: medical
benefits, the right to make life-and-death medical decisions, and
so forth.
Law also serves to constitute identity and citizenship around
three further issues of relevance to the case of Elián González. The
first is age. Children are yet another category of less-than-citizen,
108 • Boundaries of Dissent

with restrictions on their capacity to exercise the duties and rights

of citizenship. Children are unable to vote. They are restricted in
their ability to move across space. They cannot operate motor
vehicles or travel across geopolitical boundaries unaccompanied
by a parent, except in rare instances. They are likewise restricted in
their capacity to occupy—via age-specific curfews—public spaces
at particular times. Their bodies are also carefully regulated. They
are forbidden from consuming otherwise legal mind-altering sub-
stances like alcohol. The general rules that structure the formal
definition of citizenship in essence amount to a presumption of an
individual—generalized into an abstract legal subject—with the
capacity to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.
Above all, they must be fully capable of independent judgment
and possess an awareness of individual responsibility and culpabil-
ity. A child’s status as less-than-citizen is based precisely on its pre-
sumed inability to match these standards.
Second, the definition of the citizenship status of a child is
wrapped up in larger definitions of family. Alessia Bell argues that
“the child . . . is the raison d’être of family. Contemporary law
knows this” (2001). She argues the rights claims of parenting have
traditionally been divided by what she calls “blood, state, and
sweat.” Parental rights have historically been most strongly based
on biological blood, in turn connected to patriarchal property
rights. The 20th century saw a greater relative shift away from
property toward a focus on the labor of child-rearing, and thus
toward motherhood. At the same time, the relative de-biologiciz-
ing of parental rights in the contemporary era means that rights
are often open to greater interpretation. Consider, for example, the
meaning of blood in contexts such as surrogate motherhood, gay
and lesbian families, and in vitro fertilization. In addition, the
greater role of states in managing social reproduction has increas-
ingly placed them in the role of both defining parental rights and
(in some cases) fulfilling them. If a child is deemed to lack the
capacity for sound independent judgment, then who is it that
stands in to represent that child’s “best interests”? A biological par-
ent? An extended family member? Or perhaps in the absence of a
clearly competent family member, the state itself?
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 109

The final issue of relevance in the Elián case was the boy’s
status as an illegal immigrant; yet another category of less-than-
citizen that placed him outside the boundaries of law and thus of
formal citizenship. The peculiar nature of U.S. immigration poli-
cies with respect to Cuba—which I discuss more below—offer
greater opportunities for otherwise illegal immigrants who man-
age to make it ashore. Yet Elián did not. As such, beyond being a
minor with a surviving parent, the boy’s immigration status was
such that under virtually any normal circumstances, he would
have been immediately returned to his country of origin. Because
he had no formal immigration status in the United States—he
was in essence a nonperson from the standpoint of the law—he
had no real basis to stay in Miami.
The formal legal debate about whether Elián should return to
Cuba thus involved all of these aspects of the boy’s identity before
the law and centered on three questions. First, did the boy have
any legitimate abstract claim to asylum? This question was about
his immigration status. Second, if yes, did he—as a child—have
any right to petition for asylum? This centered on his citizenship
status with respect to age. Finally, if Elián himself could not speak
before the law, who could present his case in his stead? This last
question related to how the law distributed familial rights. All of
these questions were essential to answering the more fundamen-
tal question: Where should Elián call home?
The extended family repeatedly asserted the boy’s right to citi-
zenship. All of their efforts thus centered on this issue. The asy-
lum claim meant to establish a legal presence in the United States
apart from the father in Cuba. To do that, they claimed, first, that
the boy had legitimate fear of persecution if he were to return to
Cuba. The legal argument centered on this issue. Second, they
argued that because the surviving parent was subject to the same
persecution, his statements on his wishes for Elián could not be
taken at face value. Therefore, the child’s stated wishes should
trump those of his father’s. Finally, the Miami family argued that
in the absence of legal recognition of Elián’s capacity for sound
judgment, they should be allowed to represent his interests
before the law.
110 • Boundaries of Dissent

Yet the law recognized none of these claims. The child himself
had no legal right to petition for asylum. As Deputy Attorney
General Eric Holder later put it, “At the core of this case is a little
boy—so young that he does not have the capacity to make legal
decisions for himself ” (2000). Likewise, an INS decision memo-
randum concluded that “[a]t his tender age, Elián does not have
the capacity to seek asylum on his own behalf ” (Cooper 2000).
The child—as a child—had less-than-full rights to citizenship
quite apart from his immigration status.
Likewise, the extended family had no right to file the petition
on his behalf given the surviving father. International immigra-
tion law typically applies standards of custody and family not of
the country of destination, but of the country of origin. This is
precisely to help mitigate the potential for international cus-
tody disputes, in which extranational states become wrapped
up in adjudicating. The greater freedom of movement afforded
by contemporary transportation systems, and the simultaneous
durability of international boundaries and the legal territories
they delineate, heightens the potential for international con-
flicts over child custody. States are thus loath to issue rulings
that directly contradict standard custody policies of a child’s
country of origin. And as the INS noted, “Cuban law . . . rein-
forces the right of both parents to exercise parental authority”
(Cooper 2000). Legal precedent thus held that father’s rights
trumped all.
When the INS formally announced its decision on the Elián
case, it couched it in a language of the objective rule of law.
As INS Commissioner Doris Meissner put it,

This decision has been based on the facts and the law.
Both U.S. and international law recognize the unique
relationship between parent and child, and family reuni-
fication has long been a cornerstone of both American
immigration law and INS practice. … We urge everyone
involved to understand, respect, and uphold the bond
between parent and child and the laws of the United
States (2000).
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 111

Likewise, a State Department spokesman also emphasized the

rationality and generality of law as it would be applied in the case
of Elián:

This case will be followed according to normal proce-

dures. It has nothing to do with Cuba as such. There are
no special procedures. It will be followed according to the
book (The Miami Herald 1999a).

The position of government officials was thus both that the law
was unambiguous and that it placed authority for decisions relat-
ing to the boy in the hands of the father.

“Family Values” and the Politics of Scale

If administration officials appealed to the rule of an objective and
dispassionate law as rooted in legal precedent, those that sup-
ported keeping Elián in Miami responded by asserting that legal
precedent was of little use when applied to Cuba. For them, to
measure the rights of a boy fleeing tyranny against those of a
father subject to it was comparing apples to oranges. One lawyer
in the keep-the-boy-in-Miami camp asked, “Which kind of a
family is a less important factor in how this boy should be raised
than which kind of state” (Time 2000a). Conservative columnist
George F. Will, meanwhile, drew on an almost poststructuralist
sensibility in arguing:

Children need fathers, but they need the culture of free-

dom even more. To assume that Elián’s father has an
indefeasible right to immerse Elián in Cuba’s highly ideo-
logized tyranny . . . is to make a fetish of biology (2000).

A similar point was echoed in a protest sign outside the Little

Havana house where the boy stayed that read, “Freedom Super-
cedes Fatherhood” (Time 2000b).
Conceptions of family were thus central to the legal battle and
to the broader conflict over whether the boy would return to
Cuba or stay in Miami. This accounts in large part for why the
112 • Boundaries of Dissent

case resonated with a broader conservative American public and

its discourses of family values and freedom. Amid the heightened
political climate of a presidential campaign season, Republican
candidates had no shortage of public comments on the matter.
Senator John McCain argued during a debate that Elián should
stay because “his mother sacrificed her life in order that her son
could have freedom,” and Steve Forbes called Elián “Bill Clinton’s
human sacrifice to Fidel Castro” (The Miami Herald 2000a), con-
juring up images of a corrupt and amoral political leader feeding
a child to an ogre.
Here, then, the issue revolved around the relationship between
family, state, and child. For those who wanted to keep Elián in
Miami, the boy’s father could not fulfill the duties of citizenship
required of a parent not because he was a poor father—indeed, at
one point a lawyer working with the Miami family said that
“[o]ur position is not that the father is a bad guy” (The Miami
Herald 1999a)—but rather because he lived in Cuba. Under the
conditions imposed by the Castro regime, the father lacked the
free will necessary for sound judgment and action. Therefore, in
balancing different rights claims with respect to family and to
residence, they argued, the courts ought to consider the interna-
tional geopolitics of human rights.
Conservatives thus sought to both loosen and expand the
tightly drawn boundaries of belonging and identity that are typi-
cally associated with the conservative discourses of family. Con-
servative politics of boundaries and belonging have long held in
some tension the micro-geographies of family and home, on one
hand, and the macro-geographies of nationalism. “Family val-
ues” involves not so much a private sphere wholly sheltered from
the public world of the state as a discourse about the relation
between the private and the public; about making a particular
story of the American family a story of the American nation-state
as a whole. Will’s disparagement of the “fetish of biology” he
associated with those who argued the father’s rights trumped all
is thus perhaps less of a contradiction to conservative discourses
of family and state than it appears on face value. By loosening the
bounds of family in this circumstance, they sought to harden the
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 113

boundaries of the nation itself vis-à-vis Cuba. For them, the

larger context of citizenship as shaped by state practices was—at
least in these rather strategically political discourses—more
important than the bonds of blood in the equation of where the
boy ought to live.
Even Republicans were split on the issue of how to adjudicate
the conflicting claims, however. Senator Orrin Hatch argued,
“When it comes to this little Cuban boy, there is only one con-
cern that everybody ought to have in their minds, and that is
what is in the best interest of that child. We have laws in this
country that will basically take care of those interests” (The
Miami Herald 2000a). Still, this left rather unanswered the ques-
tion of which institution in fact best represented the law in this
case. Some, like then-presidential-candidate Al Gore, argued the
courts represented the ultimate authority over the questions at
issue. “[T]he ultimate decision as to what is in this boy’s best
interest should be made on the basis of the rule of law according
to due process—not politics and not diplomacy,” Gore said in a
statement, and “[t]he courts are in the best position to make this
determination” (The Miami Herald 2000a).
In all the legal challenges, courts upheld the reasonableness of
the federal government’s response. Still, in rejecting the extended
family’s appeal, the Federal District Court in Florida did express
concern—that echoed in part Will’s position—about the degree
to which law’s smooth surface extended beyond borders:

According to the INS policy, that a parent lives in a

communist-totalitarian state is no special circumstance,
sufficient in and of itself, to justify the consideration of a
6-year-old child’s asylum claim (presented by a relative in
this country) against the wishes of the nonresident parent.
We acknowledge, as a widely accepted truth, that Cuba
does violate human rights and fundamental freedoms
and does not guarantee the rule of law to people living in
Cuba. . . . Persons living in such a totalitarian state may be
unable to assert freely their own legal rights, much less the
legal rights of others. Moreover, some reasonable people
114 • Boundaries of Dissent

might say that a child in the United States inherently has a

substantial conflict of interest with a parent residing in a
totalitarian state when that parent—even when he is not
coerced—demands that the child leave this country to
return to a country with little respect for human rights and
basic freedoms (González v. Reno et al. 2000).

Seeming to open the door to a divergence from legal precedent,

the court suggested that parental rights were not sacrosanct and
that geopolitical considerations ought to provide some weight in
INS decisions.
Critics of the decision emphasized the notable lack of ambiguity
of the citizenship status of children before the law. “A child can’t go
to the dentist without permission, can’t have any kind of emer-
gency surgery, can’t choose school, religion, clothing, housing,”
noted one expert in children’s law, suggesting that if “you took this
ruling to its logical extension, a child would have the right to go to
court and say, ‘I’m a New Yorker, but I want to move to California’”
(Time 2000c). Another lawyer—this one specializing in immigra-
tion law—characterized the court’s opinion as hinting at the
potential for a “rather dramatic departure from the law” and
argued that “Elián is a little kid, and only in a surrealistic world
can you argue that he is making the asylum decision himself ”
(U.S. News & World Report 2000). Still another asked rhetorically,
“Does this mean lawyers can hang out at the gates of Disney World
as families depart and children cry out, ‘I don’t want to go!’?”
The citizenship questions opened up in the case were not only
drawn around age and the geopolitical status of Cuba within a
global human rights regime, but also how these issues intersected
around the politics of immigration. Some immigrant rights
activists noted that Elián was but one of thousands of children in
broadly similar circumstances. And yet, they argued, the child
from Cuba received the most intense interest from media and the
political establishment, while other children did not. One Miami
activist held a rally to dramatize the unique status of Cuban refu-
gees in U.S. immigration policy to the detriment of others. As he
explained, “This is the country of opportunity for everybody.
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 115

The little Cuban Elián González came here and we opened our
hearts, but I don’t see that happening with the Haitian people”
(The Miami Herald 2000b).
The unique circumstances of the immigration status of Elián
were in fact part of a larger pattern of state practices and policies
that shaped movement across the Florida Straits. The U.S. Con-
gress formalized an exceptional status for Cuban immigrants
with its passage of the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966. The act
stipulated that any Cuban migrant who arrived in the United
States and managed to stay for a period of 1 year could petition
for residency status. U.S. immigration law in essence encouraged
illegal Cuban migration by opening an interpretive gap that sepa-
rated legitimate residency claims from illegitimate, all of which
applied specifically to migrants from Cuba.
In the 1990s, the Clinton administration sought to close that
gap slightly by removing the 1-year stay requirement. All migrants
intercepted at sea were to be returned to Cuba, while all making it
ashore could petition to remain in the United States. In seeking to
resolve ambiguities, however, the so-called “wet feet, dry feet” po-
licy arguably served to heighten them. For example, Guantánamo
Bay—that geopolitical purgatory so central to the contemporary
War on Terror—also became a site of similar controversy over the
ambiguity of its territoriality with respect to the new immigration
policies. Under the new policy, when the U.S. Coast Guard inter-
cepted migrants at sea, they moved them to Guantánamo before
repatriation. Yet, some of the migrants argued, the base was in
effect U.S. territory and thus their feet were dry with respect to the
new policy. That there might emerge a specific case that reflected
the more general ambiguity of U.S. immigration policy with
respect to Cuba was almost certain.

La Lucha y La Calle: Public Space and Community

Identity
Two Cubas
Many of the stories in this book are about movement and settle-
ment, belonging and estrangement. They involve issues, in others
116 • Boundaries of Dissent

words, of how identity is tied to place. To understand the unique

spectacle of the Elián González case—and why it was instantly
about much more than abstract legal debates—it must be placed
before the backdrop of the previous 4 decades of the historical
geography of Cuban nationhood. Split by the politics of revolu-
tion and reaction, as well as by geography, Cuba in essence con-
sists of two nations separated by the Florida Straits. On one side
lie the champions of anti-imperialist nationalism and antibour-
geois revolution. On the other lie the true believers in the moral
rightness of democratic capitalism as led by the United States.
Within this context the Miami Cuban community is a collec-
tive identity of “outsiders” of a unique sort. From the stand-
point of Anglo-America, the community is but one of a myriad
of immigrant communities, marked by differences of language
and culture, and bound together by a shared past and connec-
tion to place. Yet the Miami Cuban community might be better
understood less as an immigrant community that has left its
nation behind—somewhere else and in the past—than a com-
munity in exile oriented toward the future of the country they
left.
In his interpretation of the identity politics surrounding con-
structions of the exile community and how the Elián González
case activated it in uniquely charged ways, Miguel De La Torre
(2003) argues that the mythic Cuba at the center of exile identity
represents a merging of political ideology, place, and religious
fervor. The hegemonic Cuban exile identity is one of a deep con-
servatism rooted in the certainties of a religious worldview and a
politics of unwavering absolutes. The fall of Batista and the rise
of Castro in 1959 represents a line drawn in time that sharply
divides a period of idealized nationhood from the fall from grace
that followed. From one perspective, then, the politics of exile
nationhood are profoundly nostalgic: rooted in a mythic past. In
one of his two books on Miami, David Rieff recounts the story of
a Cuban professional living in New York, who said of Little
Havana:
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 117

As you walk down Eighth Street, in a sense you have

entered a time capsule that has transported you to the
past. In Miami Cubans live or try to live La Cuba de ayer,
the Cuba of yesterday. It is a mythical country we fabri-
cated, where nostalgia and myth abound (1987: 152).

La Cuba de ayer is thus central to contemporary exile national-

ism. In this vision, the Cuba of yesterday is socially cohesive,
politically free, geographically intact.
Yet the politics of exile nationalism is not solely retrospective.
Instead, the historical imagery at once reflects a contest for the
future of Cuba and accounts for the peculiar politics of the com-
munity. It involves, as De La Torre writes, “a (re)invention of a
community’s vision of itself that is both religious and future-
oriented” (2003). The time of exile since the Revolution is seen as
an ongoing struggle—referred to as La Lucha [13]—to save the
nation from the tyranny of a communist dictatorship. Everything
is refracted through the lens of that struggle: work, religion, fam-
ily, and, perhaps most intensely, politics and ideology.
The political teleology of exile nationalism accounts in part for
its intensity. De La Torre (2003) goes so far as to call the politics
of La Lucha against the Castro regime a “Holy War.” La Lucha, he
argues, represents

a cosmic struggle between the children of light (Exilic

Cubans) and the children of darkness (Resident Cubans),
complete with a Christ (Marti), an Antichrist (Castro), a
priesthood (CANF), a promised land (Cuba), and martyrs
(those who gloriously suffer in the Holy War against Cas-
tro). Add to this cosmology a messiah—Elián (2003).

The exile model citizen at the center of the dominant Miami

Cuban identity is constructed, according to De La Torre, as a
white, relatively prosperous, aggressively masculinist, homopho-
bic man. This dominant construction of Cubanness is rooted in a
historical perspective that distinguishes an earlier wave of
migrants from the more recent period that began with the Mariel
boatlift and which has been characterized as largely nonwhite. In
118 • Boundaries of Dissent

this sense, De La Torre argues, the model citizen at the heart of

dominant constructions of Miami Cuban identity is paradoxically
racist. In asserting the myth of a predominantly white nation,
this perspective erases the reality of a biracial nation, reflecting
what Goldberg (2002) refers to as a “raceless” identity politics
that in claiming to be beyond race, actually reinforces it.
The conflicts over the identity politics of the community
have always been aggressive and often turned violent. In the
1970s and 1980s, Miami was wracked by a series of what can
only be described as political assassinations. Public figures who
challenged the hard-line anti-Castro orthodoxy of the Miami
Cuban community—many of them in the media—were com-
mon victims. In a three-year period in the 1970s, anti-Castro
groups engaged in over 100 politically motivated attacks in South
Florida (Bardach 2002). The violence peaked in the 1980s, as
political groups bombed a whole series of buildings; from busi-
nesses to foreign consulates, all seen as representing the betrayals
of collaboration with the Castro regime.
In 1986, the South Florida Peace Coalition held a demon-
stration protesting U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. The
issue was a divisive one throughout the country, but no place
more so than in Miami, where the Cuban community saw it
not only as a reflection of an abstract contest over political
ideology—the evils of communism against the salvation of
“democracy”—but as a proxy battle between Castro’s Cuba
and Reagan’s America. The presence of what radical anti-
Castro groups like Alpha 66 saw as communist sympathizers
agitating in an important Miami public space was, plainly put,
intolerable.
The Elián González story is but one example of a larger strug-
gle over the present and future standing of a Cuban nation
intensely fractured both by politics and by geography. It fused
together the symbolic politics of childhood innocence with the
geopolitical contest over Cuban nationhood. The conflict, in
turn, was played out in a variety of venues. Among them was the
formal world of courtrooms and hearing chambers, ruled as they
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 119

are by the rituals of bureaucracy and law. Equally important were

the concrete public spaces of the city.

La Calle
The politics of Cubanness is worked out not only in the rituals
of law and bureaucracy and the virtual spaces of the media, but
also in the concrete spaces of the city. In this section, I explore
how the struggle over the future of Cuba was manifest in the
public spaces of Miami during the course of the Elián González
saga and how this in turn intersected with the politics of medi-
ated spectacle.
With the case of Elián González, leadership in both Cuban
communities—the one in Cuba, and the one in Miami—quickly
used the incident to marshal resources. These battles, of course,
were never about legal abstractions alone, or even primarily.
Indeed, conflict over Elián’s legal status was a public spectacle
from the very beginning. The two sides marshaled forces in both
the concrete spaces of Miami and Havana and the virtual spaces
of media. In so doing, they sought to constitute the public in
their own image and so to shape to the conduct of affairs.
Shortly after the boy was recovered from the sea, Fidel Castro
announced defiantly, “We will move heaven and earth to get the
child back! If they have any brains, they will make sure the boy is
returned within 72 hours.” In an interview, Castro pointed to the
battle over public opinion, and the importance of conjuring
up strong publics with the capacity to influence the course of
events, when he said, “I hope that Cuba’s numerous friends in the
United States and in other parts will begin to organize commit-
tees for the release of the child kidnapped by the United States.
Heaven and earth will be moved” (The Miami Herald 1999b).
Each Cuba had its privileged symbolic sites. The regime imme-
diately seized on the incident, staging massive protests on the
streets of Havana and making intensive use of state-controlled
media to marshal support both at home and abroad. The public
spaces around the American Interest section of Havana was one
important location in Cuba and a frequent site of dramatic pub-
lic protests. And in what The Miami Herald referred to as an
120 • Boundaries of Dissent

addition to “the orchestrated campaign of public fury” that char-

acterized Cuba’s response to the situation, an estimated “1,000
grandmothers marched through Cardenas in support of the boy’s
father” (The Miami Herald 1999c).
Perhaps most prominent, however, was the micro-space of
Elián’s schoolroom. Cuban television regularly ran images of the
room and the students agonizing over the boy’s absence. His desk
sat empty, wrapped in a sign that read “untouchable,” as if to dra-
matize the child’s absence. Toward this end, Cuban television
broadcast images from Elián’s school, with crying colleagues
pleading for his return, and the boy’s empty school desk drama-
tizing his absence. Notably, although the schoolroom was a space
symbolic of childhood innocence, it was also a public space of the
state; not a domestic interior.
In Miami, by contrast, the drama focused on the private home
of the extended family where Elián stayed for the duration of his
time in Florida. Around this site, the public battle pitted the
extended family against the federal state. The family represented
the religiously inflected worldviews of the Miami Cuban commu-
nity more broadly. The INS and the Department of Justice repre-
sented the abstractions of state-sanctioned law and with it the
authority of the state itself.
In turn, the battle between these two perspectives was drama-
tized on a public stage: in the opinion pieces and letters to the
editors of newspapers, in the brashly conservative commentary
on Miami’s radio airwaves, and on television news. Much of the
public identity of the Miami Cuban community has been worked
out through local media. Radio has played a particularly strong
role. As Bardach characterizes it, “A good deal of Miami Spanish
language radio has operated as the Big Brother of the commu-
nity” (2002: 103). By this she means it is heavily politicized to the
point of serving to enhance a hegemonic ideological perspective
that not only is intolerant of dissent, but whose power of persua-
sion extends to the concrete politics of the streets. On more than
one occasion, as just one example, the FCC has fined Miami
radio stations for incitement to riot.
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 121

Newspapers have also been a battleground of sorts. The domi-

nant ideological slant of the city’s editorial pages has historically
been consistent with that of hegemonic exile politics, and when
papers have strayed from an anti-Castro position they have often
suffered as a result. When, for example, The Miami Herald pub-
lished an editorial in 1992 critical of efforts to tighten the sanc-
tions against Cuba, the staunchly anti-Castro Cuban American
National Foundation launched a high-profile public campaign to
discredit the paper. The paper also found its vending machines
vandalized and its publisher the victim of death threats (Levine
2000).
The case of Elián González as it played out in Miami was above
all a political spectacle dramatized in the public spaces of the city
and projected onto a mediated public sphere. Activists in the
Miami Cuban community pressed their representation of the
meaning of the event on the streets and in local media. Among the
publics conjured by the Elián spectacle was the homegrown con-
servative in the Miami community. Yet the case also resonated
more widely, with a larger national conservative movement.
A story in The Miami Herald commented on the degree to
which media exposure seemed to influence not just the conduct
of the legal battle, but how the conflict played out in the streets.
The story described a scene where the night before police had
cleared the area with tear gas. Before the local evening news
broadcasts, the story noted, “no more than 80 people milled
around two television trucks parked on a corner” (The Miami
Herald 2000c). Within an hour, the scene dramatically changed:

By 10 p.m., three more TV trucks had arrived and sprouted

antennas. A helicopter hovered. The crowd had more than
tripled. Police were lined up in riot gear. People were much
more animated, as was the cacophony of chants and car
horns. At 11 p.m., with most local stations broadcasting
from the intersection, people hoisted posters not seen there
all day; the crowd swelled even more. At midnight, almost
a half-hour after the newscasts had ended, and 24 hours
after the previous night’s tear-gas confrontation, the corner
122 • Boundaries of Dissent

was completely clear. No TV trucks. No protesters. No

parked cars. Only the occasional police cruiser and curious
motorist drove past.

Some in the exile community raised concerns. One of those in

the crowd was 77-year-old Watergate burglar Eugenio Rolando
Martinez. He was there, according to the reporter covering the
story, to serve as a “moderating influence” on both police and
protesters. “I shouldn’t be saying it,” he said, “but I believe that
a lot of the trouble in the crowd is because of this,” by which he
meant the television cameras. “Some of these people,” he
argued, “don’t even know why they’re here.” Miami Police
spokesman Lt. Bill Schwartz concurred, arguing that “[p]eople
who have a genuine concern and want to get their message out
will use the television as a forum; people who just want to cause
trouble and act silly will use television as an exhibitionist plat-
form.”
The question of how to dissent was one raised in the exile
community from the beginning. Initially, activists made a point
not to take to the streets, in part to distinguish themselves from
the protests in Cuba, which they characterized as bellicose and a
contrived political show. The no-protest period quickly evapo-
rated amid the heated political conflict, but the theme of the
need for respectable and principled dissent emerged in various
contexts. Later in the saga, for example, a crowd of thousands
protested outside the home where the boy was staying. Along
with the intense media presence, singer Gloria Estefan came to
lend support. She said the following before the crowd and the
cameras:

We are a peaceful community. We’re asking all Cuban-

Americans to continue protesting as they have done so
far, in a respectful manner, and not be carried away into
violence or civil disobedience (The Miami Herald
2000d).
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 123

In actions and rhetoric such as this, individuals like Estefan and

Martinez sought to constitute the exile community as a public
with common purpose and force of will, as well as to represent
that community before a larger American public as morally com-
mitted and disciplined dissidents. They insisted on their rights to
the streets as a necessary venue in which to dramatize legitimate
dissent. At the same time, they sought to constitute the exile
community—in essence, Elián’s new family—as disciplined; fully
respectful of the duties of citizenship.
Raul Martinez, then-mayor of Hialeah, FL, discussed the need
to balance the right to dissent for one segment of his community
against the right to peace for others. “We have to not look out for
the right of one group, but for the rights of the entire commu-
nity” (Olkon, Epstein Nieves, and Merzer 2000), he said. More-
over, he was concerned about the appearance of dissent before
the media spotlight, speculating that “[w]hen this gets on
national television, what sympathy is the rest of the country
going to have?”
Still, the point bears repeating that community is not natural
and organic, but constructed. Despite all the appearance of an
unwaveringly unified position on all things Cuban, the Miami
Cuban community is itself a discourse shaped by practices. As
one exile put it, “When everyone talks about the Cuban exile
community supporting this kid, what are they talking about?
They may control the Spanish radio stations that try to manipu-
late everyone with their propaganda, but they don’t represent the
entire Cuban community in Miami” (Olkon, Epstein Nieves, and
Merzer 2000).

The Politics of Home

Private Spaces
The most important site in Miami was the home of Lazaro
González, where Elián stayed for the duration of his time in Flor-
ida. While the incident presented clear protagonists, and an easily
drawn theme, both of which played well on the evening news, it
also took place on a clearly defined stage. In the case of the little
124 • Boundaries of Dissent

boy from Cuba, that stage proved to be the suburban house of

Elián’s uncle, where the boy stayed for the duration of his time in
Miami (Figure 5.1). That house served as a metaphor for a larger

Fig. 5.1 Scene outside González home in Little Havana. (Photograph courtesy of AP/Wide
World Photos, used by permission.)

drama. This fact became reflected in the protesters arrayed out-

side who—brandishing Cuban flags and Catholic sym-
bols—vowed to protect Elián and his new home from the outside
intrusion of the state and what many saw as its illegitimate inten-
tion to remove the boy and send him back to Cuba. The army of
media personnel who covered this spectacle served to turn this
drama into one of national, even global, import.
On one hand, the space around the home provided a platform
on which to stage the spectacle. From the beginning, all of the
symbolic presence of the Miami Cuban community seemed con-
densed into the space immediately outside this home. Supporters
of the boy and his continued presence in Miami displayed signs,
conducted prayer vigils, constructed shrines, played music, and
vowed to protect the boy. Further, photographers and news cam-
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 125

erapeople were on constant watch for daily appearances of the

boy before the media spotlight.
The home, then, was a complexly mediated space of dissent. It
offered a platform to both dramatize larger opposition to state
authority, as well as provide the boundaries of shelter—largely
symbolic—from the intrusion of unwanted bodies and the
authority they represented. The Miami Herald described the
scene inside and outside the home in the following way:

A world of politicians, lawyers, strategists and professional

Castro-haters has taken over the small two-bedroom house
where the child is living with his Miami relatives. An army
of photographers, cameramen, reporters, and technicians
has taken over the area surrounding the house (2000e).

“They have become prisoners in their own home,” the story con-
cluded, “a modest, beige stucco house in Miami’s Little Havana.”
The home is arguably the symbolic site par excellence of Ameri-
can nationalism. Within hegemonic national myth, the home is
the bounded space of the nuclear family, representing a private
sphere of individuals who share common blood and common
space. It is a space of reprieve from the public duties of work and
citizenship; a space of idealized family and nationhood. Feminists
have long challenged this perspective of the home as haven from
both work and the obligations of the state (Massey 1994), offering
a more complex view of the social production of domestic space
and of the dynamics of work and citizenship in which it is wrapped
up. The home from this perspective ranges from being viewed as at
worst a site of exploitation—a space where women have been his-
torically bound—to a more ambivalent space: one both of exploi-
tation and of nurturing, work as well as reprieve (hooks 1990).
So how, then, were discourses of home marshaled in the con-
text of the Elián González case? One striking way focused on
how the home shaped the relationship between the boy and the
(extended) family. The very public spectacle that took place out-
side the modest suburban home revolved not only around the
grand geopolitical demons conjured up by the Miami Cuban pop-
126 • Boundaries of Dissent

ulation, but also, at the same time, around arguments about

domesticity. Beyond serving as a stage, the home also served to
mark off the private space of the domestic from the intensely pub-
lic space of the spectacle outside and pointed to the deeply politi-
cal, if often masked, nature of that distinction. The space behind
closed doors became at once intensely public, with debates by
media pundits about exactly what was taking place behind those
doors. Did the surrogate family provide a healthy environment
for the child? Did the boy’s cousin provide the maternal figure
tragically lost and now so necessary to provide continuity? Or was
the boy subject to psychological manipulation, caught up in the
very public discourse of the Miami Cuban population?
Those who wanted to keep Elián in Miami argued that the
family provided nurturing relationships important to the boy’s
well-being and thus that the home itself was a nurturing space. In
this vision, the extended family in essence became recentered as
the primary nurturers; as a kind of surrogate nuclear family. The
discourse of the nurturing family thus became spatialized within
the boundaries of the home.
This discourse in turn was couched in heavily gendered terms.
Much of the discourse of the nurturing family home centered on
Elián’s cousin: a then-21-year-old woman named Marisleysis
González. From the beginning, many portrayed the young woman
as the maternal figure that sheltered the boy from both the grief of
losing his mother, as well as the onslaught of the outside world. As
she herself put it, “I know I have to be strong for Elián because I’m
the mother figure in his life” (The Miami Herald 2000e).
Critics instead offered a very different perspective on the char-
acter of the family home. Rather than nurturing the child so as to
allow his essential being freedom of expression, they argued
instead that the extended family manipulated the child and his
presence before the cameras to promote their own ideological
perspective. Further, they charged that Marisleysis González was
far from the nurturing maternal figure. Instead, they portrayed
her as an unstable woman who exploited the child for her own
ideological purposes, trotting him before media cameras to bring
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 127

before the public images of the nurturing alternative to life in

Cuba [14].
The height of the conflict over the meaning of home—sanctu-
ary or prison—was manifest in the response to the airing in April
of a late-night videotape of the child emphatically telling his
father he wished to stay in Miami. For many, the video bordered
on child abuse. “That video,” said a medical ethicist, “was politi-
cal kiddie porn. It’s clearly exploitation” (The Miami Herald
2000f ). The ethicist’s point relied on an interpretation of the
citizenship status of children vis-à-vis adults, as well as of the
extended family vis-à-vis the surviving parent. In turn, he linked
these concerns to an argument about the nature of media itself;
saying that “[c]hildren are not competent to give their consent to
be on TV. It never should have been taken. It never should have
been broadcast.” A Clinton administration official echoed the
sentiment by saying, “This is the most appalling example so far of
this child being manipulated and exploited by the Miami rela-
tives who continue to block Elián’s immediate reunification with
his father” (The Miami Herald 2000f)
How the politics of identity and citizenship with the Elián case
intersected around the home extended beyond its immediate and
stable boundaries. The debates about the videotape were one
example. Here the issue centered on how representation was
mediated: how meaning was moved across the public/private
divide. From the home-as-haven perspective, the videotape was a
neutral bearer of the legitimate interests and desires of the child.
For those who argued from the home-as-prison standpoint, the
boundaries of the home shielded the family from legitimate pub-
lic scrutiny. That shelter provided a space within which to orga-
nize representation to fulfill narrow ambitions that were at odds
with the needs of the child.

Domestic Space and State Power

The question of how authority and meaning moved across the
boundaries of the home—or not—was also evidenced in a much
more high-profile example: how to enforce the state’s will on the
128 • Boundaries of Dissent

matter of where Elián should live. In particular, in the face of

repeated refusals to turn over the child, should state force be
applied to resolve the situation? Put differently, should the state
hold out for the citizens’ willing compliance with its authority
and therefore the surrender of the child from the private space of
the home to public world beyond? Or should it forcefully cross
the boundary of the home to enforce its authority? If the ques-
tion about Elián González was where the boy ought to call home,
the question presented to authorities was where does the state
properly reside?
The issue was highlighted, in quite dramatic fashion, by the
response to the events of 22 April. By April, Justice Department
officials were increasingly frustrated by the González family’s
refusal to hand over Elián, despite repeated legal and bureau-
cratic rulings that upheld his repatriation to Cuba and to his
father. Lazaro González defiantly proclaimed, “They will have to
take this child by force” (Time 2000d).
A Newsweek story described the scene around the home in the
following way:

As women in black dresses made prayer circles, burly men

formed flying squads to crash the barricades. Pop diva
Gloria Estefan held forth for the cameras, and movie star
Andy Garcia asked to have his picture taken with the
child (2000b).

The crowds around the home were increasingly large and aggres-
sive; prepared to guard the home against any potential intrusion
by federal forces. Federal officials pointed to a picture of a home
surrounded by a dangerous group of people: bodyguards with
concealed weapons permits, 15–20 men—many of them with vio-
lent criminal records—camped out in tents pitched in a neighbor’s
yard, and reported spottings by federal agents of members of the
paramilitary group Alpha 66 (Newsweek 2000c). Likewise, local
officials were publicly refusing to facilitate the removal of the boy.
As federal officials concluded that talks were going nowhere,
they prepared for the use of force. They chose a time likely to
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 129

attract the least resistance, and an aggressive intervention team

designed to quickly subdue any residual resistance. In a predawn
raid of the González home, federal agents burst through the crowd
who were there to protect against such an action and subsequently
smashed open the front door of the house with battering rams.
Agents proceeded to the bedroom, where Elián was huddled with
one of the men who rescued him the previous Thanksgiving. With
military-style weapons raised, they demanded the child.
In the wake of the raid, the streets of Little Havana erupted in a
riot. One report described the scene as “a gauntlet of concrete
benches, garbage dumpsters, newspaper boxes, stop signs, chairs,
and other objects thrown into the wide streets and burned”
(Time 2000e). Again the conduct of dissent presented a question
of meaning. For many, the riot confirmed a view of a petulant
community. In the face of the bad publicity, some rationalized
the response by arguing it was an overaggressive state that ulti-
mately caused the raid. One man remarked, for example, that

we are peaceful people. We are not violent. Look at what

they have turned us into (Time 2000e).

For him, this was a community normally up to the duties of citi-

zenship and maintaining its proper boundaries of order only
prompted to transgress them when placed under the extreme
pressure of outside intervention.
With the raid, the state forcefully crossed the boundary that
marked off the public and the private in order to reassert its
authority against dissenting citizens and local government offi-
cials. In the wake of the action, there was a flood of commentary,
much of it focusing on an image that came to crystallize the rela-
tionship among citizens, the state, and space as played out in the
saga of the boy from Cuba. The image—quickly circulated
around the world to grace the following morning’s front
page—depicted a federal agent, in full paramilitary garb, point-
ing an automatic weapon at the head of Donato Dalrymple, one
of the fishermen who had saved Elián from the ocean. The agent
130 • Boundaries of Dissent

Fig. 5.2 Emblematic media image of the raid of the González family home by federal
agents. (Photograph courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos, used by permission.)

is demanding that Dalrymple hand over the child, who is seen

shrieking in terror at the sight of the agent (see Figure 5.2).
But while much as the commentary focused on these four
figures—the three protagonists and the gun—it also focused on
where they were: the closet of the bedroom where the boy had
been sleeping during the early-morning raid. For conservatives,
this was a horrifying image of a tyrannical state that had over-
stepped the bounds of its authority and violated the sanctity of
what conservative commentator Will described as a “peaceful
American household” (This Week 2000). The failure of the state to
respect the sanctity of the divide between the public space outside
and the private realm within, Congressman Tom DeLay argued,
blurred the moral line that distinguished the United States from
other countries. The tyranny of this act, in other words, allowed an
equivalence to be drawn to the tyrannical state of Cuba (Meet the
Press 2000).
In interpreting the raid and the events preceding it, commen-
tators argued by geopolitical analogy. Within an international
perspective, the Right argued that the incident suggested the U.S.
state was like Cuba. A Miami Herald editorial asked, “If the presi-
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 131

dent believes the thug display by armed federal agents against a

horrified 6-year-old child constitutes the right thing to do, then
we must ask him this: What country do you govern, sir? Is it the
United States or is it Cuba?” (The Miami Herald 2000g). In a sur-
vey of responses to the raid, one nursing student in Texas who
otherwise supported the child’s return to his father said,

To me, it was something I would see if he were in Cuba. It

just was not right, not in a family home, not in America.
These people have done nothing, no aggression, no vio-
lence (The Miami Herald 2000h).

An exile in Miami replied similarly, “It’s unforgivable what the

government did. That’s something you’d expect in communist
Cuba or Hitler’s Germany but not in the United States.”
Within a national perspective, commentators often repre-
sented the conflict between the federal state and local dissidents
by reference to the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s. Critics of
the administration compared the Miami Cuban community to
the Civil Rights movement itself. “Pictures of the 6-year-old,
screaming in terror, in the clutches of those who had put a gun in
his face,” Will argued, “demonstrate what leaders of America’s
Civil Rights movement understood: the power of graphic jour-
nalism when recording the brutal infliction of force to enforce
injustice” (2000). Another editorial in Newsweek drew on a simi-
lar theme, saying, “In the 1960s, protesters at antiwar demonstra-
tions chanted, ‘Hell no, we won’t go,’ and were seen as brave
resisters in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi; today, protesters out-
side the Little Havana house holding signs reading ‘Hell no, he
won’t go’ have been seen for weeks by many critics as lawbreakers
in the spirit of George Wallace” (Alter 2000).
Indeed, supporters of the raid and its reassertion of federal
state authority over the lawless space of the González home also
made comparisons with Civil Rights battles. Such rhetoric typi-
cally compared the Miami Cuban community with segregation-
ists from the 1960s resisting the dismantling of the geographies
of Jim Crow through the exercise of power exerted from else-
132 • Boundaries of Dissent

where. One Newsweek article—quoting Miami-Dade County

Mayor Alex Penelas’ statement that “our local law-enforcement
resources will not participate in the forced removal or repatria-
tion of Elián González, which we would consider illegal”—likened
it to “a Southern governor resisting school integration 40 years
ago” (Newsweek 2000a).
National opinion polls had shown general support for returning
the boy to his father. Public opinion was much more sharply
divided on the raid, however. A bus driver in the Bronx explained his
reaction this way: “This was like the cops saving him from kidnap-
pers. After all the threats and the crazy ranting, it would have been
crazy for them to go in without guns” (The Miami Herald 2000h).
Not surprisingly, interviews with supporters of the raid also
focused on the image. Questions put to Deputy Attorney General
Holder focused specifically on how the image would play on a
global stage. And in an interesting recognition that symbolic
violence is as much the preserve of the state as it is of those
who would defy it, former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger
explained in reference to the image that “a great show of force
can often avoid violence” (This Week 2000). It is not just opposi-
tional groups like the Zapatistas in Chiapas that make use of vio-
lence as theater, then, but in many cases the state itself.

Legacies
Among the vestiges of the conflict over Elián were two museums:
one in Miami, and the other in the boy’s Cuban hometown of
Cardenas. The latter is typical socialist kitsch, reflected in every-
thing from the building’s name—The Museum of the Battle of
Ideas—to the bronze statue of the boy upheld “by a sea of hands,
representing the Cuban people” (Washington Post 2002). The
museum in Miami is called Casa Elián or the Elián Museum and
consisted of the preserved home that both sheltered the boy and
which endured the violation of federal agents storming its doors.
During the course of the saga, Elián’s image circulated over the
airwaves and within concrete spaces. The Cuban government
plastered Havana’s crumbling facades with murals of the boy, and
 Elián González and the Geopolitics of Home • 133

Cardenas was likewise awash in images. The image, however, also

made its way elsewhere. In Moscow, a group holding signs of
Elián protested outside the U.S. Embassy, demanding his return.
And Elián’s image also made its way to Seattle, to show up on
posters lofted in the air amid the protests over the meetings of
the WTO. What in the world did an international custody battle
have to do with globalization and trade?
In some sense, absolutely nothing. The antiglobalization pro-
tests did, however, provide a stage on which activists of all stripes
could dramatize their cause. “If the image of a child can be effec-
tive in campaigns like muscular dystrophy,” a spokeswoman for
the Cuban-American National Foundation explained, “then it
can make people aware of Castro’s victims” (Time 1999). For the
Right, the child was a symbolic weapon that—because of the res-
ervoirs of meaning associated with childhood itself—could be
used to sharpen the moral lines that answer the question of
where the boy ought to call home. Seattle provided a way to
express broader discontents about various injustices in a context
of otherwise radically different politics. In another respect, how-
ever, both the Elián González saga and the protest over economic
globalization shared commonalities. They each centered on rela-
tionships between state power and citizenship, and the bound-
aries that define them.
 6
Free Trade and Fences: Globalization
and the Politics of Mobility in
Québec City, 2001

In April 2001, as representatives from 34 states gathered in a

conference center in Québec City for the annual meeting of the
Summit of the Americas, activists from similarly diverse places
gathered on the streets of the city. Summit delegates were in
Québec City to discuss details of the proposed Free Trade Area of
the Americas (FTAA), which would extend NAFTA over the space
of the entire hemisphere (save for Cuba). Before leaving for the
Summit, newly elected President George W. Bush noted that
when implemented, the FTAA would create “the largest free trade
area in the world, encompassing 34 countries and 800 million
people” (Edwords 2001). More prosaically, Bush sounded a theme
that would subsequently become much more prominent. “Our
goal in Québec,” he said, “is to build a hemisphere of liberty”
(Edwords 2001).

135
136 • Boundaries of Dissent

Efforts such as the FTAA are often characterized as building

blocks of a transparent and inevitable process of “globalization.”
Such a rendering portrays globalization as an almost-natural
process and any resistance to it as futile. It would be more accu-
rate, however, to characterize dominant rhetorics of globalization
as embodying a rather more particular vision: one based on prin-
ciples of neoliberalism. From this perspective, the future is envi-
sioned normatively as one of fast-paced mobility. Goods and
services could move across international borders with minimal
resistance, providing consumers the freedom to choose among
an unprecedented cornucopia of alternatives. Likewise, the world
of neoliberal globalization is one of fluidly mobile capital, where
corporations can easily move investments and productive facili-
ties around the world. When George W. Bush spoke of creating a
“hemisphere of liberty,” then, he was imagining a borderless,
free-flowing world that linked producer and consumer across
arbitrary distances. Geography, in essence, no longer mattered.
The FTAA was thus yet another example of the boundary-
eroding drive of economic globalization under neoliberal ortho-
doxy. Nevertheless, the supreme irony is that in the early 21st
century, a summit dedicated to realizing neoliberal visions of lib-
erty could only take place alongside significant efforts to limit it.
Likewise, in a normative world of borderless mobility, bound-
aries were absolutely essential to the staging of the event. In the
months before the Summit, Québec City, through unprecedented
transformations in the urban security landscape, became a barri-
cade city (Figure 6.1). Security officials erected a massive fence
that wound 3.8 kilometers (2.4 miles) around the historic city
center, bounding a 10-square-kilometer zone around the Summit
site that barred any public access, never mind demonstrations.
A pass system granted access across the boundary of the Fence
only to designated residents, employees, accredited delegates,
reporters, and others explicitly approved by authorities.
Canadian officials’ efforts to secure order in Québec City were
not limited to the space of the city, however. At the larger scale of
state boundaries, Canadian authorities carefully regulated move-
ment across the international border with an eye toward influenc-
 Free Trade and Fences • 137

Fig. 6.1 Tearing down the walls of regulation. (Image courtesy of Artizans, used by per-
mission.)

ing movement into Québec City. The focus of these efforts was to
keep many activists away from Québec City altogether. Not unlike
efforts by the FBI to limit the mobility of supporters of the
Wounded Knee occupation in 1973, the Canadian state’s efforts to
constrain the mobility of certain people was likewise an attempt to
shape the contours of dissent in public space. A politics of public
space was thus inseparably a politics of scale.
The radical geosecurity engineering involved in staging the
Summit of the Americas in Québec City raised deep questions
not just about the nature of neoliberal globalization and its
rather stunted rhetorics of freedom and liberty, but also about
democratic citizenship itself in an era of globalization. Who
should have what kind of rights to dissent in what kinds of ways?
Equally important, where should they be allowed to express their
dissent? Conversely, what length ought a liberal state go to ensure
order, and at the expense of what liberties?

Seattle and the Antiglobalization Movement

The Summit of the Americas took place before the backdrop of
more than a year of massive antiglobalization protests inaugu-
rated in Seattle in late 1999 (Figure 6.1). Like Québec City, Seattle
138 • Boundaries of Dissent

played host to a large international meeting dedicated to realizing

neoliberal dreams of a hypermobile world unfettered by states or
the collective rights and responsibilities their borders might
contain. Delegates from over 130 countries went to Seattle to
attend meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose
purpose is to promote a world of freely mobile trade. As the orga-
nization itself rather innocently puts it, “The WTO is a place
where member governments go, to try to sort out the trade prob-
lems they face with each other” (World Trade Organization 2005).
Up until 30 November 1999, the notion that a meeting to
discuss the arcane rules and regulations associated with an inter-
national trade organization could attract tens of thousands of
protesters was largely unthinkable to the American public. Yet by
the end of the day, tens of thousands of protesters converged on
the city. Trade unionists and environmentalists, anarchists and
feminists, immigrants rights activists and indigenous people
from far beyond Seattle all converged on the city’s streets to ener-
getically protest the WTO and all it was taken to represent. The
organization presented an institutional face to the vast abstrac-
tions of neoliberal globalization.
Activists successfully shut down the meetings through aggres-
sive tactics of confrontation. Their tactics consisted largely of
strategically limiting the mobility of delegates within the city:
denying their access to the site of the meetings. In response, the
Seattle City Council issued a series of emergency orders designed
to reassert control of the city’s public spaces. Among them was
the designation of a 25-block “no protest zone” that removed the
right of assembly from the downtown spaces that hosted the
meetings. In turn, police aggressively enforced the emergency
orders. Images of smashed store windows and bloodied protest-
ers dominated evening news broadcasts. The images alternately
represented the heavy-handed weight of repressive state authority
and the mindless violence of an anarchist fringe.
The intensely mediated spectacle of it all—coupled with activ-
ists’ successful shutting down of the meetings—turned Seattle
from an anonymous location in the business of free trade into a
contested site in the larger contest over the future contours of
 Free Trade and Fences • 139

global citizenship. If Chicago 1968 represented a larger conflict

over the meaning of the United States and its relationship with
the rest of the world, so too did Seattle 1999. Out of Seattle, the
antiglobalization movement became part of a broader public dis-
course, and a significant political force.

Protesting Globalization
The very term “antiglobalization movement” is controversial and
suggests a somewhat artificial coherence. “Antiglobalization is not
one thing,” Tom O’Connor argues, “but a complicated alliance of
many different sectors including progressive trade unions, new
social movements, and oppositional youth cultures” (2003). Nev-
ertheless, in the wake of Seattle, this quite diverse and eclectic mix
of groups and movements was now lumped together—some
would argue largely by the media—under the banner of a larger
umbrella called “antiglobalization,” and there was broad—if often
grudging—recognition across the political spectrum that this was
a politically significant movement. The antiglobalization move-
ment enjoyed momentum. It was organized across relatively
extensive geographies, successful in making its presence felt at
various subsequent international meetings focused on the busi-
ness of neoliberal globalization, and politically visible.
The Summit of the Americas took place against this backdrop.
Host to 34 heads of state and roughly 9,000 participants, it was
the largest and most significant such meeting in Canadian his-
tory. Largely for this reason, the Summit was also host to tens of
thousands of protesters. As they did in Seattle, and subsequently
in Prague, Washington, Melbourne, and Davos, the activists were
in Québec City to protest against the broader neoliberal project
to rework the boundaries that mediate their lives. As with Seattle,
for the protesters, the issues at stake with the FTAA were not
narrowly about free trade. They also encompassed issues such
as nature and immigrants’ rights, patriarchy and xenophobia,
indigenous rights and militarism.
The broad point was that the effort to cast questions of trade
as exclusively about trade served precisely to obscure their more
140 • Boundaries of Dissent

wide-ranging connections and contradictions. To privilege the

mobility of capital was thus to disparage the mobility of labor
and with that to contribute to a sometimes xenophobic anti-
immigrant racism. To the degree that the project of neoliberal
globalization worked to dissolve the boundaries to the free move-
ment of goods and investment, it also served to dissolve the
boundaries of collective rights and citizenship and to leave intact
still other boundaries.
For the activists, the boundary politics of neoliberal globaliza-
tion served to enable the freedom and mobility—and indeed
power—of those individuals and organizations that were already
the most privileged members of the global citizenry. Free trade
simply presented multinational corporations greater freedom to
take advantage of opportunities offered by various localities as
they competed in a global competitive field. Likewise, the
enhanced mobility offered by a globalizing economy also offered
companies the freedom to avoid the unionized wage rates and
regulations of developed economies and to exploit the low wages
and relatively lax regulations of many developing economies
(Brecher and Costello 1998). The enhanced capital mobility of
neoliberal globalization created competitive pressures that drove
down wages and labor conditions. For activists, the project of
globalization was less about dissolving boundaries for the greater
good of all—as Bush’s rhetoric of a “hemisphere of liberty”
would suggest—but rather in reconfiguring various boundaries
in ways that selectively privileged an already global elite.
Although there were clearly issues at play in Québec City that
had a somewhat different resonance than those dramatized south
of the border—privatization was of particular concern, for exam-
ple, as activists worried about its impact on Canada’s vaunted
social welfare state—these discourses on the contemporary geog-
raphy of citizenship and marginality under globalization are
broadly applicable to the constellation of movements associated
with antiglobalization. In this sense, the articulation of dissent on
the streets of Seattle and Québec City were quite similar in form
and content.
 Free Trade and Fences • 141

Globalizing Protest
Although the events in Seattle and Québec City reflected signifi-
cant protest against globalization, however, they also illustrated a
more concrete transformation in the nature of protest itself. As
much as they constituted a significant protest of globalization,
the protests also illustrated the globalization of protest as well.
The transformation in the nature of protest as reflected in the
antiglobalization movement was enabled in part by the very
technologies that facilitated the complicated economic geogra-
phies of global multinational capital. Technologies such as the
Internet, cell phones, and text messengers allowed for relatively
efficient distributed organizing and information sharing, across
large geographic distances. Satellite-connected television dra-
matically enhanced the technological ability to widely circulate
images of the sort performed in the context of protest events. All
of these technologies were central to the success of the antiglo-
balization movement. They made it easier to bring together a
diversity of people with broadly similar interests in one space
and to use that presence in space to widely circulate a particular
political message.
Characterizing the new spatial relationships brought together
in the antiglobalization movement’s practices, Paul Routledge
(2000, 2003) suggests the concept of “convergence space.” Rather
than conceive of a monolithic movement with unitary interests
and politics, convergence space suggests instead a more complex
and differentiated mingling of identities, politics, and interests.
As he puts it:

A convergence space implies a heterogeneous affinity of

common ground between various social movements,
grassroots initiatives, nongovernmental organizations,
and other formations, wherein certain interests, goals,
tactics, and strategies converge. It is a space of facilitation,
solidarity, communication, coordination, and informa-
tion sharing. It is both virtual—enacted through the
Internet—and material, enacted through conferences and
142 • Boundaries of Dissent

various kinds of direct action such as demonstrations and

strikes (2000: 25).

The concept also suggests a more complex view of the spatialities

of such movements. If the antiglobalization movement is not one
movement, but many—each of which is itself characterized by
complex and dynamic interactions with spaces from the micro-
level of the street and the city, to the larger spaces of national
governments and global media—then the convergence space
itself is all the more complex.
From this perspective, the antiglobalization movement is itself
a product of globalization, if a more complex, contentious, and
messy process than globalization as seen through the lens of
trade delegates. Yet as much as the events in Seattle and Québec
City reflected something new about the contemporary politics of
global change and the technology of dissent, however, they also
showed clear continuities with the politics of dissent in previous
decades. Again, divisive political moments played out in city
public spaces, as dissenters actively claimed those spaces and
police aggressively sought to deny them such claims. Again, dis-
senters and police relied on geographical tactics in seeking to
effect their will on city public spaces. Activists relied on creative
communications strategies to coordinate their convergence on
Seattle, as well as novel street theater to dramatize their claims
and make them media-friendly. Again dissent in public space
became mediated spectacle, the meaning and impact of the event
as much about the virtual spaces of television and the newspaper
as about the streets of Seattle.
Since 1999, a variety of other sites where large institutions with
global reach and influence meet have also become sites of mas-
sive protests. Prague, Melbourne, Bangkok, Washington, and
New York—to name but a few—have been wracked by protests
against institutions taken to represent an ominous force called
globalization: the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO. Protesters
have not just creatively dramatized the symbolic politics of glo-
balization, but have also creatively used its instruments—most
notably cell phones and the Internet—to organize. The frequency
 Free Trade and Fences • 143

and intensity of the protests have prompted states to adopt simi-

larly novel tactics to maintain order and contain dissent. The
remainder of this chapter thus analyzes these dynamics in the
context of one particular protest event: that which took place in
Québec City in April of 2001.

Boundaries and the Politics of Mobility in Québec City

Mobility Rights and Public Space in a Barricaded City
The large issues about the boundaries that contain—or not, as it
were—states and economies, identity and power, rights and
responsibilities also played out over a variety of other kinds of
boundaries. In the months before the Summit, Québec City was
transformed into a “barricaded city.” Security officials and plan-
ners radically transformed both the physical landscape around
the Summit site, as well as the very content of its public spaces.
The city’s most significant public spaces were—for a period of
time—transformed into something else entirely. The officials
charged with ensuring order in Québec City’s streets argued such
measures were necessary to avoid the kind of anarchy seen in
Seattle. As Québec Minister for Public Security Serge Menard put
the matter rather menacingly months before the event, “If you
want peace, you must prepare for war” (Leroux 2001a).
The Summit took place before the backdrop of more than a year
of major civil unrest that accompanied meetings of the WTO in
Seattle, the IMF in Washington, and the World Bank in Prague.
With that hindsight [15], the security arrangements around the
Summit were the most elaborate in Canadian history. A committee
coordinated security among the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
(RCMP), the armed forces, the Québec City Police Department,
and the Sainte-Foy Department of Public Safety (Tremblay v.
Québec [Attorney General] 2001). They involved over 6,000 secu-
rity personnel, drawn from across Canada. The RCMP, according
to one report, sealed all sewer entrances in the area around the
Summit location, “rented all the vacant apartments and houses
within the security perimeter, and reserved all the hotel rooms—to
keep troublemakers out” (Leroux 2001b). Québec security officials
144 • Boundaries of Dissent

also emptied a local prison during the event to provide space for
arrestees.
The primary spatial technology officials used to ensure order
in the city was the Fence. The 2-meter-high chain link fence
stood on large concrete blocks and wound 3.8 kilometers
through the historic city center, encircling a 10-square-kilometer
space. Eight high-security checkpoints filtered access into and
out of the space bound by the Fence. Two further mechanisms
regulated movement across that boundary. The first was a pass
system that granted access to those roughly 25,000 people with
legitimate long-term claims to that space based on either work
or residence. The other was an accreditation system that certified
people with more transitory—but still officially legitimate—
reasons to be in the city center during the course of the meet-
ings: some 5,000 delegates and roughly 3,000 media personnel
(Leroux 2001a).
The Fence thus barred access to the city center to everyone else
(and the majority of Québec City residents, in fact). Moreover,
those who did manage access beyond the Fence could not partic-
ipate in legal demonstrations, as the city police department had
an explicit policy to deny permits. In addition, they found them-
selves subject to an obscure local ordinance that banned wearing
clothing that might obscure one’s face, such as bandannas. The
purpose of the measure, no doubt, was to ensure better visibility
of occupants of public space and to target particular individual
troublemakers. Together, these measures reflected an aggressive
effort to ensure order in a post-Seattle context.
The aggressive security measures brought predictable reaction
from civil rights activists. One Vancouver-based lawyer and activ-
ist put the issue in stark terms when she argued that the measures
constituted a “criminalization of dissent” that had effectively
“established apartheid” (Grace 2001). She drew the connection
between South Africa and Québec by virtue of the fact that, in
both cases, state power was exercised through the regulation of
bodily mobility. As she put it, “you need passes to move in and
out.” The label that critics attached to the Fence—the “Wall of
Shame”—was itself meant to suggest two other boundaries: the
 Free Trade and Fences • 145

Berlin Wall and the Wall of Shame and Death dividing El Paso
and Ciudad Juarez. One activist explained the symbolism like so:

The Berlin Wall . . . separated ideology and territory in the

service of statist imperialism and the Wall of Shame and
Death … separating the Americas, not on the basis of ide-
ology, but on the basis of economic exploitation; dividing
the haves from the have-nots; the mythical El Dorado of
the North from the barrios of the South; the illusory king-
dom of capital from the regions where wealth originates
and poverty reigns (Bobiwash 2003).

For critics, the Fence represented a fundamentally undemocratic

privatization of public space; part of a broader bundle of tactics
that collectively served to shrink the boundaries of permissible
dissent by regulating who could move where, and in so doing
shape the content—and the practice—of public space itself.
Yet it was not only activists and lawyers who were uneasy
about the citizenship implications of the Summit security mea-
sures. One self-described “free-trader,” for example, wrote of his
experience observing firsthand the aggressive policing tactics
used during the Summit:

Yes, the delegates’ security must be guaranteed, and the

violent elements must be controlled. But at what cost?
And when police attack peaceful protesters, who is to
blame when more violence results (McElravy 2001)?

This free-trade proponent was concerned about the political con-

tradictions of on one hand promoting a rhetoric of liberty, while
on the other heavily circumscribing it.
Others were concerned about the negative economic impact.
One local restaurant owner, for example, commented:

You think of the images of Québec being transmitted

around the planet, the publicity, the contacts for the future,
all the extra business for hotels, boutiques, restaurants. …
We don’t have much information so far, but everything in
146 • Boundaries of Dissent

the news seems to be negative. … [N]ow there’s all this talk

of having local residents wear identity cards and barricad-
ing whole sectors of the city for anyone who doesn’t have
accreditation. Sure, you need security, but couldn’t that
provoke them even more (The Toronto Star 2000)?

For this business owner, the contradictions of the Fence extended

beyond symbolism to the very heart of the economic matter. In
aggressively working to maintain order, he suggested, officials
were limiting the very thing they sought to promote: a world of
freely mobile goods and consumers.
The erection of the Fence also reflected the more general ten-
sion within liberal democracy between the right to freely dissent
and the need for order. A spokesperson for a Québec legal rights
organization put the tension—and the need to strike a reason-
able balance—like so:

The necessity to establish a security perimeter shouldn’t

transform the provincial capital into a city under siege,
where the fundamental rights of civil society to express
itself cannot be exercised in public space (Leroux 2001b).

The Fence thus represented an ambivalent spatial moment in

Canada’s historical geography of citizenship and symbolized the
inherent contradictions of liberal democracy.
This tension—between the need for order and the freedom
to dissent—was the subject of a legal suit brought before the
Québec Provincial Court by Montréal-based attorney Marc
Tremblay. On 29 January 2001, Tremblay contacted the Québec
City Police Department to ask for a pass to enter the space
beyond the Fence during the Summit. As he wrote in an applica-
tion letter:

I wish to conduct an individual and peaceful demonstra-

tion. My demonstration is not intended to disrupt the Sum-
mit in any way, nor is it intended to prevent anyone from
entering the Convention Centre or any other place, nor to
 Free Trade and Fences • 147

breach the peace, nor to disrupt the movements of the

dignitaries or other persons attending the Summit of the
Americas (Tremblay v. Québec [Attorney General] 2001).

Despite being told no such passes would be granted for the pur-
poses of demonstrations, Tremblay persisted in formally applying
for the pass. The application was rejected.
Tremblay then sought judicial relief. He claimed that the
Fence—and officials’ refusal to allow him to cross it—violated a
variety of his fundamental rights under the Canadian Charter.
They violated his ability to freely express himself, his right to be
presumed innocent until proven guilty, and his freedom to
assemble in spaces and at times of his own choosing. In addition,
all of this was tied together around mobility rights: the ability to
move from place to place.
Central to Tremblay’s constitutional argument was his asser-
tion that in using the Fence to limit his right to move, security
officials also limited his ability to freely assemble in space and to
speak. Tremblay couched his rights claims in narrowly drawn,
individualistic terms. He presented his case in the most non-
threatening of ways: as an individual. He wanted access to the
meeting site in order conduct a peaceful demonstration of one.
He explicitly noted his aims were purely communicative; that he
had no intention of disrupting the meetings in any way, other
than through the power of persuasive speech.
And yet, he argued, embodied speech—rather than simply
mediated images—needed to be geographically present to be
heard by the proper audience and to be persuasive. Tremblay’s
argument rooted his critique of the Fence on central tenets of
liberal rights, cast with an explicitly spatial orientation. The
Fence, he argued, limited the capacity to speak freely because it
limited the freedom to assemble in space and to move across it.
148 • Boundaries of Dissent

Speech untethered to geography, he recognized, is not truly free.

There is a gap, in other words, between the right to move and the
right to assemble. The ability to move in general does not neces-
sarily mean the ability to move to any location in particular, and
location—as geographers are wont to emphasize—is often every-
thing.
The relief Tremblay sought was rather more broad than the
narrowly drawn claims he was making, however. He asked the
court to halt construction of the Fence and to direct authorities
to allow demonstrations. If the Fence violated Tremblay’s indi-
vidual rights to move within the city and to assemble in public
space to express dissent, he requested the court intervene to pro-
tect the interests of all Canadian citizens by completely removing
any impediments to either assembly or mobility within the city.
Absent this, Tremblay requested he be issued an individual pass
to move freely within the space bounded by the Fence. A sup-
porting attorney proposed further alternatives to the court, all of
which involved freeing up the capacity to move within the city
center and to conduct peaceful demonstrations.
The Fence, of course, was aimed precisely at regulating who
could move where in the city. It established a selectively perme-
able boundary around the city center. The space bounded by the
Fence contained the city’s most important public spaces. Those
very same spaces were to be the venue for a meeting that pre-
sented unique security challenges. As the court interpreted the
fundamental spatial contradiction:

The streets, sidewalks, and squares of the Upper Town of

Québec City are public places, where all citizens should
be able to express themselves using all the means at their
disposal as long as they do not contravene legal or regula-
tory provisions. However, for three days from this Friday,
20 April, the political authorities have chosen this public
space rather than government property as the venue for
an international relations exercise. Unprecedented in
terms of its scale in Canada, this economic summit will
host 34 heads of state from throughout the Americas in
 Free Trade and Fences • 149

the centre of Québec City (Tremblay v. Québec [Attorney

General] 2001: Paragraph 60).

For authorities, this presented an unresolvable problem: One

space could simply not contain such disparate interests, practices,
and bodies. Their solution was thus to privatize the city’s central
public spaces for the 3 days of the meetings and displace anti-
FTAA gatherings elsewhere.
Officials took pains to argue that the FTAA meetings were
somewhat unique in the context of international meetings rela-
ting to neoliberal free trade. They were to bring together an
almost unprecedented group of heads of state. Given the history
of major civil unrest associated with such meetings, and the stated
intention of some groups to go to the Summit, officials argued,
the aggressive security measures—including the Fence—were
more than justified. Security officials wished to completely banish
any potential disorder from the city center. Instead, they planned
to move the spaces of dissent elsewhere. Planners arranged for
demonstration sites in other locations in the city, including three
in close proximity to the Fence. Still, this raised the question of
whether such relatively marginal protest sites were equivalent to
being at the site of the meetings themselves. The court put the
matter like so:

Aside from the major disruptions to local residents, the

security fence keeps citizens who merely wish to attend
the event or demonstrate peacefully far away from the
heart of matters. Specifically in the case of protesters, the
fence makes it impossible to enter into any direct visual
or audio communication with the people whom they
wish to address, namely the heads of state of the 34 coun-
tries taking part in talks to set up the FTAA (Tremblay v.
Québec [Attorney General] 2001: Paragraph 82).

The spatial conflict, then, was not simply about whether public
dissent would be permitted in Québec City, but where.
The legal question revolved around whether such regula-
tion—and the inherent limitations on the rights of some—was
150 • Boundaries of Dissent

balanced against the need to ensure order for others. In assessing

the case, the court was required to weigh the abstract legal claim,
as well as the concrete contextual issues that might intervene
in determining the reasonableness of the security measures.
The court agreed with Tremblay that the Fence limited certain
fundamental liberties under the Charter. Specifically, it wrote that
“the freedom of expression and of peaceful assembly has definitely
been limited” (Tremblay v. Québec [Attorney General] 2001: Para-
graph 63).
The issue before the court, however, was not just whether the
Fence violated particular rights of individuals, but whether such
violations were reasonable. The court concluded they were indeed:

The recent experiences of Prague and Seattle, among others,

demonstrate clearly that in the current context of protests
over globalisation, it is sadly necessary when organising a
major economic summit to erect a security fence to seal off
the area in which delegates are to move around. The aim is
to avoid, as far as possible, any potentially violent confron-
tation between the forces of order and a large mass of pro-
testers including rioters who are impossible to identify and
control (Tremblay v. Québec [Attorney General] 2001:
Paragraph 77).

This argument drew on two prominent themes. First, context

matters in assessing rights. That context included, on one hand,
an aggressive antiglobalization movement with a history of vio-
lent confrontation, and on the other hand an event of major
scope and importance that would attract significant attention
from these same groups. The second theme—expressed a num-
ber of places in the ruling—was less matter-of-fact and more
evocative of the larger stakes involved: that in the face of faceless
rioters “impossible to identify and control,” the “forces of order”
must adopt novel tactics in response. The Fence was just such a
novel tactic.
Likewise, the court rejected out of hand Tremblay’s claim
that the Fence violated his right to be presumed innocent. Trem-
 Free Trade and Fences • 151

blay argued that the very fact of a pass system presumed an entire
class of people—indeed, the majority of Québec City citizens—to
be potential troublemakers and lawbreakers, and thus that they
were by default presumed guilty. The court disagreed, noting
there was no explicit charge against Tremblay and thus that he had
not been formally presumed guilty.
Perhaps most interestingly, the court rejected what was argu-
ably Tremblay’s central claim: that the Fence violated his mobility
rights. Liberal constructions of mobility tend both to privilege
individual mobility against collective and to be drawn more
tightly around residence and work than the transitory movement
of bodies across space. Article 6 of the Canadian Charter, for
example, states that citizens and permanent residents have the
right “to move to and take up residence in any province,” and “to
pursue the gaining of livelihood in any province.” As the court
noted in assessing Tremblay’s claims, this is a decidedly more
limited notion of mobility than the expansive one held by the
plaintiff.
The court’s reading of mobility rights was consistent with
Canadian precedent. Blomley (1994) has noted that Canadian
courts have tended to construct mobility rights in ways that
privilege individual rights. They have given fairly broad protec-
tion, for example, to movement in search of economic oppor-
tunities, or to be free from sanctions that penalize such
movement. On the other hand, the courts have tended to be
much more deeply suspicious of collective rights. The case
study he presents is of a mill town in British Colombia devas-
tated by a company’s decision to close its factory there and
move it to Mexico. The issue here was the right of a com-
pany—seen in the eyes of law as an individual—to freely move,
measured against whatever duties of corporate citizenship it
owed to the town as a collectivity. In both this case and in
Tremblay v. Québec, courts rejected readings of mobility that
cast it in expansive terms. The right to mobility, they argued,
was not absolute; it applied for the most part to individuals and
was less the sort of short-term mobility on which political
activism is based than that of the longer-term freedom of a citi-
152 • Boundaries of Dissent

zen—constructed in narrowly legal and economic terms—to

move residence.

Boundaries of Sovereignty
BOUNDARY, n. In political geography, an imaginary line
between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of
one from the imaginary rights of the other.

— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Clearly much of the conflict over the FTAA was played out on the
stage of Québec City and its public spaces. And it was resolved in
those concrete spaces more than in the reserved space of the
courtroom and the abstractions of law. Although the court
rejected Tremblay’s suit and the Fence remained, activists claimed
the city’s public spaces nonetheless. People wove ribbons through
the Fence, transforming it into a space symbolic of something
other than what it appeared at face value. Later, a group of activ-
ists managed to tear down portions of the Fence. Although not
successful in shutting down the Summit as the activists in Seattle
had been, they successfully registered their dissent through the
medium of public space.
Yet the geographic dynamics of the protests in Québec City
extended far beyond the city and the boundary that contained it.
During the meeting, another important issue both for the Cana-
dian state and for activists was who would be allowed to cross the
border. One of those activists interested in moving across the
border and on to Québec City was then-85-year-old David Del-
linger. Dellinger had an entire lifetime of activism behind him.
During World War II, he went to jail over his refusal to submit to
conscription. In the 1960s, he was a major figure in the move-
ment against the Vietnam War. He was perhaps most famous for
his role in organizing the protests that took place at Chicago in
1968 and was one of the Chicago Eight initially prosecuted under
the H. Rap Brown Act. In 1973, he expressed his solidarity with
Wounded Knee occupiers by traveling to the site, in the process
 Free Trade and Fences • 153

likely violating the very law he had previously been prosecuted

under. Dellinger, put simply, was for many security officials pre-
cisely the sort of “outside agitator” that gave them pause, even if
he was a rather elderly one (1975).
As in Chicago in 1968, the Summit of the Americas was the
occasion for another important protest event for Dellinger. As he
put it optimistically, “I think that for the first time that we have
an actual ability to change the system” (Smith 2001). Despite
his activist background, Dellinger was allowed—most likely
because of his age—to cross the border and move on to Québec.
Yet although the famous activist was allowed to travel to Québec
City, many others were turned away, particularly those with
arrest records or, as a CBS News report (Smith 2001) put it, those
with “an attitude.” If in Québec City officials constructed a new
boundary to filter access into the city center by selectively limit-
ing the mobility of some, in this case border officials made use of
an existing international geopolitical boundary to achieve the
same effect. In each, the goal was the same: to regulate who could
move where vis-à-vis the site of the Summit of the Americas.
Anticipating just this mobility problem, rumors spread on
the Internet among activist circles that the Akwesasne Mohawk
Nation had offered its territory as a corridor that would allow
activists to circumvent Canadian customs. As one Indian nation
whose territory is bisected by the international border that divides
the United States and Canada, some Akwesasne activists offered
protesters access across the border (Montreal Gazette 2001).
Despite the trumpeting of the New World Order that accompanies
the dissolving boundaries of the contemporary world—and
beyond the boundary-erasing impetus behind the FTAA—for
Native America boundaries have been of long-standing impor-
tance. The six nations that make up the Iroquois Confeder-
acy—known simply as the Six Nations—have a particularly strong
history of asserting their sovereignty. In recent years, the interna-
tional border has figured prominently. In 1997, for example,
Grand Chief Mike Mitchell of the Akwesasne Mohawks filed suit
against the Canadian government over its authority to levy cus-
toms duties against members of the tribe (Mitchell v. Canada
154 • Boundaries of Dissent

1997). Mitchell argued that both the territorial recognition written

in treaties and the historical geography of ancestral trading territo-
ries established Mohawk sovereignty rights that trumped those of
the Canadian state itself. Indeed, in assessing the sovereignty
claims of the Akwesasne vis-à-vis the international border, the
judge noted, “What is at issue in the present case … is what consti-
tuted Mohawk territory.”
The judge supported the plaintiff ’s sovereignty claims and
their implicit arguments in support of mobility rights unre-
stricted by an artificially imposed border. The argument was
firmly historical and geographical:

With respect to the use of the territory in and around

Akwesasne for the purposes of trade, I am satisfied that
the Mohawks traveled across the boundary from their
homeland in the United States into Canadian territory for
trade-related purposes prior to the arrival of the Europe-
ans. The Mohawks crossed the boundary with their goods
for personal and community use without having to pay
duty or taxes on those goods. Whatever goods they
obtained either by raiding or by hunting and fishing
could be freely brought back across the border (Mitchell v.
Canada 1997).

The legal judgment that came out of this historical geographic

interpretation recognized a partial sovereignty for the Mohawk.
“I find,” the judge wrote, “that the plaintiff and the Mohawks of
Akwesasne have established an aboriginal right to pass and repass
freely what is now the Canada–United States boundary with
goods for personal and community use and for trade with other
First Nations.”
In 2001, the border and the competing sovereignties that it
dramatized was at issue again. A common theme for Akwesasne
activists was the everyday indignity of being forced to submit to
the authority of Canadian and American border officials. One
activist—Shawn Brant—argued that “[t]he border is a barrier to
community life in Akwesasne.” He went on to say that “[i]t is the
 Free Trade and Fences • 155

right of the Mohawk Nation to determine who can cross the bor-
der” (Zwarenstein 2001). Another Mohawk activist, John Boots,
explained the everyday geopolitics of mobility around the border.
“Sometimes it takes hours just to go get my mail 3 miles away,”
Boots explained. In part because of his status as an activist, he
continued, “I get pulled over on the way there and pulled over on
the way back.”
The Summit of the Americas—and the manner in which
Canadian officials were planning to use the border to regulate
movement into Québec—provided an opportunity for Akwe-
sasne activists to dramatize alternative understandings of terri-
torial sovereignty, mobility, and boundaries. Brant, for example,
saw it as an opportunity both to dramatize Mohawk sovereignty
during the Summit and also to prepare for future efforts to reas-
sert such territorial authority, all by reasserting control over
mobility:

My motivation is to assert and reinforce the sovereign

integrity of Mohawk people within the Mohawk Nation
and to bring the organizing bodies together so we can
stand and fight in preparation for the fall. … We will
engage in attacks against the provincial economy, the pro-
vincial infrastructure. We will shut down highways, road-
ways, bridges until this government is brought to its
knees (Zwarenstein 2001).

Like Tremblay in his lawsuit against the Fence that ringed the
Québec City historic center, these activists sought to dramatize
the enduring presence of boundaries and the less-than-fully-
democratic authority they gave shape to.
The activists also saw their efforts as contributing to a broader
solidarity effort: that if the FTAA could contribute to highlight-
ing issues of indigenous sovereignty, so too could issues of native
sovereignty be used to dramatize the concerns at issue with the
free trade treaty. As Boots further explained the larger issues
involved,
156 • Boundaries of Dissent

The reason why we’re helping them is we align ourselves

with their protests as the poor people of Canada, the U.S.,
and Mexico . … It’s amazing how many of our aspirations
are parallel (Hanes 2001).

As much as they sought to highlight the boundaries that continued

to divide, they did so to recognize commonalities across borders.
To affirm this perspective, activists throughout North Ameri-
can border regions conducted cross-border solidarity actions.
The Stop the FTAA coalition organized a cross-border protest at
the United States–Mexico border at Tijuana–San Diego, while
other regional groups did the same at United States–Canada bor-
der locations in both Washington and in the Northeast. The New
York City-based Ya Basta! Collective planned to dramatize alter-
native notions of citizenship and boundaries with an action at
the crossing at Champlain, NY, that included distributing world
passports (Leroux 2001c).

Antiglobalization and Boundaries of Citizenship

We expected this. You can’t have a trade summit these

days without tear gas; it would be like having a cheese-
burger without the cheese.

— Senior Bush administration official

(Newsweek 2001)
The Akwesasne community was hardly unified in its support of
openly defying the authority of the Canadian state. Indeed, the
tactics by which these activists sought to highlight the conflict
over Akwesasne sovereignty was a divisive one. Grand Chief
Mitchell, for example, was against the action, worrying about the
repercussions. As he put it:

It is fair to say people are not in favour of this. … They

don’t like this negative image and they are resentful that
when people try to use the border to their own gain it
 Free Trade and Fences • 157

always seems to be in connection with Akwesasne and

that portrays us as a lawless society (Hanes 2001).

During a community meeting to discuss the issue, Mitchell

showed a video of the unrest in Seattle, as if to emphasize the
potential for anarchy that might accompany any action that sup-
ported the antiglobalization movement.
As with the unrest of the 1960s, the antiglobalization protests
that erupted in Seattle and Québec City presented a crisis of inter-
pretation and of citizenship. To the degree one can generalize
about the antiglobalization movement, one can say that in part it
offers an alternative language of citizenship rights to either the
cosmopolitan individualism of neoliberalism or the more collec-
tive nationalism associated with a Keynesian era. That alternative
is not entirely coherent, but in general might be characterized as a
cosmopolitan vision of social justice. The language of rights is in
general collective, but one that recognizes commonalities that
span national borders. It thus presents challenges in locating—
and indeed bounding—citizenship and sovereignty.
As in Chicago 1968 and Seattle 1999, one interpretation saw in
the violence an overaggressive state maintaining its own author-
ity and legitimacy at the expense of basic liberal rights. In the
weeks after the Summit, Amnesty International issued a press
release calling for a formal investigation into the state’s aggressive
policing of the Summit. The group cited excessive use of tear gas,
unnecessary use of plastic bullets and electro-shock devices, and
the sequestering of arrestees in cramped conditions away from
legal representation (Amnesty International 2001).
Critics focused instead on the violence of the protestors and
their politics. They were often similar to interpretations of Seat-
tle, exemplified by an editorial published in Time shortly after the
WTO protests. Titled “Return of the Luddites,” it argued:

The left professes concern for Third World labor. But its
real objective is to keep jobs at home. That means stop-
ping the jobs from going to the very campesinos it claims
to champion—and sentencing Third World workers to
158 • Boundaries of Dissent

the deprivation of the preindustrial life they so desper-

ately seek to escape (Krauthammer 1999).

For critics like this, the globalization of protest evidenced in

Seattle simply allowed the intensely local interests and political
perspectives of the protesters to be made into a global spectacle
that masked their lack of real political substance.
Among the more cynical interpretations of the antiglobaliza-
tion movement in mainstream media circles were those of Fareed
Zakaria. Zakaria interpreted Seattle as the resurgence of a world-
view that he thought was no longer appropriate in a contempo-
rary world of neoliberal globalization. Speaking in a language of
cosmopolitan globalism and concern for the plight of the poor in
the Global South, Zakaria argued, the antiglobalization move-
ment masked a thoroughly antiquated and parochial perspective.
As he put it:

The idea that American workers will gain from slowing

down, shutting off, or further regulating trade has no
basis in history, economic theory, or common sense. It is
simply a frightened reaction to change (1999).

This is by now a commonsense interpretation of the antiglobal-

ization movement: that if it critiques neoliberal principles of free
trade and free markets, it is antitrade and antimarkets, which
reflects an irrational fear of change and a nostalgia for a distant
past.
Roughly 18 months later, Zakaria again raised similar themes
about the ultimate superficiality of the antiglobalization move-
ment. His argument rested on three fundamental points. First,
the kind of dissent performed in the streets of Seattle and Québec
City was fundamentally deviant and thus illegitimate. “By taunt-
ing the police, beating drums, and throwing rocks,” he wrote,
“the rioters make it pretty clear that they want not a rational
debate but the world’s attention” (2001). For Zakaria, “beating
drums” was not a legitimate part of the practice of citizenship;
“rational debate,” by contrast, was.
 Free Trade and Fences • 159

The second, closely connected, point was that the activists’ tac-
tics of dissent were deviant as well because they were out of place.
The proper sphere of citizenship for Zakaria was a clearly liberal
notion of a rational world of talk rooted in legislative chambers
and ballot boxes. The activists, by contrast, relied on a mediated
public sphere to circumvent their ultimate irrelevance to the real
business of citizenship.

It is trying to achieve, through intimidation and scare

tactics, what it has not been able to get through legisla-
tion. The lesson of Seattle seems to be: If you cannot get
your way through traditional democratic methods,
through campaigns, lobbying, and legislatures, then riot
and rabble-rouse on television. In the bizarre atmospher-
ics of the modern media, when a few thousand trained
protesters surround the elected presidents and prime
ministers of 34 countries, the protesters gain the moral
high ground (Zakaria 2001).

This rather Habermasian outlook renders the aggressive politics

of dissent associated in the public imagination with the antiglo-
balization movement as fundamentally deviant both because of
the nature of the tactics and because they have a disproportionate
influence by virtue of the media. Again, we see the old themes of
the insubstantiality of mediated protest and of how a deviant
group of outsiders exploit the potentials it opens up.
Finally, Zakaria argued that the ultimate problem with the
antiglobalization movement was that its antidemocratic charac-
ter also manifest in a perversely anticosmopolitan globalism. The
antiglobalization movement, Zakaria suggested, was not interna-
tional enough. As he wrote,

The leaders of antiglobalization now advocate policies for

their own sheltered communities in rich Western coun-
tries. Of course, they claim their policies will help work-
ers in Africa and Asia. But they won’t. What developing
countries need more than anything else—yes, even more
than new labor and environmental regulations—is eco-
160 • Boundaries of Dissent

nomic growth. And yet every proposal made by the pro-

testers would slow down that growth and keep the Third
World mired in medieval poverty. So much for interna-
tional solidarity (2001).

From this perspective, the antiglobalization movement was a mass

of contradictions. While speaking in the language of global justice,
critics like Zakaria charged, their politics were profoundly local.
On CBS’s Face the Nation, political pundit Bob Schieffer made
broadly similar arguments, though focusing more on the issue of
representation and politics. Schieffer seemed particularly troubled
by the eclectic mix of seemingly disconnected issues dramatized
during the protests. “A protest about everything,” he argued, “is a
protest about nothing, and that’s a nuisance” (Schieffer 2001). The
antiwar and women’s rights protests of earlier decades worked, in
a way he felt Québec City did not, because they were focused
clearly on single issues. Instead, the antiglobalization movement,
Schieffer asserted, had incoherent and internally contradictory
politics that made its meaning illegible.
It is arguable whether the politics at issue on the streets of
Seattle and Québec City were really as incoherent, or past exam-
ples as clear and focused, as Schieffer suggests. It may well be the
case that the emerging language of the geography of citizen-
ship—the spatial anchoring of rights and responsibilities—artic-
ulated in these (anti)globalizing protests is not as clear and
coherent as it may yet be. But the underlying issues articulated by
activists, despite their significant diversity, are quite clear.
Critics like Zakaria seemed troubled by the irony that the anti-
globalization movement creatively used the very technologies of
a mediated globalization to dramatize their concerns. For the
critics, this allowed for the marginal perspectives of the protesters
to gain much wider exposure and political reach than they would
have otherwise. “What we saw in Seattle,” Zakaria argued in the
wake of Seattle,

is the rise of a new kind of politics. Disparate groups, orga-

nized through the Internet and other easy means of com-
 Free Trade and Fences • 161

munication, pursue at the supranational level what they

cannot accomplish at the national level (Zakaria 1999).

The desire to declare the new is no less strong in critics of the

antiglobalization movement than its champions. It is striking to
note here, however, the strong parallels to arguments made more
than 25 years before with respect to Wounded Knee and no
doubt significantly farther back in time and in other sites.
Indeed, the trope of the “outside agitator” exploiting the poten-
tials of mediated public spheres by stirring up trouble in public
space is an old one.
The irony is that critics like Zakaria ascribe a coherence to the
“antiglobalization movement” that arguably is a product of the
critics themselves, all to critique its internal contradictions. Such
criticisms reflect both a certain level of cynicism, as well as a
rather conventional understanding of the relationships between
geographical boundaries and the politics of citizenship that may
no longer be relevant to a globalized world. As another article,
this one about Seattle, put it,

Hitherto, it’s been easy to insist that anyone opposed to

“trade” was by definition a protectionist, happy to hide
behind the walls of the nation-state. That simple equation
no longer holds good; one of the most important lessons
of Seattle is that there are two visions of globalization on
offer, one led by commerce, one by social activism (Elliott
1999: 38).

Subsequent protests in Washington, Prague, Genoa, and

Québec City (Drainville 2002) suggest that perhaps there is
something more to the antiglobalization movement than critics
profess.
At issue in the new social movements woven together under
the banner of “antiglobalization” is both a new language of the
geographies of citizenship and new approaches to the practice of
dissent in public space. As Duncombe interprets the latter,
162 • Boundaries of Dissent

In this new style of mass action there are no marches or

speakers. Instead the goal is to occupy public space and
transform it through blockades, lock downs, or, in the case
of RTS affinity groups, clowning and dancing (2002: 228).

What unites many of these groups, he argues, is “shared distate

for spectator-style politics” (Duncombe 2002: 228).
More broadly, the point of the protests in Québec City was
precisely to throw into relief the politics of trade; to make it less
an abstract process than a grounded practice. In surveying the
controversy over the FTAA, no greater free-trade booster than
The Economist noted that for all the talk of liberty at the center of
the free-trade arguments of President Bush, in practice the
United States had a quite ambivalent—often self-serving—posi-
tion on trade (The Economist 2001). The Brazilian government’s
hesitancy over the FTAA, the magazine suggested, was not
entirely irrational:

Brazil’s greatest fear is that the United States is plotting to

stop it from becoming a big exporter of high-value manu-
factured goods and to make it return to its historic role of
churning out low-value commodities. This is not entirely
paranoia. The United States currently applies a whole
range of duties, quotas, price restraints, and other mea-
sures to processed items from Brazil.

Despite the claim by critics that the antiglobalization of the

North ultimately hurts the poor of the Global South, many of
the most trenchant critiques of neoliberal globalization come
from precisely there. Those critiques are often articulated in
the streets. In the past decade, ordinary people in places other-
wise worlds apart—from the streets of Bangkok (Glassman 2002)
and Arequipa, Peru, to the jungles and small towns of Southern
Mexico—have expressed remarkably consistent arguments
against the direction of contemporary economic and political
change under the pressures of neoliberal globalization. Those cri-
tiques often center on the gradual and selective erosion of the
boundaries that contain the capacity for states to ensure the
rights of citizenship.
 7
Quarantining Dissent

If there is no place to freely assemble, there is no free

assembly. If there is no place to freely express, there is no
free expression.

— Reclaim the Streets

Wherever threatened, the first thing power restricts is the

ability to linger or assemble in the street.

— Henri Lefebvre (2003 [1970]: 20)

Dissent and the broader politics of citizenship, I have argued, is a
fundamentally geographical process. A variety of different kinds
of spaces—delineated through a variety of different kinds of
boundaries—provide media through which rights and identity
are given form, contested, and redefined. As such, they can pro-
vide insight into larger practices of citizenship and state power.
Public space provides the most concrete of spatial media
through which citizens materialize their dissent. It provides a the-

163
164 • Boundaries of Dissent

ater of bodies in space, where identity and power is both displayed

and contested. In each of the case studies I have presented, public
space has provided both a material venue and a representational
platform that dramatized the more specific issues at play. In debates
about public unrest in 1968, public spaces provided media through
which citizens expressed collective dissent: about the projection of
American power abroad and the racial logics that disciplined urban
spaces within. At the same time, such events provided occasions for
larger debates about the rights and duties of citizenship. Likewise,
in the more recent cases of antiglobalization protests and the con-
flict over Elián González, access to public space was central.
Communications media provide another important spatial
medium that is wrapped up in the larger politics of citizenship
and dissent. At Wounded Knee in 1973, activists seized the his-
toric site and erected various boundaries to contain it as means
to dramatize the broader boundary politics of American Indian
sovereignty. They did this, however, primarily through their abil-
ity to turn that space into a platform through which to reach dis-
tant publics via the relatively new world of television news.
Without activists’ simultaneous material control of space and
their savvy efforts to make it legible to a mediated public, the
occupation would never have been the spectacle that it was; argu-
ably it might not even have happened to begin with. Likewise
with the Elián González case, which was simultaneously an
intense expression of community identity in public spaces and an
intensely mediated spectacle.
Rights to public space, however, are also formalized in the
more abstract space of law. In all of the case studies, an impor-
tant part of the geographical dynamics of the conflict was legal.
Laws provide states bureaucratic instruments to regulate dissent
that are simultaneously geographical. The H. Rap Brown Act
emerged in 1968 as a product of the larger concern with what its
sponsors regarded as the breakdown of state-sanctioned citizen-
ship. Laying the problems of public unrest at the foot of “outside
agitators,” they sought to shrink the boundaries of permissible
dissent by more tightly constraining the ability of activists to
move across space and so to move between significant sites of
 Quarantining Dissent • 165

protest and other spaces of public dissent. In turn, roughly

5 years later, the Nixon administration used this law to aggres-
sively contain the lawless space of the Wounded Knee occupa-
tion. If the Wounded Knee occupiers sought to “jump scales”
through media exposure and to sustain the occupation through
tangible spatial connections, the state worked to actively circum-
scribe and to contain the site precisely to preclude that. In rather
similar ways, the Canadian state also worked to manage the con-
duct of dissent in Québec City in 2001 by controlling the ability
of activists to assemble in space through limiting their ability to
move.
Finally, the geopolitics of law are simultaneously a geopolitics
of mobility. The networks through which people and things
move across space also provide important geographical contexts
to the dynamics of dissent. Who is allowed to move, in what
kinds of way, and with what effect were significant issues at stake
in all of the case studies. The debates that raged in 1968 about
“outside agitators” largely involved concern about the unchecked
mobility of a certain class of people. Likewise, during both the
occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 and the protests in Québec
City in 2001, different actors actively intervened either to con-
strain the capacity of certain people to move freely or, on the part
of those same people, to evade such technologies of control.
The debate about where Elián González should call home was
also centered on the conditions under which people moved; in
this case across international borders.

9/11: Geography, Dissent, and the “War on Terrorism”

As I write this early in 2005, it is difficult to contemplate the
themes of this book—the intersections of citizenship, dissent,
and the politics of boundaries—without considering the events
of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent “War on Terror.” The
events of 9/11 were, if nothing else, a global spectacle. With sim-
ple yet bloody force, 19 hijackers turned the most innocuous
instruments of globalization into deadly weapons, severely dam-
aging the seat of American military power and leveling—with
166 • Boundaries of Dissent

absolutely spectacular effect—a symbol of American capitalism.

That the destruction of the World Trade Center towers had quite
concrete effects on lives lost, on the landscape of a great city, and
on the larger economy in which it sits is clear. Yet 9/11 was also a
media event. Millions around the world saw the WTC fall to the
ground in real-time. And, in public spaces around the world mil-
lions expressed their sympathies with the victims of the tragedy.
The post-9/11 era represents a reassertion of an acutely aggres-
sive American state power both across global space (Smith 2005)
and within domestic territory. If in the weeks following the events
of 9/11 the moral boundaries that contained American identity
behind a wall of indifferent nationalism dissolved somewhat amid
the sympathetic global response, those walls went up again as the
hawks in the Bush administration began to inch toward a global
response. “Terrorism,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
agreed in response to a question from a reporter early on, “is not a
country.” In the face of a dispersed and largely invisible threat, the
United States would respond with similar geographic agility.
To explain the new post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy to the
American public, Bush, Rumsfeld, and other senior officials con-
sistently used metaphors that rendered terrorism as deviantly
natural. The purpose was to “drain the swamp”: to transform the
geographic milieu that allowed particular locations to become
havens to terrorists. As Rumsfeld explained in another press con-
ference:

We’ll have to deal with the networks. One of the ways to

do that is to drain the swamp they live in. And that means
dealing not only with the terrorists, but those who harbor
terrorists (2001).

So if terrorism per se was not a country for Rumsfeld, networks

such as al-Qaeda still had grounded geographies. As he said:

The terrorists do not function in a vacuum. They don’t

live in Antarctica. They work, they train, and they plan in
countries (2001).
 Quarantining Dissent • 167

The campaign to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan began in

short order. B-52s dropped precision-guided bombs across the
country, and special forces troops snagged possible al-Qaeda sus-
pects, who were put on planes and shipped halfway around the
world to the legal-geographic purgatory of Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba.
And then there was Iraq. For the hawks in the administration,
terrorism clearly was a country. Despite massive global opposi-
tion and the largest anti-American demonstrations since the
1960s, the Bush administration methodically and stubbornly
marched toward a war that violated all of the principles of inter-
national law; a pre-emptive war based on what amounted to an
unsupported rumor of a potential future threat. Among the only
national politicians courageous enough to point out the utter
insanity of the war, and indeed its moral contradiction, was con-
servative Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who said on the floor of
the House of Representatives,

We have for months now heard plenty of false arithmetic

and lame excuses for why we must pursue a pre-emptive
war of aggression against an impoverished third world
nation 6,000 miles from our shores that doesn’t even pos-
sess a navy or air force, on the pretense that it must be
done for national security reasons. … Military force is
justified only in self-defense; naked aggression is the
province of dictators and rogue states. This is the danger
of a new “pre-emptive first strike” doctrine. America is
the most moral nation on earth, founded on moral prin-
ciples, and we must apply moral principles when deciding
to use military force (2002).

The Mediated State and the Geopolitics of Scale

In all the criticism of the Bush administration’s pre-emptive war
against Iraq and its violation of all norms of international law, it
is often forgotten that the Clinton administration sought to do
roughly the same in 1998. For months, the administration lined
168 • Boundaries of Dissent

up a similar string of arguments: about Saddam Hussein’s open

flouting of international authority as represented by the United
Nations, about the need to enforce the rule of international law
in the face of such defiance, and so forth. To put the final touches
on the media campaign to prepare the nation for war, the admin-
istration staged a live town hall meeting at Ohio State University
in February of 1998. The event was broadcast live on CNN to an
estimated 200 million viewers worldwide, including, it seems,
Hussein himself.
The event was designed to present the appearance of open pub-
lic discussion that the name “town hall meeting” would suggest, an
intimate forum for rational public debate about the benefits and
costs of military confrontation. Yet the event was in fact heavily
scripted. To attend, one needed a pass. Such passes, in turn, were
divided between the roughly 1,000 red passes given to, as one criti-
cal account put it, “Ohio State University faculty, cadets, veterans
and other military personnel, and local politicians,” and the some
5,000 white passes made publicly available the day before. The for-
mat tightly regulated who could ask questions of the administra-
tion officials, restricting it to attendees with a red pass.
Despite all the precautions, the carefully managed spectacle
was not quite carefully managed enough. A group of activists
began chanting, “One, two, three four, we don’t want your racist
war!” and were disruptive enough that a producer agreed to
allow one of them—Columbus-area substitute schoolteacher Jon
Strange—to pose a question before the microphone in exchange
for their silence. Stepping before the microphone, Strange asked
a simple question of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright:

Why bomb Iraq, when other countries have committed

similar violations? … Turkey has bombed Kurdish citizens.
Saudi Arabia has tortured political and religious dissidents.
Why does the U.S. apply different standards of justice to
these countries (Albright, Cohen and Berger 1998)?

The ensuing exchange was as fascinating for what it revealed

about the otherwise lack of vibrant debate in the contemporary
 Quarantining Dissent • 169

American public sphere as for what it revealed about the incoher-

ence of Clinton administration geopolitical policy. Albright’s
response was both to note the administration’s consistent con-
demnation of human rights abuses everywhere and to argue that
Hussein was “qualitatively and quantitatively different from every
brutal dictator that has appeared recently.” There was something
different about Iraq, she argued. Not willing to accept Albright’s
pat response, Strange continued:

What do you have to say about dictators of countries like

Indonesia, who we sell weapons to yet they are slaughter-
ing people in East Timor? What do you have to say about
Israel, who is slaughtering Palestinians, who impose mar-
tial law? What do you have to say about that? Those are our
allies. Why do we sell weapons to these countries? Why do
we support them? Why do we bomb Iraq when it commits
similar problems (Albright, Cohen and Berger 1998)?

Albright quite obviously did not expect this sort of questioning

and wilted a bit under the pressure, wondering aloud why critics of
the administration were defending Hussein. Strange pressed on,
retorting that the issue was not support for Hussein, but rather
“that there needs to be consistent application of U.S. foreign pol-
icy.” Frustrated with Albright’s attempt to elude the question, he
finally raised his voice and firmly said into the microphone,
“You’re not answering my question, Madame Albright!”
With that single exchange—broadcast live and in prime
time—the entire war juggernaut was deflated in ways that mir-
rored the expression on Albright’s face. I am not suggesting that a
single question thwarted a war, but I am suggesting that the
exchange made visible deep dissent over the move toward war
with Iraq that limited the capacity of the administration to go to
war. As Strange recounted of the surprising effectiveness of the
protest,

Though the town hall meeting was completely undemo-

cratic and was arranged to silence dissent and promote the
170 • Boundaries of Dissent

United States and its plan to bomb Iraq, it offered a ripe

opportunity for protest. First of all, the presence of TV
cameras probably kept security goons a little tame. I can’t
think of any other reason why they didn’t just cart us off
from the moment things got hectic, which is the standard
practice. They just kept giving us more leeway. Secondly,
the meeting was broadcast around the world LIVE. …
This meant that we weren’t confined to a basketball arena
in Ohio, but that we were able to tell the whole world that
there are Americans who oppose the United States’ war
plans. (Albright, Cohen and Berger 1998)

The incident thus reflected a simultaneously mediated spectacle

and the concrete control of the media platform itself. In essence,
Strange and his colleagues had turned the scripted media stage
into a more fully public space and a protest platform. And, he
and his colleagues were convinced, the visibility of the encounter
had real effects:

We left the town hall meeting convinced that our protests

had been a success. The immediate effect we had on the
national debate was evident in the national nightly news
and in newspapers around the world the following day.
We accomplished more than we could have ever imag-
ined, with limited organization and limited resources. In
18 hours, we saw our ideas go from a small group of peo-
ple talking at the community co-op to international TV
(Albright, Cohen and Berger 1998).

The very fact that the administration felt it necessary to stage the
town hall meeting, and then to tightly control it, shows the
degree to which it understood the power of publicity.

The Power of Privacy

The second Bush administration, of course, took the scripting of
public spectacle to an entirely other level. Among the Bush
 Quarantining Dissent • 171

administration’s strategies of managing the politics of dissent has

been carefully managing its geography. The administration’s stra-
tegic exploitation of a geography at once of publicity and of pri-
vacy—the careful centering of that which is consistent with the
message, and the sequestering out of view of that which is
not—played out at a variety of scales, in a variety of different
spaces.
The management of domestic dissent has largely involved the
public spaces of cities. During his first administration, Bush
made important policy speeches before “public” audiences that
were in fact carefully preselected. In an article in The American
Conservative, James Bovard (2003) wrote with concern of the
administration’s application of Seattle-style “no-protest” zones to
the provision of security for the president. Bovard recounts
example after example in which the public spaces through which
the president moves are swept clean of any visible hint of dissent:

When Bush travels around the United States, the Secret

Service visits the location ahead of time and orders local
police to set up “free speech zones” or “protest zones”
where people opposed to Bush policies (and sometimes
sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined. These zones
routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential
sight and outside the view of media covering the event.

This reflects, it seems, a broader movement to quite literally

contain dissent; to locate it in bounded spaces more easily con-
trolled.
The centrality of law—and the geography of law—to the con-
duct of state power and the dynamics of citizenship is clear with
respect to a post-9/11 political landscape. In the same way that the
H. Rap Brown Act was written in such broad and vague ways as to
potentially make illegitimate and illegal a wide range of political
actions in the 1960s, so too has law been deployed in aggressive
ways to police dissent today (Cole and Dempsey 2002). New laws
such as the PATRIOT Act restore such broad law enforcement
latitude to the state that it prompts Don Mitchell to ask, “Is Civil
172 • Boundaries of Dissent

Disobedience a Form of Terrorism?” (2003b). The ACLU has

concluded that “[t]he responses to dissent by many government
officials … so clearly violate the letter and the spirit of the supreme
law of the land, that they threaten the underpinnings of democ-
racy itself”(American Civil Liberties Union 2003: 18).
Given the history of efforts to regulate dissent in the United
States, there is reason to be concerned. Between the height of FBI
power in the late 1960s and its involvement in the Wounded
Knee occupation a few years later in 1973, the organization went
through significant transformation, in which its previous power
and autonomy waned significantly. Disclosure of the aggressive,
sometimes illegal manner in which the FBI policed domestic
political dissent led to reforms that limited the organization’s
power. In the wake of 9/11, however, then-Attorney General John
Ashcroft worked aggressively not just to restore such power, but
arguably to extend it. In the context of what was argued to be
unprecedented threat, Ashcroft and others argued for similarly
unprecedented powers to respond.
Particularly striking with respect to the geography of state power
and politics of publicity is that Ashcroft’s most controversial
actions were perhaps best distinguished by their antigeography.
Suspects and possible informants were held, for unknown reasons,
in undisclosed locations, for indefinite length: In essence, they
were “disappeared.” What seems lost in much of what public dis-
cussion of these actions existed is that they were thoroughly
legal—indeed, almost normal—under the statute written in the
wake of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (Sparke 1998).
Under these laws, anti-immigrant racism was fused with domestic-
security concerns to allow for the shockingly aggressive removal of
the most basic rights held by American citizens (Wall Street Journal
2001) [16].
The deployment of American state power through the mecha-
nism of privacy—in this case the obscuring from public view the
practice of state power—played out in other spaces, too. In the dip-
lomatic lead-up to the Iraq War, the administration exerted
immense pressure on crucial United Nations member states to cob-
ble together the so-called “coalition of the willing”; its strategies
 Quarantining Dissent • 173

included covert espionage by British and American intelligence ser-

vices against Security Council members as well as the Secretary
General himself (Observer 2003). The purpose was to gain strategic
insight that might allow them to better manage the diplomatic out-
come, and with it the public legitimacy—and indeed the perceived
international legality—of the war[17].

Politics in Other Spaces?

More broadly, the questions raised by these measures is not just
whether a threat exists and for whom, but also how such threats
are discursively and institutionally constituted, and to what
degree the deployment of state power to counter them in the
“public interest” is subject to the public visibility, accountability,
and debate that are the hallmark of democratic practice.
My larger theoretical argument is that a more careful analysis
of the politics of boundaries and scale, on one hand, and that of
publicity and citizenship on the other, can provide richer insight
into broader practices of democracy. We need, in short, to start
thinking about somewhat counterintuitive ideas such as the geo-
politics of home—about how larger geopolitical discourses and
stakes can come together around the micro-spaces of the domes-
tic home—or the way that states sometimes wield power by ren-
dering their own practices as private, like those that take place
behind the closed doors of a home.
Lynn Staeheli (1996) argues that it is a mistake both analyti-
cally and politically to assume that the public world of politics
only ever takes place in public spaces and adds that there is a
need to think through carefully exactly how distinctions between
publicity and privacy are drawn in different contexts. Such a
focus allows us to “identify spaces, interests, and actions that are
more or less public without implying that either are absolutely or
ideally public” (1996: 605). If it is the case that analysis of public
dissent and scale can benefit from more nuanced appreciation of
scale, it is equally true that work on scale can benefit from greater
attention to the social construction of publicity. Put simply, who,
what, and where is visible and public, and on what terms?
174 • Boundaries of Dissent

Even a theoretically and conceptually rich and sophisticated

concept of boundaries can only ever be partial. As Kathleen Kirby
(1996: 116) puts it, suggesting caution about uncritical views of
boundaries and scale, “Recent world events suggest that on a geo-
political scale, as on the personal scale …, boundaries may pro-
tect us as much as they confine us, or may protect even as they
confine us.” Continuing, she suggests that

boundaries are often more than arbitrary: Their surfaces

can contain, illustrate, and shield the existence of massive,
tangible differences in intentions and interests that may
emerge with murderous force when those limits are atten-
uated. Maintaining boundaries has seemed to many theo-
rists a necessary element of political activity (1996: 66).

Although the process of “jumping scales” involves a particular

aspect of social relations—dissolving the boundaries that define
narrow notions of identity, perhaps—other boundaries must be
simultaneously constructed or maintained. Whether this involves
access to private spaces within which to organize a political pro-
test, for instance, the securing of rights to protest in public space,
or efforts to redraw legal boundaries, it is clear that geographies
of scale are quite complex. The issue, then, is not only about
expanding the scale of a given phenomenon—and therefore of
dissolving boundaries—but of selectively dissolving and main-
taining various kinds of boundaries and the spaces that they
define.
The American Right learned this lesson a long time ago, craft-
ing a well-oiled political machine that exhibits a quite effective
politics of scale. Some on the Left have commented on the con-
trasting tactics of the Left and the Right. Kevin Mattson (2005),
for example, suggests that perhaps the Left is too fixated on the
1960s as the model for progressive politics. “The Left is often
identified as a series of marches,” he writes, and “[p]rotest has
become an easy way to express dissent.” Instead, he suggests a
need to learn from the success of the Right, which, he argues,
employs a more disciplined set of strategies that largely eschews
 Quarantining Dissent • 175

the theatrical politics of the streets for the more somber politics
of organizing.
Yet it seems to me this perspective rather misses a crucial
point. It ascribes a seamless coherence to both the tactics and the
politics of the Right that belies the reality. The Right is not just
business elites at fundraisers or intellectuals at Washington think
tanks or radio talk show hosts projecting their words across the
airwaves. The success of the Right is not only a function of its
money and its intellectual capital, and of its careful exploitation
of discourses of freedom and order in fora other than public
demonstrations. It is also, as the 2004 election seems to have
made clear, the preacher on a pulpit in small-town Ohio with a
congregation willing to go out and do the political work to real-
ize their vision of a just world. Likewise, it is the antiabortion
activists who do more than write letters to editors, but engage in
often quite aggressive—sometimes violent—disruptions of larger
norms of public order.
Perhaps it is thus correct that the Left needs to learn from the
past rather than borrow from it. The lesson, however, is perhaps
not to throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater; to leave
the streets and the tactics of confrontational politics to the dust-
bins of history in favor of the more staid settings of legislative
chambers and policy debates. Indeed, that suggests a perhaps too
instrumental end to the business of protest politics, as if they
were only ever about effecting a specific change, rather than also
to do other kinds of work. The English word “demonstration”
has become rather dead in its rote usage, but it is useful to con-
sider its fundamental meaning. Like the Spanish word mani-
festación, the word points to the practice of making visible—in
space—dissenting ways of thinking, being, and imagining the
future. The function of such demonstrations or manifestations of
dissent is often not only to speak before a larger public, but also
at the same time to constitute what Nancy Fraser (1992) referred
to as counter-publics.
Still, arguably the largest collective demonstrations in history
failed to stop the juggernaut of the neoconservative war machine.
And despite all of the failures of the subsequent war in Iraq—the
176 • Boundaries of Dissent

missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the ongoing threat

of civil war fragmenting the country into pieces, Abu-Ghraib, the
some 18,000 estimated Iraqi and 1,500 American dead at the time
I write this—the Right managed to re-elect President Bush with
slim majorities of both the electoral and the popular votes, and to
strengthen its dominance of the legislative branch. It remains to
be seen what kinds of practices of dissent will be up to the task of
providing real alternatives.
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[accessed on January 29, 2005].
 Notes

1. Steve Herbert’s work on policing is an exception to some extent, though

his focus is rather more broad than simply the policing of dissent in pub-
lic space (1997).
2. The association between visibility, identity, and political legitimacy
occurs beyond riots. Mexican military officials, for example, commented
on the anonymity of masked campesinos who could not be otherwise
clearly marked as Zapatistas, and thus as threats to the state.
3. In truth, my theoretical argument would be a broader one than the his-
torical aspect of it. It seems to me the argument I present here could be
usefully deployed—or at least tested—in vastly different historical con-
texts. This is not to say there is not something new about contemporary
protest, of course, but rather that there is a tendency sometimes to both
exaggerate the differences of contemporary protest and with it to leave
out critical analysis of the changing nature of protest politics.
4. In its 1968 “interview with an authority on riots,” for example, U.S. News
& World Report sought, “in the wake of the riots that rocked cities across
the nation,” answers to two basic questions: “Is full-scale insurrection
next on the schedule, [and] what is being done to meet the threat?” (U.S.
News & World Report 1968: 38).
5. As Claire Potter (1998) explains, the federalization of police authority
came in part as a response to new criminal threats. The kind of public
bandits the FBI was initially designed, in part, to apprehend—the auto
bandits that freely crossed state lines and, thus, necessitated an equally

189
190 • Notes

mobile police force—were themselves enabled by that same state. Aside

from the road network established by the federal state that allowed rela-
tively cheap and privatized mobility—both important to this new sort of
crime—criminality itself was bound up in complex state transforma-
tions. “[T]he elevation of bandits to a politicized folk status,” she argues,
“can be linked to the history of . . . state concentration, capital concentra-
tion, and the proletarianization of labor . . . [p]recisely because they
articulate a prenational past . . . [and] reject modern, state-centered
political solutions”(Potter 1998: 84–85).
6. Susan Smith observed a similar discourse of citizenship articulated by the
“New Right” in the 1980s (1989).
7. The Antiriot Act was also known as the Stokeley Carmichael Act.
8. Indeed, the grand jury that indicted the Chicago Eight also considered
indicting the media networks as well.
9. The Watergate scandal broke during Wounded Knee. According to Mann
(1992), the famous “Deep Throat” source who leaked details of the illegal
break-in at the hotel to journalist Bob Woodward was almost certainly a
highly placed FBI official. Particularly likely, in his view, were three men
involved in FBI decision-making at Wounded Knee: Mark Felt, Charles
Bates, and Gray himself. In 2005, press reports confirmed that the source
was in fact Felt. As Mann explained, the possibility that an FBI official
brought down a president is interesting for what it illuminates about the
internal dynamics of the state. The FBI was in a period of transition fol-
lowing Hoover’s death in 1972. During this period the Nixon White
House sought to bring the historically autonomous organization under
closer control. The appointment of Gray from the Attorney General’s
office to the Acting Directorship of the FBI was one symptom, but the
tensions expressed at Wounded Knee were likely connected to these
larger issues as well.
10. AIM’s version of events was just the opposite: that the FBI helicopter had
fired indiscriminately on people who had gone to collect the bundles.
11. Warner’s plan itself was highly secret. “Information about the battle
plan,” one FBI memo noted, “was on a need-to-know basis” (Bates 1973).
The plan was so sensitive, in fact, that neither the Pentagon nor the
Attorney General’s office were willing to provide a copy to the FBI.
12. One might speculate that the leak was quite deliberately intended to put
pressure on the occupiers to peacefully end the occupation. As with ear-
lier Army plans, however, the FBI was not informed of its details. Refer-
encing the New York Times article, one senior FBI official explained, “The
information which we in the FBI sought officially now appears in the
national media. This would indicate a leak or the information was fur-
nished to the news media, but denied to the” (Bates 1973). This senior
official was clearly unhappy with this. As he explained in another memo,
 Notes • 191

“It is inconceivable that the foremost law enforcement agency, would not
be given a copy of a plan of operation in which it is both directly and
indirectly involved” (Bates 1973). He further expressed the view that
while the FBI might not be involved directly in the assault, “this does
not preclude the possibility that if something goes wrong the FBI will be
immediately dispatched to remedy a bad situation, as has been done in
the past.”
13. La Lucha is a term rooted in the Cuban independence movement.
14. Only later—after the child was reunited with his father—did a psycholo-
gist who examined the boy indicate that the attachment Elián had to his
cousin was less that of a son to a mother, than a schoolboy crush.
15. Post-Seattle, security officials were much more prepared to ensure their
control over city public spaces. The Commander of Washington, D.C.,
Metro Police, for example, reported he had personally visited Seattle,
Prague, and a variety of other sites of significant protest events with the
explicit intent of learning about the evolution of protest tactics (Mitchell
and Staeheli 2004).
16. As in the past, the political logic behind these new laws and their aggres-
sive enforcement is also a geographic logic. The new “Department of
“Homeland Defense” guards the defenseless American public against the
terrorist lurking amid small towns and suburbs.
17. The targets of the espionage—Chile, Pakistan, Guinea, Angola, Came-
roon, and Bulgaria—were of particular concern to American and British
officials because of their lukewarm support for the war and their active
efforts to avert it through diplomatic means.
 Index

1968, 37–40, 164 Boots, John, 154–155

borders, 136, 153–156
boundaries, 4, 7, 106, 163
A
difference, 22
Adams, Paul, 26 home, 124, 127, 129
Afghanistan, 167 law, 28–29, 63; see also jurisdiction
Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, 153–155 neoliberalism, 136, 161, 162
Albright, Madeleine, 168–170 public/private, 18, 23–24
Alcatraz, 1969 occupation, 71 race, 36
Alpha 66, 118 sovereignty. See American Indian/First
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 92 Nations, sovereignty
American Indian/First Nations Wounded Knee, 69, 70
identity, 104
Brant, Shawn, 154–155
sovereignty, 68, 104, 153–155, 164
Brown, H. Rap, 37, 51–53, 57
treaty rights, 68, 78
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)
American Indian Movement (AIM), 67,
Washington headquarters occupation,
83–84, 103
1972, 71
Amnesty International, 157
Bush, George W.
Anarchy USA, 50
administration, 166–167, 170
antiglobalization movement, 139–143,
president, 135, 140, 162,
157–162
171, 176
authority, 69, 72, 129
Byrd, Robert C., 46–48, 55

B
Batista, Fulgencio, 116
C
Blomley, Nicholas, 29, 36, 151 Cambridge, Maryland, 53
body, 21, 24, 54, 62, 108, 149 Canada
Bogue, Andrew, 81, 84 Charter, 147, 150–151

193
194 • Index

Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), D

143
Daley, Richard, 39, 57
state, 137, 153
De La Torre, Miguel, 116
capitalism, 17, 25
DeLay, Tom, 130
Carmichael, Stokeley, 51–53, 57
Dellinger, David, 64, 152–153
carnival, 43
Detroit, 42
Castro, Fidel, 116, 119
deviance, 158
Chicago
difference, 22
Democratic Convention, 1968, 38–41,
dissent, 14, 72, 163
57–58, 152–153, 157
domesticity, 125
childhood, 107, 132–133; see also rights,
law, 29, 59, 89
children
mobility, 146
China
order, 39, 122, 123, 158
Tiananmen Square, 2, 15–16, 26
space, 35, 45, 149
cities, 19, 41
citizenship, 6, 10, 15, 16–17, 107, 163
boundaries, 161; see also boundaries E
children. See rights, children
Economist, 162
dissent, 33–34, 40, 48, 49, 145, 158
Ehrlichman, John, 89
gender, 107, 125–126
Estefan, Gloria, 122
law, 29, 30, 95, 109
neoliberalism, 140
race, 1, 107 F
rights/duties, 44, 46, 164
family, 107, 108, 117, 125–126
sexuality, 107
Federal Antiriot Act, 53–64, 89–95,
space, 19–21, 25
152, 164
the state, 113
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 8,
civil disobedience, 48
44–45, 74, 81, 91, 94, 96, 98, 104
Civil Rights Act of 1968, 55
Felt, Mark, 81, 86, 93, 98
Civil Rights movement, 1–2, 25–26, 41,
feminism, 18, 33, 125
51–52, 57, 90, 131
Florida, 105
Clark, Ramsey, 55, 58
Clearwater, Frank, 101 Fraser, Nancy, 18–19
Clinton, Bill free trade, 138, 139
Adminstration, 115 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA),
President, 115 135–136, 152
Colburn, Wayne, 79, 85–86, 88, 101 Frizzell, Kent, 88
Cold War, 22, 38, 40, 50, 82, 106, 107
communications, 26 G
conservatives, 112, 129
containment, 69, 73, 80, 102 Garden Plot, 64–65, 96–97
Cramer, William, 52 gender, 33, 107, 117, 125–126
criminality, 45 ghetto, 44
“crisis-as-theater,” 71 geopolitics, 50, 82, 106, 115, 164
Cuba, 106, 111, 113, 124, 126, 130 globalization
Cardenas, 132 politics of, 136
Havana, 119, 132 protest, 141–143
law, 110 Goldberg, David Theo, 118
Mariel boatlift, 117 González, Elián, 9, 105, 107, 118, 164, 165
state, 132 asylum claim, 109
Cuban Adjustment Act, 115 raid, 129
Cuban American National Foundation, González, Lazaro, 123, 128
121, 133 González, Marisleysis, 126
 Index • 195

Gore, Al, 113 M

governmentality, 6
Marx, Karl, 43
Gray, Patrick, 81, 87, 89–90, 92, 93
materiality, 21, 24
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, 115, 167
Mattson, Kevin, 174
“guerrilla theater,” 68, 77
Means, Russell, 78
media, 6, 8, 119, 164
H mass, 17, 25
Habermas, Jürgen, 16–19, 24 newspaper, 120
Hatch, Orrin, 113 personnel, 79, 96, 102, 144
Haydn, Tom, 39 press pass, regulation, 80
Held, Richard, 75, 86 protest, 25, 58, 69, 103, 159
Hellstern, Richard, 99–100 and public sphere, 18,
Herod, Andrew, 22–23 radio, 120
Holder, Eric, 132 rights, 62
home, 125–128 riots and, 47
homeless, 20 space as, 15, 35
Hoover, J. Edgar, 44–45, 47, 49 spectacle, 71
human rights, 112, 113 Meissner, Doris, 110
Mexico,
Chiapas, 2–4, 132
I Cuban Community, 116, 118,
identity, 10, 18, 22, 28, 34, 115, 127, 166 126, 131
immigrants, 20, 109, 115 Little Havana, 124, 128
Independent Oglala Nation (ION), 68, 78–79, Mexico City, 4
103 Miami, 8
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 143 migration, 117
Internet, and protest, 34, 141 Mitchell, Don, 21, 27–28
Iroquois Confederacy, 153 Mitchell, Mike, 153, 156
Mitchell v. Canada, 153–154
mob, 31
J mobility, 95, 136, 140, 155, 165; see also rights,
John Birch Society, 50 mobility
Johnson, Lyndon, 42 morailty, 48
jurisdiction, 28 Moscow, 132

K N
Kent State, massacre, 98 nationalism, 112, 116–117, 166
Kerner Commission, 42–43 neoliberalism, 14, 136
King, Martin Luther, 46, 51, 52, 57 Newark, 42
Kirby, Kathleen, 174 Nixon, Richard
Kleindienst, Richard, 69, 73, 89, 98 adminstration, 8, 58, 71
President, 48
L North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), 135
labor, 57
La Lucha, 117
Lamont, Buddy, 101–102 O
law, 27–30, 46, 48–49, 53, 56, 107, 109, 151 order, 46, 48, 146, 150
Lima, 12; see also Peru “outside agitator,” 45, 47, 50, 53, 62–63, 152,
looting, 43 161, 164
Lyman, Stanley, 85, 87, 88 outsiders, 45, 49, 82, 84, 100, 159
196 • Index

P Rieff, David, 116

rights,
Paris, 38
assembly, 31, 59, 138, 147
Patterson, Bradley, 70–72
children, 108, 110, 114
Paul, Ron, 167
collective, 140
Penelas, Alex, 131
citizenship, 162; see also citizenship
Peru, 11–14
democracy and, 22, 31
Pine Ridge Tribal Government, 81
family, 108
place, 115
immigration, 109–110, 114, 139
policing, 43, 138, 142
mobility, 59, 60–62, 92, 147–148, 151
Posse Comitatus Act, 98
parental, 114
power, 6, 10, 15, 18, 23, 30, 34, 89, 163
speech, 59, 60, 147
Prague, 38
versus responsibilities, 160
private, privacy, 3, 18, 23, 28, 125
riots, 6, 14
protest, 5, 11
1960s United States, 42–45, 47, 49
protest platform, 70, 77
antiriot acts, 30, 32; see also Federal
public, publicity, 3, 44, 63, 75, 95, 97, 120
Antiriot Act
bandits, 45
citizenship, 34; see also citizenship
dissent, 30, 47, 71, 103
incitement, 55, 57, 60, 120
global, 4
interpretive politics, 31–32, 41, 54
media, 62
scholarly methodology, 33–34
opinion, 40
state authority and, 30–31, 52–53
privacy, 23, 129
Routledge, Paul, 3, 15, 141
protest, 5
Ruddick, Susan, 20
scholarship, 7, 16–19, 23–26
Rudé, George, 31
violence, 28, 40
Rumsfeld, Donald, 166
public space, 32, 137, 142, 143, 145–146, 161,
166
citizenship, 15, 19–22; see also citizenship S
dissent, 12, 48, 54 scale (geographic), 5, 7, 100, 137
norms, 6, 27 dissent, 31
order, 46 “jumping,” 71, 174
privitization of, 24, 149 law, 28–29, 36, 55, 59
public sphere, 16, 20, 52 politics of, 21–23, 27, 45, 63
Zapatistas. See Zapatistas protest, 14
race, 63
Q Schieffer, Bob, 160
Seattle WTO protests, 4, 9, 137, 139, 141–142,
al-Qaeda, 166
157
Quebéc City, 10, 135–137, 143–152
sexuality, 107, 117
security fence, 144–152
Situationists, 43
Québec City, Summit of the Americas, 10,
135–136, 139, 149, 155 Smith, Neil, 23
Sneed, Joseph, 73–76, 87, 91, 93, 101, 103
social movements, 25
R sovereignty, 153
rabble-rousers, 44 space, 14, 15, 16, 19
race, 36, 42, 44–45, 49, 57, 107, 118, 164 concrete/material, 20
Red Power movement, 71 virtual, 25
Reno, Janet, 106 spectacle, 5, 10, 70, 76, 89, 104, 119, 124, 138
representation, 24, 33 spectacles of dissent, 14, 22, 24, 34
Republican Party, 105 Staeheli, Lynn, 21, 24, 173
residence, 151 state, 5, 6, 14, 15, 28, 89, 108, 112, 127, 163
resistance, 14, 30 Strange, Jon, 168–170
 Index • 197

T Vietnam War, 40, 73, 81, 99

violence, 28, 40, 49, 53, 130, 145, 157
Taliban, 167
and the state, 132
terrorism, 12, 72
visibility, 28, 89, 91, 97–98, 139
war on, 115, 165
theater, 132
Thurmond, Strom, 51, 55 W
Tremblay, Mark, 146–147 Warner, Volney, 97, 99, 101
Tremblay v. Québec, 146–151 Watergate, 122
Watts riots, 43, 50
U White House, 70, 71, 98
Will, George F., 111, 112, 129
United States
Wilson, Richard, 68, 82–85, 88, 104
army, 88, 96–98, 101
World Bank, 143
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 98
World Trade Center, 166
Community Relations Service (CRS), 85,
World Trade Organization (WTO), 4, 9, 138,
86
143
Department of Justice, 73, 76, 88, 94, 95,
Wounded Knee, SD
120
air-drop, 94
Federalism, 36
Immigration and Naturalization Service bunkers, 68, 73, 103
(INS), 114, 120 massacre, 1890, 67
Marshals Service, 74, 85, 98, 101, 104 occupation, 1973, 8, 137, 152,
National Advisory Commission onCivil 161, 164
Disorders. See Kerner Commission perimeters, 69, 70, 74, 75, 76, 78,
Right, 174–175 79, 94
South, 25, 50 roadblocks, 73, 75, 82, 87
State Department, 111 tribal roadblock, 84–85, 104
“states’ rights,” 26, 52 White Paper, 74–75
Supreme Court, 105 Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense
United States v. Dellinger, 57–64 Committee, 80–81

V Z
Vietnam, antiwar movement, 90 Zakaria, Fareed, 158–160
Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), Zapatistas, 2–4, 26, 132
78, 91 Zoot Suit Riots, 33