PUBLIC-MAKING IN HYPER-DIVERSITY: Politics, Elections and the Democratic Party in Queens, New York

Abstract

Queens is the most diverse county in the country and much of its diversity comes from relatively recent immigration. It is therefore exactly the kind of place that a variety of theorists have argued cannot have ‘a public’ through which questions of politics, plans and policies can be discussed and debated. In this article we explore the potential for a public in such spaces of hyper-diversity and do so through the lens of electoral politics and the state. A set of findings emerges from this research. First, the hyper-diversity in Queens does not change the reality that much of what is happening is the very typical and mundane ‘drama’ of power politics in a city. Secondly, in that mundane competition for power, racial and ethnic differentiation are not preexisting forces of nature that determine political behavior, but are co-constituted with political, economic and social processes that often play out in ideology and geography (neighborhood). Finally, this leads us away from views of ‘the public’ that implicitly accept or assume either a fixity of its identity or an essential set of characteristics in its constitution.