The New Politics of Community

Abstract

Ideas about community are especially prominent in late-twentieth-century U.S. society. The term community resonates throughout social policy, scholarship, popular culture, and everyday social interactions. It holds significance for different populations with competing political agendas (e.g., political groups of the right and the left invoke ideas of community yet have very different ideas in mind). No longer seen as naturally occurring, apolitical spaces to which one retreats to escape the pressures of modern life, communities of all sorts now constitute sites of political engagement and contestation. The new politics of community reveals how the idea of community constitutes an elastic political construct that holds a variety of contradictory meanings and around which diverse social practices occur. In this address, I analyze how reframing the idea of community as a political construct might provide new avenues for investigating social inequalities. I first explore the utility of community as a political construct for rethinking both intersecting systems of power and activities that are routinely characterized as ‘‘political.’’ Next, by examining five contemporary sites where community is either visibly named as a political construct or implicated in significant political phenomena, I investigate how the construct of community operates within contemporary power relations of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, ability, nation, and race. Finally, I explore the potential intellectual and political significance of these developments.