ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates on some of the invaluable insights that Neil Smith's urban work offers on the theft of Black space and wealth through decades of gentrification and the more acute dispossession of the subprime crisis. It suggests that Smith's work on gentrification and revanchism are invaluable resources for understanding struggles in places such as Ferguson, precisely because of his emphasis on urban geopolitical economy as not only a space-time of capitalist transformation and anti-capitalist struggle, but one of imperial renovation and anti-imperial insurgence. The chapter discusses aspects of the changing nature of the US Empire and especially its domestic cartographies of urban accumulation. Looking to the changing geography of the American city and the recent rounds of dispossession and displacement of Black communities brings into focus not only the everyday violence and securitisation of the US racial state but also significant shifts in the workings of empire at home.
