Abstract
Second books, like second albums in the world of pop music, can be a tricky business. Alice Mah, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick (UK), has skilfully avoided the pitfall, with a volume on Port Cities and Global Legacies that is no less stimulating than her preceding book, in which she compared Niagara Falls, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Russian town of Ivanovo (Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place, University of Toronto Press, 2012). The present study, examining the cases of Liverpool, Marseilles and New Orleans, rests once again on solid groundwork in three different countries: Mah’s visits, extending from 2009 to 2013, allowed her to conduct a total of 80 interviews, with an impressive array of people, from city and port authority officials to dockworkers and seafarers, business people and residents. It reveals the same ability to combine methodological tools borrowed from various subfields of the Humanities, namely ethnography, connected history and critical geography practised by David Harvey and Mike Davis. To the question of how the three declining harbours are reinventing themselves in the new global age, she offers answers that manage to be both rich and subtle.
The book divides into three parts, with the first two sections (devoted to ‘Urban identity’ and ‘Waterfront work’) forming the most coherent wholes, as Part III (‘Radicalism’) is in fact composed of one chapter synthesising the findings and walking in the footsteps of Part II, and another offering a general conclusion to the volume. The comparative dimension of Mah’s study is inscribed into the very structure of the book, so that the body of the text keeps all the theoretical promises made in the introduction.
The first half of the book takes a look at the cities’ reconfigured identities through the prisms of cultural productions, urban regeneration and museography, angles that prove fruitful as all three ports have recently had to make both introspective and public relations efforts – Liverpool and Marseilles because they were elected European Cities of Culture in 2008 and 2013 respectively; New Orleans because of the reconstruction forced upon her by the Katrina devastations in 2005. Mah’s chapter 4 is particularly enlightening, and I am grateful to the author for articulating my own mixed feelings whilst visiting Liverpool’s and Marseilles’s museums. The sanitised nature of much of the exhibitions displayed inside the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (MUCEM) is indeed frustrating. And though the way in which Liverpool deals with its imperial heritage is more satisfactory (as British curators are generally more daring than their French counterparts, whether one considers display or content), it still tends to place slavery and the slave trade at too safe a distance in the past. The Museum of Liverpool’s celebration of the colourful ‘world city’ ends up overshadowing the darker sides of what being a global city meant, and still means. Local labour historians have also deplored its sidetracking of working-class militancy. Having scrutinised the way in which the museums in Hull (UK) reflect, distort or amputate the Humberside port’s proletarian past, the reviewer can only subscribe to the author’s contention that urban identities are a battlefield, often shaped only marginally from below and more definitively by economic and political pressures from above, in particular the determination to sell an attractive face to tourists and investors.
The second half of the book, with its nuanced reflections on the radical legacy of waterfront struggles, is equally compelling. Mah rejects the idea of a Golden Age when port workers were perfectly united, and recounts how the global legacies characterising all three ports have also carried with them professional, sectarian and racial divisions. Yet such centrifugal tendencies were sometimes overcome, and Mah refuses to consider the memory of those victories as just remnants of days gone by. Though the interviewees often expressed nostalgia in their evocations of past fights (especially, in the case of New Orleans, for the spirit of the civil rights movement), the author emphasises the role of intergenerational transmission in the creation of a class-based sense of community that did not disappear with the technological and organisational metamorphoses of the 1980s. Remembrance matters in the present, she argues – without overstating her case. She admits that the socialist, communist, trade-unionist, anarchist, antiracist and feminist circles preserving the heritage of waterfront radicalism are often rather marginal, and that the way they could impact the local workers, or connect with the fights going on in the wider world, remains problematic. Mah is also right in observing that docker pride often went hand in hand with a sense of exclusiveness (‘If we are brave enough to stand up for our rights, why can’t other categories of workers do the same?’), a form of elitism that backfired when they were toppled from their aristocratic position. Having said that, the book ends on a hopeful note: the memory of solidarity is convincingly analysed, in Merseyside, in the Bouches-du-Rhône as well as on the Mississippi delta, as a potential fuel for tomorrow’s social and environmental struggles.
The book is illustrated with 14 black and white photographs of places where the author led her inquest: pictures of the ports as they can be seen today, in the age of containerisation and gentrification, and also of those spots where waterfront activists used to or continue to meet – the Bar Phocéen in Port-de-Bouc, the CASA Bar in Liverpool and the Black International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) union hall in New Orleans. Maps comparing the three ports in their heyday and in the 2010s would have been a valuable addition, but the most regrettable omission is that of in situ portraits of some of the interviewees. For a book that is so warm in its approach to social realities, it is a shame that the illustrations selected should show so few human beings, and only from afar. The same can be said of the coldish cover of the book.
But these are only minor complaints, as all the qualities that allowed Mah to be awarded the 2013 British Sociological Association (BSA) Philip Abrams Memorial Prize are there. Here is a book likely to delight sociologists and historians as well as specialists in urban studies, i.e. those open to the intellectual adventures entailed by the criss-crossing of disciplines; a book to be placed in the hands of postgraduate and indeed doctoral students willing to enrich their thinking repertoire; a book that might even appeal to the general reader, as it is full of references to popular culture, from Neil Young to the TV series Treme. Of course, while many British and French readers will grasp the allusions to the New Orleans musical scene, few citizens of the French Quarter will have watched an episode of the soap opera Brookside, or listened to IAM’s hip-hop hymn Je danse le MIA. In spite of such (inevitable) intercultural obstacles, the book manages to be both ambitious and accessible. Its style is sensitive, atmospheric, at times even poetic, qualities that are not always associated with sociology, but which suit the object under study: the persistence of global pasts that were often violent and painful in present cityscapes, and the uncertain paths forward for places and people with such heavy histories behind and inside them.
Alice Mah is at present engaged in a five year project on ‘Toxic Expertise, Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry’, possibly the most audacious topic she has attempted to tackle so far, as it will imply research into corporate-induced pollution across the world, and the possibilities of resistance stemming from citizen-led inquiries. Judging from the excellence of Mah’s contributions to critical sociology so far, I am certainly not the only reader looking forward to the completion of that survey. It goes without saying that I would also be curious to hear what Mah has to say about Hull’s ‘City of Culture’ events when 2017 comes.