Book Description

Through feminist attention to the everyday, inner-workings of the drug economy, this research explores the contested spaces of the neighborhood block as both stages for the enactment of the 'war on drugs,' and intimate, formative spaces for black men as they rely on the drug economy and navigate aggressive policing and incarceration. There is a plethora of research focusing on violence and the inner city. There is also an abundance of research that investigates the role of drugs and drug dealing in the United States. However, there is little work explicitly engaging the lived experiences of practitioners and their economic agency -- particularly the experiences of black men. The dissertation addresses this gap through a community study of Grays Ferry, Philadelphia that begins from the neighborhood block and moves out to investigate the role of the drug trade in producing complex social networks of support, reciprocity, power and violence. This study integrates the well-developed theoretical and methodological lens of feminist geography with the tradition of developing a place-based understanding of life and crime in US inner-cities. The study attends to the ways in which those who sell drugs remain loyal to the practice and the community their economy creates in the face of 'war on drugs' policies that result in incarceration, harassment, and stigmatization. This project approaches the drug economy, like any economy, as a system of social relations that binds people together. Understanding this system of social relations offers insights into the inner-workings of African American, urban communities and economies in post-industrial US cities.