Critical Race Geography

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself.

Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism.

As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of antisemitism and Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.

Numerous research studies have explored how institutions such as schools are produced as white spaces. Whiteness is a socio-spatial process that constitutes particular bodies as possessing the normative, ordinary power to enjoy social privilege. Within the Canadian colonial context, whiteness has been produced historically through the violent confiscation of land and resources from Indigenous Peoples. This violence has been silenced through grand narratives of Canadian " tolerance, " and white-settler fantasies of the Canadian landscape as empty and wild. Many environmental education programs continue to rely upon and reproduce these colonial ideas of race and space. Escaping the classroom, Canadian environmental education programs propose to advance personal and educational decolonization through experiential land-based learning. Integrating the discussions in anti-racist, anti-colonial education with the literature on race and nature, this qualitative article draws from student interviews and artefacts to interrogate how whiteness continues to be normalized within environmental education through various dominant narratives of Canadian nation building, such as: the disaffiliation of whiteness from the violence of colonialism, reifying Canadianness as goodness and innocence; the ongoing erasure of Indigenous Peoples and histories from the land; and the reification of wilderness as an essentialized, empty space. These narratives continue to entitle white people to occupy and claim originary status in Canada, signifying wilderness and the environment as a white space. La blancheur du vert : La racialisation de l'´ education relativè a l'environnement Un bon nombre de recherches se sont intéresséesà lamanì ere dont les institutions telles que lesécoles se conçoivent comme des espaces blancs. La notion de blancheur peutêtre envisagée en tant que processus socio-spatial qui dispose certains corpsà détenir le pouvoir normatif et ordinaire et ainsi bénéficier depriviì eges sociaux. Dans le contexte colonial canadien, la blancheur est le résultat historique de l'appropriation brutale des terres et des ressources des peuples autochtones. C'està partir des grands récits sur la « tolérance » canadienne et du fantasme d'un paysage canadien vide et sauvage créé par les colons blancs qu'on a réussì a faire taire ces actes de violence. ` A ce jour, les programmes d'´ education relativè a l'environnement puisent et reproduisent ces types d'idées coloniales sur l'identité raciale et l'espace. Hors des murs de l'´ ecole, des programmes d'´ education relativè a l'environnement conçus au Canada visentà contribuerà l'avancement de la décolonisation personnelle etéducative par une méthode d'enseignement fondée sur l'expérience du terrain. Se situant au croisement des discours sur l'enseignement antiraciste et anticolonial et de la littérature sur l'identité raciale et la nature, cetté etude qualitative cherchè a comprendre, ` a partir d'entretiens menés auprès d'´ etudiants et par l'analyse d'artefacts, dans quelle mesure la blancheur demeure toujours un des principesà l'origine de l'´ education relativè a l'environnement, principes qui repose sur les points forts des plus grands récits de l'´ edification de la nation canadienne: la dissociation entre la blancheur et la violence du colonialisme; la réification de la canadienneté en termes de «bonté et innocence»; la suppression continue des histoires et des peuples autochtones du territoire; et la réification de la «nature sauvage» en tant qu'espace essentialiste et vide.

North American food scholars, activists and policymakers often consider how to make a community food project more inclusive to ‘vulnerable populations’ to increase participation in local food efforts. Drawing from qualitative research conducted with two community food organizations in Seattle, Washington, I argue that inclusive efforts are not addressing the power asymmetries present in organizations and within communities. Engaging with black geographies literature, I reveal how a black food justice organization grapples with violent histories of slavery and dispossession rooted in a black farming imaginary, and works to re-envision this imaginary to one of power and transformation. The spatial imaginaries and spaces of each food organization acknowledge racial histories differentially, informing their activism. Black geographies possess knowledge and spatial politics that can revitalize community food movements, and I consider how white food activists might reframe their work so that their efforts are not fueling the displacement of residents of color.

Reflecting on European colonialism in 1950 - at a time when discussions about what we now know as the European Union emerged in western Europe, Aimé Césaire wrote, . . . Europe is morally, spiritually indefensible. This idea is fairly commonplace in much of the post-colonial world and it has some purchase within certain academic and intellectual circles elsewhere. And yet, in the process of denouncing the widely noted presence of racism in Hungary, thirty-six leading Hungarian intellectuals have, in a recent public document, felt compelled to thank France, and through France, a generic, trans-historical notion of Europe, for what they saw as the latter's profound, longue-durée goodness. It is partly my concern for the economic hardship, political marginality, cultural discrimination, and social exclusion faced by the Romanies of eastern Europe and partly the precision with which the Letter articulates the topos of west European moral superiority - a central pattern of European identity discourse - that prompts me to raise the following initial questions: How is it possible to denounce racism by referring to Europe, especially western Europe, the main historic source and promoter of racism as we know it today? What purpose does the genre of the open letter serve and how does it function? How does the signatories' implicit project of geopolitical self-positioning relate to the theme of the West as an object to be emulated, long dominant in the modern history of east-central European ideas of emancipation?

This article argues that the discourse of tropicality in Colombia creates boundaries and binaries between racial-ized and normative territories, rural peripheral areas and urban centres, and spaces that have been constructed as darker "barbaric" regions closer to sea level and whiter "civilized" regions in temperate altitudes. Nevertheless, there is nuance to the geographies of tropicality, because race is difficult to contain within urban/rural spaces. Additionally, race as a social construct that is permanently in the making, presents changes in space and time, challenging any static ideas of race in intersection with geography. In supporting the argument that the discourse of tropicality produces racialized spaces, this article addresses forced displacement and the racialization that takes place along with displacement , which implies the crossing of the "border" between the "tropics" and the cities; and how Afro-Colombians, Indigenous, and Mestiza campesinas challenge the ideas of tropicality by creating new geographies as they settle after displacement. Résumé Cet essai soutient que le discours de la tropicalité en Colom-bie crée des frontières et des oppositions binaires entre territoires racialisés et normatifs, entre régions rurales périphériques et centres urbains ainsi qu' entre les régions près du niveau de la mer construites comme étant plus foncées et « barbares » et les régions tempérées dites plus blanches et « civilisées » situées en altitude. Les géographies de la tropicalité sont cependant plus nuancées car la race est difficile à contenir à l'intérieur d' espaces urbains ou ruraux. De plus, la race est un construit social en devenir permanent qui change à travers le temps et l' espace, ce qui remet en question toute idée statique concernant son intersection avec la géographie. Soutenant l' argument selon lequel le discours de la tropicalité produit des espaces racialisés, cet article traite du déplacement forcé et du processus de racial-isation qui accompagne le processus de déplacement, qui implique la traversée de la frontière entre les «tropiques» et les villes; et de la façon dont les campesinas afrocolombiens, autochtones et Mestiza, en s'installant suite au déplacement, créent de nouvelles géographies qui remettent en question l'idée de tropicalité.

The study of the memorialization of landscapes of violence is a vibrant field both within and beyond geography. Previous scholarship has highlighted the contestation that surrounds the memorialization of landscapes of violence as well as the politics of memory that are manifest on the landscape. To date, however, little work has explicitly theorized ‘violence’; this has a tremendous bearing on the understanding of how, or if, certain ‘violent’ acts are remembered or memorialized. This paper constitutes an attempt to denaturalize violence through a foregrounding of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ violence. Through a case study of racialized violence in Greensboro, North Carolina, we argue that geographers and other social scientists must articulate more clearly how violence, as a theoretical construct, is abstracted from the concrete realities of lived experience and represented discursively and materially on the landscape. We conclude that the potential for, and actual realized memorializ...

The study of the memorialization of landscapes of violence is a vibrant field both within and beyond geography. Previous scholarship has highlighted the contestation that surrounds the memorialization of landscapes of violence as well as the politics of memory that are manifest on the landscape. To date, however, little work has explicitly theorized ‘violence’; this has a tremendous bearing on the understanding of how, or if, certain ‘violent’ acts are remembered or memorialized. This paper constitutes an attempt to denaturalize violence through a foregrounding of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ violence. Through a case study of racialized violence in Greensboro, North Carolina, we argue that geographers and other social scientists must articulate more clearly how violence, as a theoretical construct, is abstracted from the concrete realities of lived experience and represented discursively and materially on the landscape. We conclude that the potential for, and actual realized memorializ...

This thesis concerns itself with the excavation of the historical and cultural geographies of the production, circulation, and reception of a grassroots-initiated geography education journal, and of the lives of the people and movement that contributed to its existence. Contemporary Issues in Geography and Education (CIGE) was the journal of the Association of Curriculum Development in Geography (ACDG): a pan-institutional collective of school geography teachers, authors, artists, activists and academics who desired a vision of school geography informed from the political Left, to enable the voices of those excluded from power to be explored and heard, and to offer up an alternative version of disciplinary geographical knowledge-making. Between the publication of its launch issue in 1983 and 1991 when it ceased publishing CIGE produced eight theme issues covering universally significant and highly contentious themes (racism, multinational trade, apartheid capitalism, war and peace, gender, ecological crisis and anarchism) from a humanist and critical perspective, offering critical analyses of the geographies therein and educational resources to utilise in educational training across schools, universities and staff education resource centres. CIGE questioned the spaces though which geographical education perpetuating social inequalities might be encountered (children’s TV through to national press criticism, publishers, subject associations, examination boards and academia). Well enough known during its publishing life and subscribed to nationally and internationally across a range of organisations, many of its contributors subsequently forged significant careers as human geographers within the Anglo-American academy, yet limited reference has been made to the journal post-1991. Recovering the stories of the journal and the people whose lives made the series, brings forth controversies and in turn awkward geographies in recovering how and why the journal series ceased publishing and why there appears to be such omission in historiographic accounts. Employing conceptual ideas pertaining to themes of archival activism, activist archives, navigating the recent past, disciplinary identity-making and geobiography, the thesis illustrates the strengths of ‘slow methodologies’ and the adoption of longitudinal research methods to enable the recovery and corroboration of primary sources, while signposting how mechanisms of contemporary academia (giving seminar workshop and conference papers on national and international scales, writing papers and co-authoring book chapters) through can reactivate engagement with the recovered archives and agitate for further materials to be revealed.

This article employs oppositional black geography as a lens to examine spatiality in the novels of two black South African women writing during apartheid, Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo. In analyzing Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan and Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die, it argues that the authors used a critical spatial analysis of the nation to critique apartheid and its oppressive policies. It holds that by insisting on authoring their own worlds in a country that sought to deny them creative agency, Tlali and Ngcobo carved out intellectual space that enabled them to critique dominant ideologies of Afrikaner nationalism and white supremacy, while imagining and writing alternatives to a nation to which their relationships were primarily ones of disavowal and subjugation. Both Tlali and Ngcobo render visible the fissures within the seemingly naturalized apartheid sites they construct in their fiction, revealing the inherent contradictions and injustices of apartheid spatiality. Through their fiction, they were thus engaged in situated knowledge production and a reconfiguration of apartheid space into a more socially just place. In narrating subaltern discourses in their novels from the standpoint of those most oppressed by apartheid law and ideology and by creatively engaging the spatiality of apartheid, Tlali and Ngcobo offer new modes for reading the nation, valuable for elucidating the ways in which the national space genders black women, and how black women, in turn shape and reshape that space.

Abstract
This paper takes a preliminary look at a commoditised form of caregiving that emerged in the first decade of the new millennium in the USA, China and Japan: adult male breastfeeding (AMBF). I argue that AMBF is emblematic of both the changing geography of industrial production since the 1973 oil crisis and how consumption has since come to be the most important economic task of those within privileged nations and enclaves. AMBF emphasises how marketing forces today have deployed what are increasingly maternalistic imaginaries to emphasise the degree to which a product or service dyadically recognises, affirms and cares for its consuming subjects. The marketised maternal is rooted in the racialised reproductive savings of those long given privileged access to the superior productivity of the Machine, which compelled smaller family size. It is these savings that have allowed for new dyadic intimacies to be fashioned between the maternalised “market‐and‐me.” The flipside of this is that privileged consumers are increasingly infantilised, even as its dependencies are supported by a workforce largely procreated by racially diminished other‐mothers (ROMs). Infantilism, in turn, psychically shields consumers from the planetary devastations that have made privileged consumption possible. AMBF holds theoretical promise by making the unconscious nature of desire‐for the maternal (as a dyadic site of caregiving) explicit along with the latter's revolutionary potential.

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies
Volume 11, issue 3, 2012

Edited by the ACME Editorial Collective

Special Theme Issue
Anarchist and Autonomous Marxist Geographies
Guest edited by Nathan Clough and Renata Blumberg

Toward Anarchist and Autonomist Marxist Geographies, pages 335-351
Nathan Clough and Renata Blumberg

Are “Other Spaces” Necessary? Associative Power at the Dumpster, pages 352-372
Nicholas Jon Crane

Anarchism, Geography, and Queer Space-making: Building Bridges Over Chasms We Create, pages 373-392
Farhang Rouhani

Organizing for Survival: From the Civil Rights Movement to  Black Anarchism through the Life of Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, pages 393-412
Nik Heynen and Jason Rhodes

At the Intersection of Anarchists and Autonomists: Autogestioni and Centri Sociali, pages 413-438
Pierpaolo Mudu

Counter (Mapping) Actions: Mapping as Militant Research, pages 439-466
Counter Cartographies Collective, Craig Dalton, and Liz Mason-Deese

Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis, pages 467-491
Brian Marks

Bridging Common Grounds: Metaphor, Multitude, and Chicana Third Space Feminism, pages 492-511
Cathryn Jesefina Merla-Watson

Gramsci Is Not Dead: For a ‘Both/And’ Approach to Radical Geography, pages 512-524
Mark Purcell

Re-inscribing the Hegemony of Hegemony: A Response to Mark Purcell, pages 525-529
Richard JF Day

Frankenstein is Dead, pages 530-532
Mark Purcell


Tribute:

Rose Street and Revolution: A Tribute to Neil Smith (1954-2012), pages 533-546
Tom Slater   



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International Standard Serial Number: 1492-9732

ACME is published with the support of the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada)