The Invention Of The Underclass

At centurys close American social scientists policy analysts philanthropists and politicians became obsessed with a fearsome and mysterious new group said to be ravaging the ghetto the urban underclass. Soon the scarecrow category and its demonic imagery were exported to the United Kingdom and continental Europe and agitated the international study of exclusion in the postindustrial metropolis. In this punchy book Loc Wacquant retraces the invention and metamorphoses of this racialized folk devi