scholarly journals Racialized geographies of housing financialization

2021 ◽  
pp. 030913252110092
Author(s):  
Desiree Fields ◽  
Elora Lee Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Automated Systems ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Collective Resistance

Financial violence is racial violence: geographies of housing financialization spatialize hierarchies of death-dealing racial difference. However, research concerned with housing financialization rarely addresses the inextricable relationship between racism and capitalism. Racial division and subordination have always been necessary to producing value in real estate; financialization materially reproduces racial capitalism by reconfiguring the death-dealing abstraction of racism from systems of individual bias and racialized bodies into automated systems. Rather than reducing racially subordinated communities to experiences of oppression and domination, producing life-giving geographies of housing requires bringing collective resistance for emancipatory social change into the analytic frame.

scholarly journals Street Names through Sociological Lenses. Part II: Constructionism and Utilitarianism

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihai Stelian Rusu
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Place Branding ◽  
Real Estate Market ◽  
Previous Issue ◽  
The Real Estate ◽  
The Real Estate Market ◽  
The City

AbstractAs toponymic means of inscribing urban space, street names have been addressed mainly by human geographers, who have articulated the field of critical place-name studies. In this paper, I continue the endeavor started in the previous issue published in Social Change Review of reading street names through sociological lenses. Whereas in the first part of this two-part contribution the analysis was made from functionalist and conflictualist perspectives, this second and final part employs social constructionism and the utilitarian theoretical tradition in making sociological sense of street nomenclatures. First, conceiving of street names as forming discursively constructed linguistic landscapes, the paper shows how urban namescapes – the “city-text” – are written, erased, and rewritten to reflect the shifting political powers. Second, the paper examines the neoliberal processes of place branding and toponymic commodification by which street names are turned into sought-after urban commodities with transactional value on the real estate market. The paper concludes by inviting sociologists to join the conversation on street names, which should become an important topic of sociological reflection.

Sustainable Spaces, Sustained Mass Incarceration: Environmental Protection as Racial Violence in the Design of Juvenile Incarceration

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Akhila L. Ananth
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Juvenile Court ◽  
Green Building ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Building Design ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Sustainable Construction ◽  
Racial Capitalism

Though scholars of racial capitalism have separately analyzed mass incarceration and environmental racism as state-sanctioned racial violence, few have put these two seemingly disparate topics of study in direct conversation. Yet tracking “sustainability” in the designs of an environmentally friendly juvenile detention facility reveals that state-subsidized corporate mechanisms of environmental protection are fundamental to racialized mass incarceration in the United States. In the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center in San Leandro, California, building designers constructed a juvenile court, social services center, and jail that all met the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold Standard for sustainable construction practices put forth by the US Green Building Council. In this carceral space, however, the ideals of sustainable building design obfuscate the role of racial capitalism in sustaining the punitive regulation of Black and other nonwhite youth through incarceration.

The biopolitical commons: A revised theory of urban land in the age of biopolitical production

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 470-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Conroy
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Urban Land ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Process Research ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Urban Commons ◽  
Point Of Reference

The literature on biopolitical production largely presumes that contemporary capital is parasitic, enclosing and capturing value that is autonomously and collectively produced across the urban landscape. In contrast, this article suggests that in particular contexts, planners—acting largely as surrogates for urban real estate capital—play an active role in the production of the urban commons for the sake of future enclosure. Using contemporary Chicago as a point of reference, it argues that such commons are (generally) produced in locales of racialized “ontological devaluation”—in spaces that have been historically marginalized under racial capitalism. Further still, this article develops a theoretical concept, the “biopolitical commons,” to name those spaces and practices that are produced for the sake of future racialized biopolitical accumulation—pulling together, in the process, research on biopolitical production and “abolition ecology.” Finally, this article concludes by posing a series of questions for future research on the biopolitical commons.

scholarly journals Black Gold, White Power: Mapping Oil, Real Estate, and Racial Segregation in the Los Angeles Basin, 1900-1939

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel G. Cumming
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Housing Market ◽  
Mortgage Lending ◽  
Resource Exploitation ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Oil Boom ◽  
Political Exclusion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Power Mapping

In 1923, Southern California produced over twenty percent of the world’s oil. At the epicenter of an oil boom from 1892 to the 1930s, Los Angeles grew into the nation’s fifth largest city. By the end of the rush, it had also become one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. Historians have overlooked the relationship between industrialists drilling for oil and real estate developers codifying a racist housing market, namely through “redlining” maps and mortgage lending. While redlining is typically understood as a problem of horizontal territory, this paper argues that the mapping of the underground—the location and volume of subterranean oil fields, in particular—was a crucial technique in underwriting urban apartheid. Mapping technologies linked oil exploitation with restrictive property rights, constructing oil as a resource and vertically engineering a racialized housing market. By focusing on petro-industrialization interlocked with segregationist housing, this article reveals an unexamined chapter in Los Angeles’s history of resource exploitation and racial capitalism. Moreover, it contributes to a growing literature on the social production of resources, extractive technology and political exclusion, and the technoscientific practices used by states and corporations to mine the underground while constructing metropolitan inequality above ground.

Civilizing swamps in California: Formations of race, nature, and property in the nineteenth century U.S. West

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110263
Author(s):  
Lindsey Dillon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Labor Force ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Salt Marshes ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
White Settler ◽  
White Settlers

This paper examines the production of settler ecologies through nineteenth century swamp reclamation projects in California. It focuses on the transformation of inland swamps into agricultural land and San Francisco salt marshes and tidelands into urban real estate. I argue that swamp reclamation was both an economic and a racial project. Swamp reclamation sought to transform perceived wastelands into productive property. Swamp reclamation was also a racial project, in at least three ways. First, it aimed to transform colonial environments for the health of the white settler body. Second, draining swamps and making solid land depended on a racialized labor force. Third, swamp reclamation was accelerated through government subsidies that largely benefitted white settlers at the same time the state of California disenfranchised Black, Chinese, and Indigenous residents and supported racial immigration policies. These formations of race, nature, and property were established by law and political economy, and undergirded by settler epistemologies of space and nature. By studying the discourses and practices of swamp reclamation in nineteenth century California, this paper contributes to scholarship on the production of settler ecologies under conditions of racial capitalism.

Dialectics, Irony, and The Well of the Saints

J. M. Synge ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 109-135
Author(s):  
Seán Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Dialectical Structure ◽  
Political Impact ◽  
Jacob Boehme ◽  
Source Materials ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Final Synthesis

Beginning with a reading of a short manuscript fragment, A Rabelaisian Rhapsody (1898–1900), this chapter shows that this short dramatic dialogue affords us a unique and overlooked insight into the structures and key concerns of Synge’s entire dramatic oeuvre. In doing so, the chapter excavates many new influences on Synge’s work through a close reading of new source materials by Jacob Boehme, Spinoza, Blavatsky, Nietzsche, Hegel, Rabelais, Paracelsus, and a number of esoteric figures, reinforcing the continued importance of mysticism to his dramatic development. In The Well of the Saints (1905), we find the final synthesis of the dialectical structure of ‘A Rabelaisian Rhapsody’, and the preparation for Synge’s overt sociological statements regarding modernization in Ireland in his articles ‘From the Congested Districts’, published later the same year. Synge established a spiritual basis for his aesthetic, countering asceticism with pantheism, restriction with Rabelaisian excess. The various iterations of this conflict can be traced over numerous dialogues, scenarios, and plays in his oeuvre, and this dialectical structure became subsumed into a larger literary vision of nonconformity and multidirectional irony. In turn, Synge’s spiritual and aesthetic opposition to ascetic or conforming figures began to influence his understanding of political and social change in contemporary Ireland. Finally, this chapter demonstrates that by reading The Well of the Saints as a play based in Ossianic dialogues, nineteenth-century Celticist readings of racial difference, and conflicting modes of production, we can begin to understand Synge’s drama as one urging consciously towards protest and designed political impact.

scholarly journals Represented Dreams: Subversive Expressions in Chinese Social Media as Alternative Symbolic Infrastructures

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630511880951 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sulafa Zidani
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Chinese Dream ◽  
Systematic Examination ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
The Chinese Dream ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Chinese Social Media

This article examines the creation and utilization of subversive expressions by Chinese Internet users amid heavy censorship. While these expressions may potentially lead to collective resistance, so far they have not been subjected to systematic examination. A grounded analysis of 270 Weibo posts that relate to nine prevalent subversive keywords demonstrates how sporadic modes of playful civic engagement consolidate as shared symbolic infrastructures. The expressions construct a systematic “counter-hierarchical” social ladder; participants express identification with the groups that are least governmental, while clearly dissociating themselves from those connected to the regime. At the same time, the expressions reveal a set of contradictory values, shedding light on the challenges facing both “the Chinese Dream” and the prospect of social change.

scholarly journals The fire this time: Grenfell, racial capitalism and the urbanisation of empire

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ida Danewid
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Governance Structure ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Global Cities ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
New Type

Over the last few years, an emergent body of International Relations scholarship has taken an interest in the rise of global cities and the challenges they bring to existing geographies of power. In this article, I argue that a focus on race and empire should be central to this literature. Using the Grenfell Tower fire in London as a starting point, the article shows that global cities are part of a historical and ongoing imperial terrain. From London to New York, São Paulo to Cape Town, Singapore to Cairo, the ‘making’ of global cities has typically gone hand in hand with racialized forms of displacement, dispossession and police violence. Drawing on the literature on racial capitalism, as well as Aimé Césaire’s image of the ‘boomerang’, I show that these strategies build on practices of urban planning, slum administration and law-and-order policing long experimented with in the (post)colonies. By examining the colonial dimensions of what many assume to be a strictly national problem for the welfare state, the article thus reveals global cities as part of a much wider cartography of imperial and racial violence. This not only calls into question the presentism of scholarship that highlights the ‘newness’ of neoliberal urbanism. In demonstrating how global cities and colonial borderlands are bound together through racial capitalism, it also exposes the positionality of scholars and policymakers that seek to counter the violence of neoliberalism with a nostalgic return to the post-1945 welfare state. As the Grenfell fire revealed, the global city is less a new type of international actor or governance structure than an extension and reconfiguration of the domestic space of empire.

Racial Violence, Racial Capitalism, and Reading Revolution: Harriet Jacobs, John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
Black Bodies

Meditating on the continued racial speculation on black bodies in our contemporary moment, the epilogue brings the link between racial violence, capitalism, and evidentiary epistemology into sharper focus. Drawing on Harriet Jacobs’s insights into the role racial violence-as-spectacle plays in the construction of wealth, the epilogue considers what ex-slave narrators bring to contemporary debates around racial violence, such as the debate over whether or not police body cameras will resolve or lessen unremitting episodes of police brutality on people of color. While the book opens with an analysis of contemporary visual slave narratives at the end of the 20th century, the epilogue ends with a consideration of the slave narrative form in the 21st century, considering works that contribute to contemporary figurations of slavery but are not all strictly within the slave narrative tradition I have defined, including John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker.

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