Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development intervenes in southern labor, civil rights, and social movement histories to counter the misconception that cooperatives are merely proto-political entities serving as training grounds for or as ancillary to institutionalized social justice movements critiquing capitalism and its fraught connections to gender, race, and class. To historically and theoretically anchor the book, the book examines seven neighborhood cooperatives, spanning from the 1890s to the present, whose alliances with union, consumer, and social justice act ... More

Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development intervenes in southern labor, civil rights, and social movement histories to counter the misconception that cooperatives are merely proto-political entities serving as training grounds for or as ancillary to institutionalized social justice movements critiquing capitalism and its fraught connections to gender, race, and class. To historically and theoretically anchor the book, the book examines seven neighborhood cooperatives, spanning from the 1890s to the present, whose alliances with union, consumer, and social justice activists animated successive generations of locally-informed, regional cooperative networks stimulating urban growth in New Orleans. Debating alternative forms of social organization within the city’s plethora of integrated spaces, women, people of color, and laborers blended neighborhood-based African, Caribbean, and European communal traditions with transnational cooperative principles to democratize exploitative systems of consumption, production, and exchange. From utopian socialist workers unions and Rochdale grocery stores to black liberationist theater collectives and community gardens, their cooperative businesses integrated marginalized residents into democratic governance while equally distributing profits among members.