Skip to main content
Gang-related violence has forced thousands of Hondurans to flee their country, leaving behind everything as refugees and undocumented migrants abroad. To uncover how this happened, Jon Carter looks back to the mid-2000s, when neighborhood... more
Gang-related violence has forced thousands of Hondurans to flee their country, leaving behind everything as refugees and undocumented migrants abroad. To uncover how this happened, Jon Carter looks back to the mid-2000s, when neighborhood gangs were scrambling to survive state violence and mass incarceration, locating there a critique of neoliberal globalization and state corruption that foreshadows Honduras’s current crises. Carter begins with the story of a thirteen-year-old gang member accused in the murder of an undercover DEA agent, asking how the nation’s seductive criminal underworld has transformed the lives of young people. He then widens the lens to describe a history of imperialism and corruption that shaped this underworld—from Cold War counterinsurgency to the “War on Drugs” to the near-impunity of white-collar crime—as he follows local gangs who embrace new trades in the illicit economy. Carter describes the gangs’ transformation from neighborhood groups to sprawling criminal societies, even in the National Penitentiary, where they have become political as much as criminal communities. Gothic Sovereignty reveals not only how the revolutionary potential of gangs was lost when they merged with powerful cartels but also how close analysis of criminal communities enables profound reflection on the economic, legal, and existential discontents of globalization in late-liberal nation-states.
In the following essay, I describe how one of the most cited but least analyzed texts in gang studies, Frederic Thrasher's The Gang (1927), has informed my approach to the analysis of gang communities. While many scholars have highlighted... more
In the following essay, I describe how one of the most cited but least analyzed texts in gang studies, Frederic Thrasher's The Gang (1927), has informed my approach to the analysis of gang communities. While many scholars have highlighted the limitations of Thrasher's work, I argue that one might read this text differently and, in my case, speculatively. I do this by moving away from privileging the text's most sociologically-polished elements and look instead to its many undertheorized speculations and unrealized claims which other thinkers from other disciplines have taken up in varying ways. As such, I ask how Thrasher's claim that "the gang" emerges as both an expression of and an outlet for the creative reimagination of interstitial space in the modern city is enriched by Walter Benjamin's writings on temporality, materiality, and childhood. I argue that a speculative reading of The Gang that does not discipline Thrasher's most profound insights but rather thinks with their disciplinary incompatibility and helps illuminate the generative inscrutability of The Gang, revealing it as an experiment in sociological empiricism. How to break the humdrum of routine existence-this is a problem for the boy. It is the problem of life generally and a great deal of human energy is expended in the flight from monotony and the pursuit of a thrill.-Frederic Thrasher, The Gang (1927)
This book challenges the dominant vision of punk – particularly its white masculine protagonists and deep Anglocentrism – by analyzing punk as a critical lens into the disputed territories of 'America', a term that hides the heterogeneous... more
This book challenges the dominant vision of punk – particularly its white masculine protagonists and deep Anglocentrism – by analyzing punk as a critical lens into the disputed territories of 'America', a term that hides the heterogeneous struggles, global histories, hopes and despairs of late twentieth and early twenty-first century experience.Compiling academic essays and punk paraphernalia (interviews, zines, poetry and visual segments) into a single volume, the book seeks to explore punk life through its multiple registers, through vivid musical dialogues, excessive visual displays and underground literary expression.
This essay examines the monstrous first as a figure haunting Western legal history, stripped of rights and often merging with the animal, and second, as a divergent sociality borne of emergencies, crises, and faultlines of late liberal... more
This essay examines the monstrous first as a figure haunting Western legal history, stripped of rights and often merging with the animal, and second, as a divergent sociality borne of emergencies, crises, and faultlines of late liberal governmentality. In particular I ask how the figure of the pathological and violent gang member structures debates about the US-Mexico border crosser, and the limits of humanity before the law. The essay moves from a genealogy of the gang member in Honduras, to the refugee asylum seeker of 2018, to ask what forms of difference-making, in the form of new monstrosities, might inform new notions of kinship and solidarity amid anthropocenic futures.
Special journal edition edited by me and Chris Garces
God's Gangs by sociologist Edward Orozco Flores examines how members of Latino street gangs in Los Angeles are leaving gangs and reshaping their lives, despite overwhelming obstacles to entering the mainstream economy. His book... more
God's Gangs by sociologist Edward Orozco Flores examines how members of Latino street gangs in Los Angeles are leaving gangs and reshaping their lives, despite overwhelming obstacles to entering the mainstream economy. His book complements the expanding literature of critical gang studies by arguing that Latino immigrants in inner-city Los Angeles are not mired in cyclical poverty. Rather these immigrants are in reach of a modest social mobility that has proven crucial in offering a path out of gangs. Flores conducted ethnographic research with two of the foremost organizations in gang recovery, an ecumenical Jesuit institution (Homeboy Industries) and an evangelical Pentecostal ministry (Victory Outreach). Each organization is active in recasting the street masculinity of gang members into conventional patriarchal roles, most often as family breadwinners and leaders in faith-based communities. The book opens with an overview of racial politics in Los Angeles across the twentieth century—a genealogical account of the stereotype of the Latino gang banger. Flores tracks the dialectical production of images of the Latino family, addressing the interaction between the biological racism of the eugenics movement and the cultural ecology of the Chicago School countering such racism; and then turning to the work of mid-century reformers and the white backlash to the Civil Rights movement. He asks how such discourses about the culture of black and Latino families shaped public policies, housing covenants, and police initiatives that led to the War on Drugs and the subsequent mass incarceration of the lower classes. It is an impressively synoptic and economical opening chapter that deconstructs national security hyperbole about Latino gangs and establishes the figure of the Latino gang-banger as a specter of Los Angeles' own history. Flores' second chapter challenges segmented and downward assimilation theorists who argue second generation immigrant families gravitate to criminalized subcultures as a response to exclusion and racial hostility. He notes that in inner-city Los Angeles, longitudinal studies show that immigrants