From Global Dispossession to Local Repossession: Towards a Worldly Cultural Geography of
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Nuala C. Johnson, Richard H. Schein, and Jamie Winders—The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography S From Global Dispossession to Local Repossession: Towards a Worldly Cultural Geography of Occupy Activism Matthew Sparke Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activism in 2011 suddenly tied global cities associated with the boom times of financial globalization and a world of discontent linked to global disposses- sion. Doing so most novelly within the affluent urban control centers and partially privatized public spaces of American capitalism, the direct action of the OWS encampments and associ- ated protests also made a global capitalist class – the so-called 1 percent – a new focus for global critique. As Naomi Klein explained in a speech to OWS activists at Zuccotti Park, there was an important political–geographic shift made manifest in this critique: a shift from a geography of blaming territories – wealthy nation-states – to targeting transnational geog- raphies of class domination. “It seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries,” she under- lined. “Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world. The point is today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control” (Klein 2011). Here, I want to argue that this shift was also very much a cultural–geographic shift too, partly because of how it reframed and communicated concerns about global class domination through local place- based action but also because of how it simultaneously made clear the worldwide resonance and relays of the activism in articulating new communities of cross-border and cross-cultural solidarity. Critical awareness about the global system careening out of control was thereby spreading from places in the global South, where it had long been obvious, to places of former plenty and complicity. “The world has come to Occupy Wall Street,” noted Andy Kroll, in an article that went on to document the multiple cross-cultural connections articulated by and in the new global–local ties: Mayssa Sultan, an Egyptian American . . . , says her compatriots decided to support the occupa- tion after hearing that Occupy Wall Street had taken inspiration from the Tahrir Square The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography, First Edition. Edited by Nuala C. Johnson, Richard H. Schein, and Jamie Winders. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Chapter 33 Johnson_5597_c33_main.indd 387 11/28/2012 2:55:14 PM
