Gigante, who says that Miami is a vehicle for
Latin dreams comparable to the place of
New York’s Madison Square Garden and
Radio City Music Hall for American dreams.
The annual Art Basel show draws international
buyers on private jets. There is
a mass influx of younger people, including
transnationals that form a significant market
for the gastronomic, arts, and entertainment
sectors of the creative economy; but Miami
has not drawn much high technology venture
capital, as it lacks a research and development
complex like Stanford or MIT.
The lack of place attachment in Miami,
however, along with the challenges of persisting
social inequality work against the
development of a coherent civic identity
and impede metropolitan aspirations as
a global city in charge of its destiny. Wealthy
districts like the downtownBayfront, Brickell
Avenue financial district, and tony Coconut
Grove and Coral Gables are a sharp contrast
with the impoverishment found in Overtown
and Liberty City and in gritty suburbs like
Hialeah and Opa-Locka. The authors find
evidence of socioeconomic bifurcation also
in the Cuban enclave. The children of firstwave
exiles of the 1960s have been able to
advance, while the second-generation
descendants of the 1980 Mariel boatlift refugees
and others have made less progress.
The authors excoriate Miami as a metropolis
of obscene capitalism, a city rife with incidents
of tax evasion, flight capital, secret
accounts, and money laundering. They chide
the hollowness of excessive consumption
anduncover a variety offorms of urban crime
spanning petty and anomic violence to highlevel
financial corruption. There have been
bursts of passionate neighborliness among
the polarized and culturally fragmented
racial and ethnic communities, especially in
the aftermath of destructive hurricanes.
Miami has rebuilt itself from the narrative
of ‘‘Paradise Lost,’’ as reported by a Time
magazine article in 1981 during the years
of the Mariel exodus, and Miami Vice—a pariah
city, but still on the precipice, with new
tensions and struggles.
The earlier book portrayed Miami as
a ‘‘city on the edge’’ contending with racial
struggle. This time the ‘‘global edge’’ has
revealed growing convergences but also
new perils. The divisions between African
Americans and Cubans have abated somewhat,
with black residents more accepting
of the progressive Latinization of Miami. A
black middle class is increasingly visible in
Miami Gardens. There is also cooperation
between Latin and Jewish elites, exhibited
in charitable giving for the arts. But the
authors find that while racial confrontation
has receded, the new social order is still relatively
amorphous and is wreaked by splintered
interests and a relatively weak collective
sense of belonging. They quote an Anglo
educator and civic leader who opines:
‘‘Miami today is a case of hyper-fragmentation:
too many commissioners, too many
voices and no one really in control’’ (p. 13).
Maps by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration illustrate areas of
the city that would be submerged by onefoot,
five-foot, and seven-foot sea level rises.
A 2016 photo from the Miami Herald satirically
illustrates a five-foot octopus left beached
by storm water in a condominium dweller’s
basement parking spot. How resilient will
Miami be, the authors ask, as the city confronts
new serious dilemmas such as transportation
gridlock, hurricanes, and the
threat of climate-change-induced rising
seas?
Solidarity in Practice: Moral Protest and the U.S.
Security State, by Chandra Russo. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2018. 210
pp. $28.99 paper. ISBN: 9781108460996.
BERNADETTE NADYA JAWORSKY
Masaryk University
jaworsky@fss.muni.cz
Solidarity in Practice: Moral Protest and the
U.S. Security State, by Chandra Russo, is
a compelling ethnography that offers
a glimpse into the world of activists who contest
what the author calls the ‘‘U.S. security
state,’’ or the ‘‘amalgamation of domestic
and foreign military, carceral and policing
priorities that coincide with the global transition
to neoliberalism’’ (p. 14). In the Trump
era, such a study is not only timely but also
helps us to better understand alternatives to
traditional forms of political protest. In an
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Contemporary Sociology 49, 2
atmosphere where nothing seems to touch
unjust and harmful policies in the United
States, and draconian measures emerge one
after another, this book about the practice of
solidarity in high-risk activism is especially
welcome and even hopeful.
In this book, Russo deftly defines,
develops, and elaborates her main conceptual
innovation—‘‘solidarity witness’’—
through ethnographic case studies of three
activist communities, or ‘‘movement
groups’’ (pp. 11–12). The School of the Americas
Watch strives to close the military training
facility at Fort Benning, Georgia, from
which countless graduates have moved on
to commit serious human rights violations
across Central and South America. As part
of the U.S.-Mexico border justice movement,
the annual Migrant Trail Walk enacts a pilgrimage
of sorts in solidarity with migrant
border crossers facing a treacherous journey
through the desert. Witness Against Torture
is a grassroots mobilization advocating for
closure of the Guanta´namo Bay Detention
Center. The three cases exhibit similarities
as well as differences, offering a ripe field
for comparative analysis that ‘‘explores
what it means to engage in a practice of ethical
witness as an expression and instantiation
of solidarity across cavernous divides
of wealth and power’’ (p. 2). The two stated
research goals, namely to see how activists
imagine and enact solidarity across such
divides and to understand the political avenues
available to them, are amply met
through an engaging and persuasive ethnographic
account that reads so well I would
call it gripping.
Part of what sets this book apart from
others that examine social movements in
which witnessing is a key aspect is the fact
that it is looking at the political activities of
relatively privileged groups, predominantly
white, faith-inspired practitioners of nonviolence
who act in solidarity with the targets of
the U.S. security state. They are not directly
affected by the forms of injustice they battle,
but rather act as movement allies. Russo was
inspired to undertake the study through her
own participation in the Migrant Trail Walk,
for the first time in 2007 and repeatedly since
then. She characterizes her positionality as
‘‘explicitly quite close’’ and sees engaged
research like this as itself a form of ‘‘witness’’
(p. 13). The reader is invited to be a witness as
well, through some stunning and often stark
photographs, which add to the richness of
the already vivid descriptions.
The book is laid out in seven chapters, and
each is compelling in its own right. The opening
chapter is refreshing; what can often be
a slog through context, conceptual terminology,
and theoretical background is instead
very readable, crisp, and to the point. I am
also impressed by Chapter Two, which offers
the historical and social context and origin
story of the three groups. There is a good balance
between too much detail and not
enough to situate the reader adequately.
The four empirical chapters use generous
excerpts from the author’s field notes and
quotes from activists, which brings the ethnography
to life in a vivid and captivating
way. The excerpts are followed by astute theoretical
observations that call upon an array
of relevant sociologists and other authors.
The theoretical parts aren’t a trudge, but
rather a breeze. That is not to say that they
are superficial or lack depth. Russo probes
analytical connections between theory and
data in a comprehensive and convincing
way.
Chapter Three is about forms of ritual protest
as testimony. A key aspect of solidarity
witness is the idea of ‘‘witness as a foremost
means of enacting solidarity with the state’s
targets by standing up to state violence’’
(p. 21). Russo looks at public mourning, participation
in the court system, and the visual
aspects of ritual protest, including the subversive
use of symbols and spaces. In Chapter
Four, ‘‘The Visceral Logics of Embodied
Resistance,’’ the activists’ physicality and
embodiedpracticesarehighlighted.Through
such embodiment, they ‘‘come to see, feel,
and understand state violence in ways they
could not otherwise . . . making the state’s targets,
which the dominant culture disavows,
harder to ignore and hold at a moral distance’’
(p. 101).
Turning to the activists’ ascetic political
practices, Chapter Five shows convincingly
how relinquishing comforts and engaging
in fasting, pilgrimage, or jail time resists individualism
and helps develop ‘‘prefigurative
community,’’ in which ‘‘movement groups
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Contemporary Sociology 49, 2
model the kinds of relationships they wish to
see in society writ large’’ (p. 140). Chapter Six
offers a fitting capstone to the analysis,
revealing the ways in which the ‘‘complications’’
of solidarity witness manifest. Russo
made a conscious decision to relegate the
conflictual aspects of these groups’ mobilizations
to a separate chapter, which works very
effectively. Of particular note are the sections
addressing issues of racial justice, offering
a complex and nuanced discussion of how
the activists manage the exclusion and microaggressions
that inevitably arise within the
groups.
The ‘‘so what’’ question is easily answered
in a book like this, and the concluding chapter
does a great job summarizing the overall
findings and placing them in a broader perspective.
The movement groups in the study
‘‘engage in practices that are frankly illogical
if measured by instrumental political goals.
Their pursuit of solidarity makes little sense
by narrow understandings of self-interest’’
(p. 25). So what does success mean—have
they ‘‘won’’ their struggles? Russo points
out that they are looking to affect social structures,
with policy goals as secondary. And
although they may face a ‘‘particularly dark
time,’’ we learn from their experiences that
contesting the status quo requires tremendous
enduranceand commitment, that piecemeal
policy change at the nation-state level
makes less sense than it used to, and that
the policies of the U.S. security state depend
on ‘‘narrow ways of seeing, knowing and living’’
(p. 183). Through their practices, these
activists make visible state violence and
abuse of the most vulnerable among us. The
book ends on a hopeful note, highlighting
the transformational potential of their work.
It is difficult to finds flaws in a book as
well-written and eloquently articulated as
this one. I would have appreciated more of
an explicit focus on the cultural processes of
meaning-making. The rich data Russo collected
lend themselves to a deeper and
thicker hermeneutical analysis that would
elaborate the structures of meaning underpinning
the work of the movement groups.
Likewise, although performativity is mentioned,
it could be theorized more fully. One
glaring question that also comes to mind is
how the groups in the study mobilize online
and use social media. While that would warrant
a different type of analysis, I think Russo
could have at least briefly referred to these
processes and their potential relevance to
the study. Notwithstanding these critiques,
this book provides a great read in troubling
times for those interested in social movements,
politics, high-risk activism, or social
solidarity. It will appeal to students as well
as seasoned scholars in these fields.
Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality
and the People’s Voice in the New Gilded Age, by
Kay Lehman Schlozman, Henry E. Brady,
and Sidney Verba. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2018. 333 pp. $28.95 cloth.
ISBN: 9780691180557.
JOSH PACEWICZ
Brown University
pacewicz@brown.edu
From the writing team of Kay Lehman
Schlozman, Henry E. Brady, and Sidney
Verba comes Unequal and Unrepresented:
Political Inequality and the People’s Voice in
the New Gilded Age, another fine volume
about inequality, political participation, and
political influence in the United States. As
the third title from these authors on the topic,
Unequal and Unrepresented differs from
preceding works mostly in its focus on
extreme Gilded-age inequity and, naturally,
its related contemporary source material.
The volume offers little in the way of sustained,
overarching argument. But it would
be a valuable addition to the bookshelf of
any sociologist looking for a comprehensive
reference guide to the literature on stratification
and political participation—or, for that
matter, anyone with an amateur interest in
American politics.
The core of the volume offers an overview
of research on the political effects of income
inequity. Chapters detail differences in the
policy preferences of individuals in different
income quintiles as well as their varying propensities
to engage in party politics, engage
in politics via the internet and social media,
and join social movements. Two more chapters
detail the nature and activities of organized
lobbying groups. The authors draw
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