Fitting in: the embodied politics of race in Seattle's desegregated schools

By considering the performative dimensions of racial identity construction, this paper joins recent calls to more fully incorporate the materiality of the body into geographical treatments of race (McKittrick 2000; Nash 2003; Saldanha 2006). Through an analysis of school desegregation in Seattle, Washington, this analysis investigates the ways in which students of different racial backgrounds negotiated the multiracial environments at their schools. Specifically, I examine how students' racial identities are worked through embodied practices as both conscious and unconscious attempts to fit into particular social realms. Drawing on performativity theory, I show how students actively mobilized their bodies to negotiate belongings that were ostensibly foreclosed by the primacy of phenotype. This paper suggests that by focusing on the active work that the body does in the social construction of race we can better theorize the ways in which racial categories are both reproduced and destabilized through everyday life.     

Knowing “Good Food”: Immigrant Knowledge and the Racial Politics of Farmworker Food Insecurity

Abstract: This article explores the ways that farmworkers, many of whom come from a culture deeply rooted in food and agricultural practices, cope with food insecurity by utilizing their agricultural and nutritional knowledge. Food assistance providers in the USA often treat farmworkers' inability to afford healthy food as a lack of knowledge about healthy eating, reinforcing racialized assumptions that people of color don't know “good” food. I argue that in contrast to food banks and low‐income nutrition programs, home and community gardens provide spaces for retaining and highlighting agricultural, cultural, and dietary practices and knowledge. This paper investigates the linkages between workers' place in the food system as both producers and consumers, simultaneously exploited for their labor, and creating coping strategies utilizing agrarian and culinary knowledge. I argue that food security and healthy eating, rather than being a matter of consumers making healthy “choices”, is a matter of class‐based and racial differences in the food system.     

Working at the ambivalence of race: ethnomimesis and the cancellation of St Paul's Carnival

The ambivalence of race is taken as a starting point in exploring the cancellation of the 2012 St Paul's Carnival, an African-Caribbean arts event in Bristol, England. That race is unstable, that it can be done and undone, has long been a focus of scholarship in social and cultural geography and beyond. This article asks instead how such a fragile state is maintained and with what implications. This necessitates regarding racial ambivalence as an activity; a condition that has to be worked at to be sustained. Ethnomimesis is used to frame these operations of racial ambivalence. Ethnomimesis is the way in which we encounter, stereotype and recognise cultural practices for ourselves and manifest them to others. It demonstrates how different configurations of race are precariously held between the creative possibilities and contingencies of situated cultural practices. Three moments of cancellation are narrated to show how ethnomimetic processes work through multiple formulations of race. This racial ambivalence is central to Carnival's failure. The organisers attempted to produce a performance of African-Caribbean culture that simultaneously denied the histories of racism that motivated the event. Ethnomimesis exposes how the racial ambivalence emergent in these cultural practices both opens and closes the possibilities to belong.     

THE NEW PRIMITIVES: IDENTITY, LANDSCAPE AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN THE MYTHOPOETIC MEN'S MOVEMENT

This paper explores the beliefs and practices of the mythopoetic men's movement. More specifically, it focuses on the movement's adherents' representations of “racial” identity and wilderness. After introducing the movement, I argue that, a) the mythopoetic men's movement creatively reworks colonialist fantasies of non-Western societies and landscapes, and b) that this process acts to naturalize the movement's adherents' contradictory experiences of power. The paper concludes with some observations on primitivist cultural appropriation.     

Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the ‘field’

Feminist geographic commonsense suggests that power shapes knowledge production, prompting the long-standing reflexive turn. Yet, often such reflexivity fixes racial power and elides more nuanced operations of difference – moves feminist scholars have, in fact, long problematized. To counter this, we revisit Kobayashi's (1994) ‘Coloring the Field’ [‘Coloring the Field: Gender, “Race”, and the Politics of Fieldwork,’ Professional Geographer 46 (1): 73–90]. Twenty years on, and grounded in our fieldwork in South Sudan and Honduras, we highlight how colonial and gender ideologies are interwoven through emotion. Decentering a concern with guilt, we focus on the way whiteness may inspire awe while scholars of color evoke disdain among participants. Conversely, bodies associated with colonizing pasts or presents can prompt suspicion, an emotive reaction to whiteness not always fixed to white bodies. These feelings have significant repercussions for the authority, legitimacy, and access afforded to researchers. Our efforts thus disrupt notions that we, as researchers, always wield power over our participants. Instead we argue that the positioning of ‘subjects of color’ in the global south, racially and in their relationships with us, is historically produced and socioculturally and geographically contingent. Rethinking the field in this way, as a site of messy, affective, and contingent racialized power, demonstrates the insights offered by bringing together feminist postcolonial and emotional geographies.     

Race and the Making of Southeast San Francisco: Towards a Theory of Race‐Class

San Francisco is engaged in a redevelopment project that could bring millions in investment and community benefits to a starved neighborhood—and yet the project is embedded in an urban development process that is displacing residents. In trying to unsettle these contradictions, this paper achieves two aims. First, I unearth a little known history of redevelopment activism that frames debate around the current project. Second, I use this history to argue for a reframing of the language of race. To wit: although the social construction of race and racism is well established, race is still deeply understood in everyday life as natural. This paper offers a theoretical fusing of race and class, “race‐class”, to help us think race through a vital constructionist lens. Race‐class makes present the economic dynamics of racial formation, and foregrounds that race is a core process of urban political economy. Race‐class works both “top‐down” and “ground‐up.” While it is a vehicle for capital's exploitation of people and place, race‐class also emerges as a mode of power for racialized working‐class residents.     

Objects for Peaceful Disordering: Indigenous Designs and Practices of Protest

Abstract

This paper identifies a number of theoretical approaches to devices known as 'lockons': sundry objects found in builders' merchants, and some people's bodies—ie peace activists pursuing non-violent direct action. This paper raises the possibility that the transforming power of designing may be enhanced if it is acknowledged that it is most powerful when it takes place in full articulation with practices.     

Spirometry, measurement, and race in the nineteenth century

Race correction is a common practice in contemporary pulmonary medicine that involves mathematical adjustment of lung capacity measurements in populations designated as "black" using standards derived largely from populations designated as "white." This article traces the history of the racialization and gendering of spirometry through an examination of the ideas and practices related to lung capacity measurements that circulated between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. Lung capacity was first conceptualized as a discrete entity of potential use in the diagnosis of pulmonary disease and monitoring of the vitality of the armed forces and other public servants in spirometric studies conducted in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The spirometer was then imported to the United States and used to measure the capacity of the lungs in a large study of black and white soldiers in the Union Army sponsored by the U.S. Sanitary Commission at the end of the Civil War. Despite contrary findings and contestation by leading black intellectuals, the notion of mean differences between racial groups in the capacity of the lungs became deeply entrenched in the popular and scientific imagination in the nineteenth century, leaving unexamined both the racial categories deployed to organize data and the conditions of life that shape lung function.     

Losing it in Hawai‘i: Weight Watchers and the paradoxical nature of weight gain and loss

In Hawai‘i, bodies may be big, successful, widely accepted, and revered by their public, yet some subjects may simultaneously be seeking a thinner body even with what appears to be ‘fat acceptance’ by many state residents. This article analyses weight and weight loss narratives of two prominent public and nonwhite men, Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole and Sam Choy. We connect these narratives to Weight Watchers International discourses of slimming as these apply to ‘nonwhite’ subjects in Hawai‘i. We suggest that Weight Watchers normalizes thinness through discourses of whiteness inherent in particular foods. Hawai‘i's regional cuisine known as ‘Local Food’ is framed as ‘exotic,’ which is distinct from what the organization proposes is ‘good’ food that produces ‘healthy’ bodies. Weight Watchers narrates slim bodies and health while normalizing ‘white’ cuisine and the bodies who consume it thereby excluding Local brown bodies in Hawai‘i.     

Ceramics,clothing and other bodies: affective geographies of homoerotic cruising encounters

This paper provides a new approach to the geographies of cruising and public homosex. For some time, social scientists have contended that, in those semi-public spaces where men meet each other for sex, actions speak louder than words and men's competency in using the space is more important that the (sexual) identities they claim in other aspects of their lives. This paper extends that argument in a new direction through an engagement with recent theorizations of affective geographies and more-than-representational approaches to spatial practices. Through a series of short vignettes of cruising encounters on city streets, in public toilets and in urban green spaces, this paper examines how public homosex is enacted and performed in relation to both human and non-human bodies, objects and the environment in which it takes place. The encounters described in the paper draw attention to the complex choreography of gestures through which cruising is performed and sexual engagement is negotiated ethically. I contend that the site-specific, performative nature of these sexual encounters suggests a more contingent sexuality arising from the interaction of bodies in specific environments and exceeding the boundaries of reified sexual identities.     

Modes of knowing: Perceiving and living toxicity in Ecuadorian Amazonia

Located in Ecuador's southern Amazonia, the Condor Mountain Range is the home of the Shuar people, who have been living for the last three decades amid increasing colonization and expanding mineral extraction. In these mined lands, gold is constantly brought into being through chemical manipulations. After state authorities declared the valleys a zone of environmental destruction, these chemical compounds in soils, waters and bodies have been widely documented. The Shuar villagers are concerned with the evident destructive effects of cyanide on aquatic life. However, the invisible hazardous effects of mercury and manganese, the evidence of which can be sensed neither in fish's flesh nor on their bodies, remain unsettled. This article explores how toxic chemicals are made perceptible or imperceptible. Toxicological and biomedical knowledge practices produce (im)perceptibility through chains of associations and disassociations. Such practice intertwines with colonization projects that ignore the importance of fish and fishing to the Shuar.     

Precarious Conditions: A Note on Counter‐Insurgency in Africa after 1945

This paper looks at the politics of surfaces, and the practices of veiling (and unveiling) and of white men wearing blackface in counter‐insurgency efforts in post‐war Africa. The sten gun beneath the veil, the unveiled woman with a bomb in her handbag and the counter‐gangs masquerading as African guerillas all embody specific kinds of violence; they also embody a political imaginary in which racial and cultural lines are more fluid than previous studies of these periods suggest; indeed, they raise questions about what makes a race, a gender or a regiment: are racial and national categories learned, mimicked, or are they literally skin deep? My question, however, is not why do people dress up as guerillas or as Western women to wreak havoc on their enemies, but how historians of post‐war Africa might understand such actions. To this end I want to read accounts of counter‐insurgency, Fanon's famous essay, the memoirs of British soldiers in Kenya and Rhodesian soldiers in Rhodesia and some of the volumes of Rhodesian wartime fiction through the lens of transgender literature, looking at how various crossings, and the multiple markers thereof, shed light on broader issues of hierarchy, race and gender at the time of decolonisation.     

Welfare Convergence,Bureaucracy, and Moral Distancing at the Food Bank

This paper seeks to extend geographic thinking on the changing constitution of the UK welfare state, suggesting the need to supplement ideas of the “shadow state” with an analysis of the blurring of the bureaucratic practices through which welfare is now delivered by public, private and third sector providers alike. Focusing on the growing convergence of the bureaucratic practices of benefits officials and food bank organisations, we interrogate the production of moral distance that characterise both. We reveal the ideological values embedded in voucher and referral systems used by many food banks, and the ways in which these systems further stigmatise and exclude people in need of support. Contrasting these practices with those of a variety of “ethical insurgents”, we suggest that food banks are sites of both the further cementing and of challenge to the injustices of Britain's new welfare apparatus.     

Fast food/organic food: Reflexive tastes and the making of 'yuppie chow'

Organic food consumption is one of several new trends in eating read as active opposition to industrialized food provision. While fast food consumption is characterized by compulsive gluttony, manifest in fat bodies, alternative consumption practices are seen to be driven by conscious reflexivity, such that consumers monitor, reflect upon and adapt their personal conduct in light of its perceived consequences. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. One is to examine the evolution of organic food from what Belasco called the 'counter-cuisine' to what organic growers call 'yuppie chow', to show how organic salad mix was the carrier of major changes in the organic system of provision, thereby calling into question the notion that organic food is necessarily an antidote to industrialized food. The other is to problematize the facile dichotomies between fast and slow, reflexive and compulsive, fat and thin, and, hence, good and bad eaters, to show where there is slippage and instability in these categories, in addition to a troubling politics of class and gender. To these ends, I showcase the changing provision of a particular organic commodity (salad mix, or mesclun) in California.     

To Rid the Italian Soul of One Dark Blot: Recognising Race in White Christian Religion

This article describes white Christian missionary uses of racial imagery for assimilating early twentieth‐century immigrants into U.S. society. In early twentieth‐century America, white Methodist missionaries sought to convert Italian immigrants from so‐called “pagans” to “one hundred percent Americans” by distancing them from racial darkness. In their attempt to convert the objects of their evangelism, Methodists syncretised secular marketing and metaphorical images and trained their audiences in a racial conversion narrative. In spite of their effort to combat the racial limitations of perceived Italian darkness, missionaries' use of darkness and light metaphors in conversion narratives reinscribed a racial Manichean dualism in their missionary practices and publications.     

他者的身体实践与城市公共空间融入研究——以“麦宿者”为例

“身体”是管窥和解读社会文化现象的重要视角。基于身体地理学,探讨他者身体与城市空间之关系,可为理解边缘群体与城市公共空间融入提供有益视角。文章以长期夜宿于麦当劳餐厅的“麦宿者”为例,探讨其身体实践与城市公共空间之相互作用,以剖析边缘群体对城市公共空间融入的过程机制。研究发现：麦宿者身体特征具有鲜明的他者性,并主要通过物质性和非物质性的身体实践来与饮食空间开展协商,通过在特定时空下的弱化他者性,来实现饮食空间的融入。文章建立了他者身体与城市公共空间相互作用的理论框架,在身体实践方面对身体地理学的相关理论进行了补充。     

Food mapping: a psychogeographical method for raising food consciousness

Food mapping is a new, participatory, interdisciplinary pedagogical approach to learning about our modern food systems. This method is inspired by the Situationist International's practice of the “dérive” and draws from the discourses of critical geography, the food movement's research on food deserts, and participatory action research. Using a “critical food lens,” this experiential exercise encourages participants to look beyond their plates and think about the health, economic, and ecological impacts of food. This ethnographic activity produces user-generated data and has the potential to transform participants' understanding of how agricultural practices effect other societal institutions.     

Scales,Lines and Minor Geographies: Whither King Island?

These are exciting times for geographers, with stimulating possibilities being offered to the discipline by various bodies of poststructural, especially deleuzian, theory. There is, however, a dearth of empirical studies utilising these opportunities, particularly in Australian geography. King Island, located in Bass Strait, is used in this article to broach some theoretical potentials. First, we introduce deleuzian theory. Second, we view King Island through three geographic representations and respective mappings. Third, we discuss the implications of lived practices, which constitute various (major and minor) geographies on and of King Island, for existing perspectives on spatial relations and linear flows between local and global scales. Lastly, we explore some recent treatments of space inflected through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, consolidating some spatial concepts and relations gleaned from King Island's cartographic moments and movements.