Out of Oakland by Sean L Malloy | East Bay Booksellers

Who Rules Oakland? : Indybay

The Oakland Chamber of Commerce and other business lobbies in the East Bay have recently pressured government officials to crack down on Occupy Oakland. Furthermore, they have popularized a narrative portraying Occupy as "harmful to local business." We critically examine ruling class networks of shared ownership, governance, and political advocacy impacting communities in Oakland by revealing links between the directors and executives of major corporations that are members in the Oakland Chamber of Commerce. In subsequent parts to this series we will provide more detailed information about the directors and executives of these companies, and provide an analysis of their social cohesion, profit-driven collusion, and political influence. More broadly, we will explore networks and institutions of economic and political power in the Bay Area.

Oakland in Popular Memory

Independent publishing at its finest

The Water’s Edge: Empire, Race, and the Global History of Oakland, California, 1848-1980

Author(s): Klein, Andrew Nelson Carver | Advisor(s): Kelley, Robin D.G. | Abstract: This dissertation explores historical intersections between capitalism, race-making, environmental change, and U.S. foreign relations from the vantage of Oakland’s waterfront. It tracks the evolution of this geostrategic coastline since it emerged as a coal-powered nexus of railroads, steamships, and military installations during American colonization. Revising the story of Oakland’s development from a global perspective, my project documents how local boosters, businessmen, and bureaucrats forged intimate ties with far-flung territories administered by U.S. troops and landowners. Combining social and environmental history with methods from Black studies, I map the transformation of Oakland’s fertile estuary into an infilled hub of postindustrial commerce, a vital node of military logistics, and a focal point for racialized labor migration. Simultaneously, this dissertation reveals how, over the long twentieth century, Black, Indigenous, Chinese, and other working-class Oaklanders found footholds on the harbor, often repurposing its imperial routes for dramatically different ends. Drawing on archives and oral histories in Cuba, Hawai‘i, and across the continental United States, I trace Oakland’s tradition of radical internationalism, most visible in the antiwar and Black Power movements of the sixties, to multi-generational struggles over the governance of coastal land. I argue that Oakland’s waterfront both bridged the continental and overseas expansion of an ascendant world power and came to serve as a proving ground for alternative forms of globalization. “The Water’s Edge” therefore offers a critical reappraisal of the generally place-bound history of North American urbanism and far-reaching lessons for building just cities in a present defined by global environmental crises.

Oakland, the Last Refuge of Radical America (Published 2012)

The Occupy movement is still wreaking havoc in Oakland, the world capital of anticapitalism.

There There by Tommy Orange | East Bay Booksellers

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

Weekend Transit Hacking: Peninsula to Oakland | Offprint

I have close friends who live in Oakland which is across the Bay from me. We generally meet in the city to hang out...

American Babylon

A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar Oakland

When Riot Cops Are Not Enough

In When Riot Cops Are Not Enough, sociologist Mike King examines the policing, and broader political repression, of the Occupy Oakland movement. King’s active and daily participation in that movement provides a unique insider perspective to illustrate how the Oakland police and city administrators lost the ability to effectively control the movement.    

Cartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space

“Cartographic Memory is a creative, important, and well-written book that offers a vital analysis of Latinx activism in Oakland. Juan Herrera’s concept of social movement continuities helps us analyze the range of ways that actors make social change, rather than only focusing on the most radical politics or certain epic moments. Herrera’s book is an outstanding contribution toward building a nuanced and complex understanding of Latinx social movements.” - Victoria Lawson, author of Making Development Geography

The Pre-emption of Resistance: Occupy Oakland and the Evolution of State Power

Author(s): Behbehanian, Laleh | Advisor(s): Burawoy, Michael B | Abstract: This dissertation aims to contribute to our understanding of contemporary state strategies targeting social movements by examining the case of Occupy Oakland. Emphasizing how state strategies, both tactical and discursive, dynamically evolve through their iterative relation to movement strategies, it presents a detailed empirical account that is disaggregated into three “moments”, each of which are characterized by the predominance of a distinct state strategic repertoire. The objective is to highlight an underlying transformation through which the state’s strategies evolve from being highly reactive, indiscriminate and vulnerable to spectacularization to becoming increasingly pre-emptive, targeted and discursively buttressed.The first “moment” commences with the movement’s occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza. Faced with Occupy Oakland’s highly disruptive tactics and its firm rejection of any forms of negotiation or cooperation with City officials, the state resorts to a strategy of Naked Coercion (reactive, indiscriminate violence that is highly vulnerable to spectacularization) which backfires and results in an internationally televised disaster on the evening of October 25th. This creates an extraordinary window of opportunity for the movement, dramatically increasing public support and enabling it to undertake the first general strike in the U.S. since 1946. This fuels a process of adaptation as the struggle proceeds into the second “moment”, and the state shifts to a strategy of Targeted Repression that is increasingly pro-active, targeted and discursively buttressed so as to diminish the danger of its spectacularization. The new strategy succeeds in permanently dislodging the occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza, as well as criminalizing the tactic of occupation and excising it from movement’s repertoire. Still unsatisfied with the repression it had achieved, in the third and final “moment” the state introduces a strategy of Pre-emptive Neutralization that is pre-emptively oriented, targeted at high “risk” populations and discursively buttressed by powerful spectacles of “risk”. This enables a thorough incapacitation of the movement – fully neutralizing its potential for collective action by rendering Occupiers a target population that could no longer even publicly assemble without inciting highly militarized police responses that were now pre-emptively justified by the risk of “violence” they collectively posed.

Oakland is a Vibe: Blackness, Cultural Framings and Emancipations of The Town

Author(s): Heitz, Kaily | Advisor(s): Scott Lewis, Jovan | Abstract: In this dissertation, I examine the ways that developers and Black community organizers in Oakland, California, utilize a situated concept of Black culture to produce value in the city. This value is constituted by a politics of Blackness rooted both in racial capitalism, shifting structures of community care, and their affective articulations. The affective qualities of Black Oakland – which includes a sense of relationality, creativity, and resistance – are understood colloquially as “vibe.” While representations of vibe are mobilized by both developers and community organizations to respectively advance and resist gentrification, I argue that the vibe of the city is constituted by a Black sense of place that cannot be reproduced through capitalist representations of cultural value alone. This study of vibe presents an opportunity to take seriously the invitation of Black geographic scholarship to work at the intersection of poetics and historical materialism by exploring relationality as a site that coproduces racialized space and experience. Where developers leverage notions of vibe to generate value through private investment, Black organizers utilize such representations in order to reclaim the physical space necessary to the very production of vibe. The latter strategy is, I suggest, an enactment of what I call “emancipatory framing,” in which hegemonic framing is mobilized in order to create alternative spaces for liberatory praxes. This dissertation explores vibe and emancipatory framing at three different scales: the Black body, the independent business, and the grassroots collective. I conclude that vibe as a material and metaphorical asset of Blackness, is at the root of contestations over place, and sometimes contradictory imaginaries of freedom.

Refusing Settler Domesticity — Oakland Public Library

Refusing Settler Domesticity — Keliiaa, Caitlin, — In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from boarding schools to labor as live-in domestic workers across the San Francisco Bay Area. Outing removed Native people from their communities and transferred them to white homes, farms, and businesses to work as menial laborers. In exchange for room, board, and meager pay, Native women and girls as young as twelve cooked, cleaned, and lived in the homes of their employers. Despite oppressive living and working conditions, Native women strategically resisted the worst aspects of outing, including Indian child removal, sexual surveillance, criminalization, and exploitation. Throughout, they forged social connections and navigated relationships to refuse domestication and assert their agency. In this groundbreaking work, Historian Caitlin Keliiaa examines Native women's lived experiences of federal policy and connects outing to the region's longer history of coerced Native labor. The book, as indictment, expands the existing work on Indian boarding schools, urban Indians, and the history of California and the West.

Hometown Chinatown: A History of Oakland's Chinese Community, 1852-1995

Focusing on the local history of the Chinese in Oakland, California, this study examines common stereotypes in the early Chinese community and Chinatown organizations.

Somebody Blew up Oakland: Dispossession as a Praxis of Racial Ordering

Author(s): Jones, Stephanie Delise | Advisor(s): Hironaka, Ann; Sojoyner, Damien | Abstract: In this dissertation, I investigate the relationship between underdevelopment and Black geographies. I then explore the consequences of this relationship on the city of Oakland. From 2019 to 2021, I conducted 68 in-depth field interviews of Black Oakland residents who detailed the processes and mechanisms by which California housing policy contributed to the displacement of Black subjects. Building on the work of scholars of Black geographies, I have interrogated the myth of development and the relationship to the dispossession of Black geographies. I theorize how racial capitalism produces vulnerable populations through housing in urban areas. The empirical contribution of my research is to provide a framework for Black geographies as people are being displaced. The theoretical contribution is to provide a conceptualization for Black geographies existing through abjections and placelessness as understood through residents of Oakland.I argue that the relationship between dispossession and refusal creates a distinct politic. In chapter two, I theorize the work of Moms for Housing to further understand Black knowledges of resistance to dispossession. Moms for Housing is used as a case study to highlight the many theoretical implications of dispossession occurring in Oakland. In chapter 3, I use two interviews from developers to demonstrate the contradictions in what I call the mythology of development. In chapter 4, I walk through the geographic stories of 2nd and 3rd generation Oakland residents and demonstrate each of the ways they feel locked out of the city as a result of the urban changes. In chapter 5, I demonstrate how communities resist dispossession and disposability. The city of Oakland lacks proactive implementation of equitable housing policy. The lack of action by the city of Oakland puts the onus on everyday residents to organize against their landlords, employers and the state.

The Color of Power — Oakland Public Library

The Color of Power — Douzet, Frédérick — <p></p><p> <i>The Color of Power </i>is a fascinating examination of the changing politics of race in Oakland, California. Oakland has been at the forefront of California’s multicultural changes for decades. Since the 1960s, the city has been a shining example of a fruitful liberal black-and-white political partnership and the successful incorporation of black politicians into the political landscape. But over the past forty years, the balance of power has changed as a consequence of dramatic demographic trends and economic circumstances. The city’s formerly dominant biracial political machine has been challenged by the demands of new multiracial interests.</p><p></p><p>The city, once governed by a succession of black mayors and majority black city councils, must now accommodate rapidly growing Asian and Latino communities. While the black-led coalition still relies on white progressive support, this alliance has weakened due to a shift in the progressives’ agenda and the voting habits of the black community, the rise of a Hispanic-Asian coalition, and a strong demographic decline of the African American population. With similar demographic changes taking place across the nation, Oakland’s experience provides insight in to the multiracial future of other American cities.</p><p></p><p> <i>The Color of Power</i> investigates Oakland’s contemporary racial politics with a detailed study of conflicts over issues like education, elections and political representation, and crime. Trained as a journalist, a political scientist, and a geographer, the author provides a unique perspective supported by numerous maps and extensive interviews.</p><p>Winner of awards from the French Society of Geography and the French National Academy of Sciences</p><br/>Trained as a journalist, a political scientist, and a geographer, the author provides a unique perspective supported by numerous maps and extensive interviews.<p>Winner of awards from the French Society of Geography and the French National Academy of Sciences</p>