Moving Encounters With Spatial Racism: Walking in San Jose Japantown

In this article, I address how walking as a curatorial practice of storying a neighborhood facilitates an irreducible politics of place occurring as affective intensities at various registers, where everyday movements entangle with spatial enactments of racism. Working with theories of assemblage and immanent movement, I examine walking narratives in San Jose Japantown, California (U.S.), a historic, ethnic neighborhood historically subjected to U.S. government and banking practices of “redlining” and Japanese American incarceration and dislocation to prison camps. As an analytical method, assemblage requires attention to movement: material elements of arrangement, the relations they require, new arranging and arrangements they might enable, and how these arrangements are legitimated. I examine spatial racism as an assemblage, analyzing its affective qualities wherein attentiveness to immanent movement might breach the assemblage and, in doing so, reach toward radical reformation through memorialization, community activism and development.

Extractivism and Territorial Dispossession in Rural Colombia: A Decolonial Commitment to Campesinas’ Politics of Place

Linked to extractive practices, territorial dispossession can be traced back to the colonisation of Abya Yala. From a decolonial commitment, this article complicates notions of dispossession and extractivism as merely emerging from war in Colombia and focuses on their presence in Campesinas territories. Based on the conceptualisations of the coloniality of power and coloniality of gender, I narrate how territorial dispossession and extractivism are felt in women’s ‘body-lands’ through foreign tourism/conservation development and new export crops in two rural veredas in the Colombian Andes and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta where I conducted participatory visual projects in 2016. From a relational understanding of place, I also demonstrate the ways that the rural population is resisting and negotiating within these processes. Ultimately, I make a call for feminist scholars to politically commit to the dismantling of the coloniality of gender, and to the resistances to territorial dispossession and extractivism (epistemic and economic) that rural women are leading in place in the Global South.

Filmmaking-in-Place

In Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Eden (2012), filmmakers Kelly Reichardt and Megan Griffiths (respectively) negotiate the interconnection between women, nature, and patriarchal capitalism through their emphasis on place, or one’s separation from it. Ecofeminist aesthetics resonate with regional production when directors emphasize relationships with environments and people over typical neoliberal concerns of production such as cost and infrastructure. A particular political aesthetics emerges when the approach emphasizes building community and the politics of place, rather than the bottom line. Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff shifts from the panoramic landscape shots of the classical Western to allow gendered engagement. This framing redirects the viewer away from the supposedly “male” action and instead focuses on the constant work of the women, which is the real action of survival. In Eden, Griffiths similarly frames human trafficking victim Hyun Jae in closed spaces where she is forced into sex work. Such cinematography is drastically juxtaposed with the open framing that signals potential emancipation. In each film, feminist politics intertwine with aesthetics of space to resist patriarchal capitalism co-opting women’s labor, an approach relevant to both environmentalism and feminism.