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This essay critically engages with the book Urban Outcasts — A Comparative Sociologyof Advanced Marginality by Loïc Wacquant. In this book, studying poor neighborhoodsin the United States and France in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wacquant argues thata new socio-economic configuration marked by dualization and polarization of the cityand of the class structure has been formed in these metropolises as a result of structuralshifts resulting from the breakdown of the Fordist regime and the recoiling of the welfarestate. He calls ‘advanced marginality’ the new regime marked by a new form of urbanpoverty that makes part of the working classes ‘redundant’. This essay highlights thesimilarities between Wacquant’s arguments and those of the theory of marginality of the1960s and 1970s, which has been criticized and abandoned in Latin America. It alsointerrogates Wacquant’s argument that advanced marginality is what will represent thefuture of metropolises everywhere, by introducing the case of Brazilian peripheries andasking questions about the increase of violence in poor neighborhoods.
