On plantations,prisons, and a black sense of place

The complexities of black geographies—shaped by histories of colonialism, transatlantic slavery, contemporary practices of racism, and resistances to white supremacy—shed light on how slave and post-slave struggles in the Americas form a unique sense of place. Rather than simply identifying black suffering and naming racism (and opposition to it) as the sole conceptual schemas through which to ‘understand’ or ‘know’ blackness or race, it is emphasized that a black sense of place, black histories, and communities are not only integral to production of space, but also that the analytical interconnectedness of race, practices of domination, and geography undoubtedly put pressure on how we presently study and assess racial violence.     

Indigeneity and the refusal of whiteness

Drawing on international literature examining mismatch between racial appearance and racial identity, this paper analyses the subgroup of Indigenous Australians who have been identified, and self-identify, as ‘light-’, ‘fair-’, ‘pale-’ or ‘white-skinned’. We utilise the term ‘race discordance’ to describe the experience of regularly being attributed an identity that is different from how one personally identifies. In contrast to existing terms such as elective race, ethnic fraud and transracialism, race discordance does not seek to explain or judge the validity of identity claims that do not match perceived appearance. When unnoticed or unchallenged, ‘race discordance’ corresponds to ‘passing’. We propose the term ‘race refusal’ to describe instances when a person rejects the race they are ascribed to. In the case of white-skinned Indigenous Australians who are frequently assumed to identify as white, race refusal entails the refusal of whiteness. When light-skinned Indigenous people refuse whiteness, what are they refusing? In conversation with Audra Simpson’s notion of refusal of state recognition as an assertion of continued Indigenous sovereignty, we find that these particular micro-politics of race refusal demand rather than negate state recognition. We argue that identity refusal by pale-skinned Aboriginal people acts to disrupt histories of assimilation, white sociality and everyday racialisation while simultaneously reinforcing Australian recognition regimes.     

Mapping reflexive communities: visualizing the geographies of emotion

Whereas ‘simple modernity’ was characterized by objective space, the grid of the map, and a removal of all subjective symbols or signs, ‘reflexive modernity’ is characterized by a re‐subjectivization of space. Within this space ‘reflexive communities’ emerge to make sense of emotions and experiences, reflecting particular ways of behaving, thinking and being. As geographers one task facing us now is to visualize and map the spaces of reflexive modernization. This paper presents a means of visualizing the text of emotions uncovered in the research encounter—a way of ‘mapping’ reflexive communities—and shows how we can articulate, negotiate and represent, complex emotional landscapes. The ‘maps’—which draw on spatial metaphors that permeate everyday emotions—such as ‘distancing’ ourselves, ‘engaging’, ‘joining’, ‘feeling detached’, ‘embracing’—were developed initially through analysis of in‐depth interviews with long‐term sufferers of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). Although the key focus of the paper is the experience of long‐term illness, the method of visualizing emotional geographies of everyday life could be applied in any number of fields. As such, it adds to the search across the social sciences for understanding the reflexive nature of contemporary space.     

Talking class,talking race: language,class, and race in the call center industry in South Africa

Against a backdrop of declining manufacturing employment, this article uses a study of the call center industry to argue that English language proficiency is central to new service jobs in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on research in Durban, we in this study show that access to call center work—especially the highest paid niches—is heavily mediated by English language skills generally attainable only at the most elite high schools. In doing so, we argue that access to English-medium education can challenge racial disadvantage, but simultaneously that English can help to consolidate white privilege through the continued association of a ‘prestigious’ accent with whiteness. The study accordingly reveals the importance of language in the changing intersectionality of race and class and, in doing so, underlines the value of social and cultural perspectives in labor geography.     

Positionality,subjectivity, and race in transnational and transcultural geographical research

This article investigates the complexities of negotiating subject positions in transnational and transcultural research by focusing on the gendering of race and racialization. As more people claim to be of mixed ‘racial’ descent and Western researchers grow more diverse, it is increasingly important that this diversity is reflected within geographical research; however, much of the existing research on subjectivity and its role in the research process has focused either on ‘white’ researchers in Global South contexts or on researchers working in their ‘home’ country or community. Less visible are accounts from those who challenge conceptions of ‘white’ Western researcher or whose racial identity can be conceived as hybrid. Moreover, there is a tendency to conceptualize race/racialization and their effects on subjectivity and positionality in relatively narrow terms. This article draws attention to the changing subjectivities of a racialized gendered body as it moves into different contexts. I examine how conceptualizations of race and discourses of racialization constitute researcher subjectivity, and how different understandings of ‘race’ mediate relationships between researcher and research participants (and others). To understand the spatial (re)configurations of (race) subjectivities and how this affects researcher positionality, I offer an autoethnography of a bi/multiracial Western woman of New Zealand Māori/Pākehā descent interpellated as ‘insufficient Other’ in her home context of Aotearoa New Zealand, then reconstituted as white and ‘sufficient Self’ in the Philippines by her research participants and Filipino ‘family’ and friends.     

Beautiful Geography: The Pictorial Maps of Ruth Taylor White

This paper explores the career of Ruth Taylor White, an American cartographic illustrator who published a significant number of pictorial maps from the 1920s into the 1940s. Taylor White’s ‘cartographs’ (as she called them) were characterized by her signature bobble-headed cartoon characters who romped through colourful, attractive landscapes. These visually rich and highly narrative maps simultaneously strove for accuracy and engaged in profound stereotyping with regard to culture, race, gender and class. They reveal not only the aesthetic and conceptual preferences of their maker but also the cultural biases of their middle-class, white American audience.     

Grief as method: topographies of grief,care, and fieldwork from Northwest Arkansas to New York and the Marshall Islands

Abstract

When we grieve during fieldwork, our grief forms new geographies of knowledge production and emotion. In this article, I use autoethnography to theorize my grief during fieldwork following the death of my sister. I examine grief’s methodological implications using the concept of ‘grief as method,’ an emotionally-inflected practice that accounts for the vulnerability produced by grief. By centering vulnerability, ‘grief as method’ also urges researchers to consider the practices and politics of ‘caring with’ our research subjects and caring for ourselves, raising larger questions about the role of care in research. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how grief’s geographical features—its mobility, its emergence in new sites and landscapes, and its manifestation as both proximity and distance—shape ‘grief as method’ profoundly. I examine grief’s spatial implications by building on Katz’s ‘topography’ to theorize a ‘topography of grief’ that stitches together the emotional geographies of researchers, blurring both spatial divisions (‘the field’ vs. ‘the not-field’) and methodological ones (the ‘researcher-self’ vs. the ‘personal-self’). If we see grief as having a topography, then the relationships between places darkened by grief come into focus. Moreover, by approaching grief methodologically, we can better understand how field encounters—relationships between people—are forged through grief. ‘Grief as method,’ in offering a spatial analysis of grief’s impact on fieldwork, envisions a broader definition of what engaged research looks like and where it takes place.     

‘Britishness’, Colonial Governance and Education: St Helenian Children in Colonial Natal in the 1870s

This article considers understandings of ‘Britishness’ in the Natal colony in the 1870s. Focusing on St Helenian children’s expulsion from ‘government’ schools that were ostensibly open to all racial groups, the article shows how competing definitions of race and ‘Britishness’ shaped the responses of colonial officials, settlers and the St Helenian community to the expulsion. The white settler population in Natal was concerned about St Helenian economic migrants’ inclusion in white, English society. In particular, the ambiguous racial status of St Helenians was seen as potentially harmful to white children. The focus on a group of recent incomers to the colony uncovers a process of racialisation unfolding in the context of migrations within the British Empire. The case highlights how movement and migration within the empire could bring these definitions of race and Britishness into conversation and conflict with each other.     

White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War

This article examines miscegenation fears in Britain in the period after World War I, noting three dominant discourses: that miscegenation leads inevitably to violence between white and black men (focusing on the 1919 race riots), that these relationships involve sexual immorality (analysing the 1920 ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’, a case involving a white woman, a Chinese man and drugs and a trial of a white woman for killing her Egyptian husband) and that miscegenation has ‘disastrous’ procreative consequences. It is suggested that miscegenation stood as one British boundary marker, separating the nationally acceptable and the nationally threatening. The parties concerned – the ‘primitive’ man of colour, the white woman of a ‘low type’ and the ‘misfit’ offspring – were each pathologised in terms of their deviant sexuality. Yet interracial relationships did not decrease, quite the contrary. The move in Britain towards a more racially mixed community began in the years after the Great War, when certain white women made choices against the norms of respectable femininity.     

Beyond race: constructions of ‘Europeanness’ in late-colonial legal practice in the Dutch East Indies

This article proposes to introduce the study of European identity into colonial history and vice versa. It analyses the ways in which the legal classification of the population functioned in late-colonial Indonesia. A close inspection of this case reveals that the oft-cited fundamental colonial difference between ‘ruler’ and ‘ruled’ was in reality not nearly as clear-cut. The concept of ‘Europeanness’ – as opposed to ‘Whiteness’ – is highlighted as the category at the center of colonial hierarchy. This leads to a re-evaluation of the relative significance of various differentiating categories in the colonial context, most importantly race and class. The author concludes that by not taking ‘Europeanness’ seriously as an independent category, scholars of ‘cultural racism’ have tended to overemphasise ‘race’, with the consequence of oversimplifying the complex, multi-layered nature of the colonial social hierarchy.     

Landscapes of political memories: War legacies and land negotiations in Laos

Wars and their aftermaths frequently transform land use and ownership, reshaping ‘post-conflict’ landscapes through new boundaries, population movements, land reforms and conditions of access. Within a global context of controversial land concessions and farmland acquisitions, we bring to light the continued salience of historical memories of war in the ways land conflicts are being negotiated in Laos. Considering circumstances at different scales—from bilateral government relations to village-level claims—we find that political capital linked to memories of wartime affiliations have crucial spatial and place-based connections, and that they affect the ways investors, government officials and villagers negotiate over land concessions. Ethnographic evidence, spatial analysis and a survey of expatriate development workers engaged with land issues in Laos suggest that such ‘political memories’ are an important but often overlooked factor in shaping an uneven concessions landscape. We discuss implications for foreign development organizations that tend to privilege technical and legal aspects of land management over such political dimensions.     

From number to name: symbolic capital,places of memory and the politics of street renaming in New York City

Numerous studies have highlighted the importance of street naming as a strategy for constructing ‘places of memory’. This paper draws upon Bourdieu's theory of symbolic capital to examine two key moments in the history of street renaming in New York City: the renaming of the avenues on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the latter nineteenth century and the street renamings in Harlem a century later. The aim of such a comparative case study approach is to demonstrate how the symbolic capital associated with street naming may be linked to an elite project of symbolic erasure and forced eviction, on the one hand, and the cultural recognition of a historically marginalized group, on the other. Both cases consider attempts to rename formerly numbered streets and avenues, and the benefit of considering them together is that they illustrate the multiple interests—as well as the exclusionary politics of race, class, and gender—involved in such shifts from ‘number’ to ‘name’. In doing so, this paper extends the current literature on street naming as a commemorative practice by linking it to a broader relational view of place-making, memory, and symbolic capital.     

Unnatural discourse. ‘Race’ and gender in geography

Geographers’ long‐term involvement in the construction ‘race’ and gender has occurred through literally and metaphorically mapping out the world in ways that highlight, perpetuate and naturalize difference. This paper provides a critical analysis of the naturalization of these categories by revealing parallels in their social construction and in the ways in which they have been independently conceptualized. The focus is on the extent to which ‘race’ and gender as social constructs have been, and are, predicated upon biological categories. We argue for a conceptualization which, while eschewing notions of essentialism and determinism, integrates the biological and social, recognizing that distinctions between the biological and cultural are invariably socially constructed. We also highlight the extent to which social constructions are political constructions, sexism and racism being modes of thought which construct the body for ideological ends. We begin to chart the political strategies whereby dominant notions of the biological and cultural can be unnaturalized, thus challenging the ways in which ‘race’ and gender are used to create social identities and to maintain relations of domination. In an attempt to develop an alternative to strategic essentialism, we focus on the practice of unnatural discourse, of imposing disorder on dominant discourses through, for example, practices associated with the unnatural, the unnaturalization of everyday language, the unnaturalization of landscapes upon which gendered and racialized relations are played out, the questioning of our disciplinary codes and the unnaturalization of vision by developing new ways of seeing the racialized and gendered embodiment of subjects.     

Working in the shade: agriculture,race, and recreational landscapes in Connecticut, 1940–1950

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, shade tobacco growers in the state of Connecticut employed white high school students from Florida and Pennsylvania, as well as African Americans from southern black colleges and high schools to harvest and process their crop. This paper traces the history of these workers as a means for examining overlooked processes of racialization in rural New England, and for expanding on discussions of race, agriculture, and rural landscapes through the context of leisure. I argue that racialization among student workers unfolded according to the structure, management, and representation of leisure and the recreational landscapes that were opened (or closed) to them. Additional contexts bearing on this process included gender, class, and status as resident or non-resident, each of which informed race-based discussions about leisure and recreational landscapes. This empirical study infuses cultural geographic studies of race and agriculture, whether in New England or beyond, with a depth of perspective not normally associated with rural landscapes. It argues for the extension of cultural geographic inquiry on leisure and racialization into the contexts of agricultural and rural landscapes.     

Imperial modernity,national identity and capital punishment in the Samarcand Arson Case, 1931

ABSTRACT. This article draws upon the fascinating and little known 1931 Samarcand Arson Case involving the possible execution of adolescent white female inmates at a juvenile reformatory in North Carolina. Marked by nationalist discourses, the spectacle generated by this case indicates much about how white New South advocates construed national life and sought to construct a white ‘civilised’ collective identity, defending their region from Northern charges of Southern barbarism and asserting their place within the imperial politics of American nation building. The decision not to execute any of the sixteen defendants was informed by a series of interconnected ideas about sexuality, national danger, ‘civilisation’ and ‘race,’ suggesting that the presumed ‘legal chivalry’ extended to the young defendants was not a simple matter of gender bias, but involved a nuanced set of reasons related to negotiations of national belonging through racialised alliances.     

Thinking ‘differently’ about a feminist critical geography of development

This paper makes a case for grounding the global in feminist, anti‐racist, and post‐colonial scholarship in order to foreground questions of race, colonialism, and history in critical geographies of development. I argue that the process of ‘doing development’ involves the imposition of power; hence, geographers' critical engagements with development need to consider the intersectionality of gender, race, and ethnicity that comprises identities of the subjects of development and of those who ‘do development’. This consideration would entail questioning the homogeneity of ‘Third World women’ as a singular category in need of development and recognising the normativity of women from the global North who, so far, have been the ‘doers’ or the key actors in global interventions.     

The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race,Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth‐Century American Medicine

Accounts of the easy, painless childbearing of ‘primitive’ non‐white women in comparison to their ‘civilised’ white counterparts were ubiquitous in early modern travel literature. In the nineteenth‐century United States, such narratives were increasingly taken up in medical and scientific literature, catalysing the production of new forms of knowledge about race and bodies. This article analyses several key medico‐scientific theories produced to explain racialised parturient pain and argues that this knowledge dynamically interrelated with both racial ideas and racial practice in nineteenth‐century society. The shifting character of this knowledge implicated changing ways of defining race, including the anchoring of racial identity in the physical body; the role of the physician as an arbiter of racial truth; and the imbrication of gender in racial classifications. Moreover, knowledge produced to explain racialised parturient pain – for instance, about race‐specific sensory physiology, muscular mechanics and skeletal anatomy – circulated within numerous social institutions, among them slavery; gynaecologic and obstetric care; medical experimentation; anti‐abortion crusades invoking the spectre of ‘race suicide’; and eugenic projects. In this way, medical discourse on the gendered body of the parturient was enrolled in the changing articulation of race across the nineteenth century.     

The Lesbian and gay past: It's Greek to whom?

Part of a series of projects which seek to defamiliarize—indeed, to queer—the concept history in lesbian and gay studies, this paper focuses on the ‘imagined cultural geography’ of ancient Greece in queer fictions of the past. Although figurations of Greek culture have been centrally important in a wide range of reverse discourses on homosexuality, such conceptual models are neither historically inevitable nor politically innocent, and are in fact weighted with dense cultural baggage. In a reading of several texts (including ones which disavow their complicity in this practice), this paper investigates the ethnocentric notions of ‘lesbian and gay identity formation’ which inhere in this cultural project to raise questions about multiculturalism and the (hidden) construction of white racial identification within these gay and lesbian discourses.