"AbdouMaliq Simone's The Surrounds brings abolitionist theorizing to the untapped potentialities of contemporary urbanization in the so-called Global South. The book mobilizes various developments in critical Black thought to conceptualize urban spaces that have exceeded or subverted their design in response to individual or collective use. Composed as an interweaving of ethnography, literary reflection, theory, and poetics, The Surrounds reads against the grain of some common assumptions: that memory iscritical to freedom; that alternative worlds are possible, and that rebellion is redeemed by the creation of such worlds. As an intersection of urban theory, Black study, and decolonial and Islamic thought, the book poses the surrounds as those spaces beyond capture, not immune from it, not free of it, but rather something aside it as a locus of continuous rebellion. The surrounds introduce space and spaciousness to the regimes of computation that seek to precisely define the parameters through which people, built environments, and the more than human relate with each other. Although situated in multi-sited ethnography and urban studies, The Surrounds speaks to a much wider range of Black critical theory and will be of interest across global Black studies"--
In The Surrounds renowned urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone offers a new theorization of the interface of the urban and the political. Working at the intersection of Black studies, urban theory, and decolonial and Islamic thought, Simone centers the surrounds—those urban spaces beyond control and capture that exist as a locus of rebellion and invention. He shows that even in clearly defined city environments, whether industrial, carceral, administrative, or domestic, residents use spaces for purposes they were not designed for: schools become housing, markets turn into classrooms, tax offices transform into repair shops. The surrounds, Simone contends, are where nothing fits according to design. They are where forgotten and marginalized populations invent new relations and ways of living and being, continuously reshaping what individuals and collectives can do. Focusing less on what new worlds may come to be and more on what people are creating now, Simone shows how the surrounds are an integral part of the expansiveness of urban imagination.
Working at the intersection of urban theory, Black studies, and decolonial and Islamic thought, AbdouMaliq Simone offers a new theorization of the interface of the urban and the political.
