Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography
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The Professional Geographer ISSN: 0033-0124 (Print) 1467-9272 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpg20 Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography Ruth Wilson Gilmore To cite this article: Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002) Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography, The Professional Geographer, 54:1, 15-24, DOI: 10.1111/0033-0124.00310 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1111/0033-0124.00310 Published online: 15 Mar 2010. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1305 View related articles Citing articles: 156 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtpg20 Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography Ruth Wilson Gilmore University of California, Berkeley To study the complexities of race and geography, research and analysis should center on the fatally dynamic coupling of power and difference signified by racism. The author considers briefly the theoretical and methodological impli- cations of key frameworks geographers used during the past century to account for racialized power differentials. To illustrate the political, economic, and cultural capacities that historical materialist geographical inquiry ought to con- sider, the author outlines the background for a new project—a case study of the U.S. during a period of unusually in- tense state-building in the mid-twentieth century. The article concludes that the political geography of race consists of space, place, and location as shaped simultaneously by gender, class, and scale. Key Words: racism, difference, power, political geography, twentieth-century U.S. Who Am I? sition to it, during the last two decades of the twentieth century.2 I embarked on Golden Gulag locate my work within the broad areas of so- and pursued it relentlessly because women in a I cial theory, political economy, and labor and grassroots organization whose loved ones are social movements. In my research and writing, in prison asked me to find out: (1) what work I investigate, largely in the U.S. context, over- does prison do? (2) for whom? and (3) to what determinations of race, gender, class, and power. end? Those three initial questions prompted The geographical impulses shaping my analy- a subsequent pair of interrelated questions, ses are deliberately counterintuitive. What I which Golden Gulag asks and answers. How wish to do is disarticulate commonsense cou- does the state-in-crisis discipline surplus workers, plings of sites and struggles and disrupt assump- and how do workers organize against their tions such as the idea that politics happens in abandonment within and across oppositional the milieu of the state, or that value comes from spaces delimited by race, gender, class, region, wage-controlled workplaces. At the same time, and violence? I am not throwing out the historical materialist The second project examines how underde- baby with the well-used bathwaters of three de- velopment and environmental racism consti- cades of Marxist geography. tute two sides of a single coin (Pulido 1996), by My goal is to emulate the work of engaged looking specifically at how environmental jus- scholars who try to find in the organizational tice activism can be a sturdy bridge between foundations of social movement-building some- grassroots activists stuck in urban and rural thing other than perpetual recapitulation of landscapes of disaccumulation. As in the case of ongoing place-based struggles that are displaced justice work, I find that women take the lead in but never resolved (Robinson 1983; Sivanandan everyday struggles against toxicities. They join 1983; Pulido 1996; Fernandes 1997; Woods forces not only as petitioners to the state in the 1998; Kim 2000; Gilroy 2000). By “place” I name of injuries sustained but also—and more mean, following Neil Smith’s (1992) typology provocatively—as petitioners to communities of scale, the range of kinds of places—as intimate of similar people in the name of reconstructing as the body, and as abstract, yet distinctive, as a place so that concepts of “safety” and “health” productive region or a nation-state.1 cannot be realized by razor-wire fences or For the past decade, I have focused my schol- magic bullet cures. arly energy on several projects that developed Women’s restless activism sent me down a from ongoing political activism. I am finishing third research path. In this new project, tenta- a book called Golden Gulag, a study of Califor- tively called “Political Geographies of Recog- nia’s remarkable prison growth, and the oppo- nition in the Age of Human Sacrifice,” I will The Professional Geographer, 54(1) 2002, pages 15–24 © Copyright 2002 by Association of American Geographers. Initial submission, February 2000; revised submission, August 2001; final acceptance, August 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK. 16 Volume 54, Number 1, February 2002 attempt to piece together a geographical gene- of any kind of power differential. There is no alogy of radicalism by tracing the development difference without power, and neither power and movement of several mature women activ- nor difference has an essential moral value ists across territories shaped by state and state- (Foucault 1977). Rather, the application of sanctioned racist terror (Nazi death camp, Mis- violence—the cause of premature deaths— sissippi lynch mob, El Salvador death squads). produces political power in a vicious cycle My observation of the ways that the women (Feldman 1991). What, then, are nonfatal have become materially and discursively able to power-difference couplings? Mutuality for one. recognize each other across many contempo- For another, my undergraduate students always rary divides demands reconsideration of the say “the family”; and while we debate how and historical geography of the present (Pred 2000). why different kinds of contemporary families All projects investigate the present’s lived are structured as they are, and to what extent structural antecendents in the long twentieth patriarchy is still a family rather than state century (Arrighi 1994) toward the end of de- affair (see Brown 1995), and how the concept tailing how that century, which I call the age of of family defines normative sexuality, there’s human sacrifice, also produced subjects whose something in the answer to work with (see, e.g., ideological and material agency moved in Collins 1990; Fortunati 1995; Gilmore 1999b). counterpurpose to “fatal couplings of power Racism is a practice of abstraction, a death- and difference” (Hall 1992, 17). dealing displacement of difference into hierar- The urgency of all three projects begins with chies that organize relations within and be- the crisis of the capitalist (Negri 1988) racial tween the planet’s sovereign political territories. state (Omi and Winant 1986). Such investiga- Racism functions as a limiting force that pushes tion neither derives from nor leads to either a disproportionate costs of participating in an in- monolithic view of the state or an “essentialist”3 creasingly monetized and profit-driven world view of race. Rather, my purpose is to use re- onto those who, due to the frictions of political search techniques to piece together a complex distance, cannot reach the variable levers of (and not necessarily logical) series of abstrac- power that might relieve them of those costs. tions in order at once to analyze and produce Indeed, the process of abstraction that signifies a multiscalar geographical object of analysis.4 racism produces effects at the most intimately States are territorial resolutions of crisis (see, “sovereign” scale, insofar as particular kinds of e.g., Tilly 1985; Mann 1988). Capitalist states bodies, one by one, are materially (if not always displace and contain highly differentiated mo- visibly) configured by racism into a hierarchy ments of class struggle in many ways. As Marx of human and inhuman persons that in sum observed, tax struggle is class struggle. The ab- form the category “human being” (Agamben straction of class conflict from the multiple sites 1999). of production (including sites of reproduction) The violence of abstraction produces all to state milieux does more than produce a free- kinds of fetishes: states, races, normative views floating—or even an interest-group-defined— of how people fit into and make places in the squabble over the appropriate disposition of world. A geographical imperative lies at the heart public resources (see Gilmore 1998b). Indeed, of every struggle for social justice; if justice is the state’s mediation is both constitutive of embodied, it is then therefore always spatial, and constituted by extra-state relations. Chang- which is to say, part of a process of making a ing ideological and material infrastructures— place. For researchers, purpose and method institutions—of actual states widen (or narrow, determine whether one reifies race and state— and sometimes both at once) the distance be- chasing down fetishes—or, rather, discovers tween categories of social actors and their ca- dynamic processes that renovate race and state pacity to realize their own freedom.5 (Gramsci 1971). When I started to work on If race has no essence, racism does. Racism is Golden Gulag, I realized that prisons were a singular because, whatever its place-based par- consequence of state failure; I had yet to learn ticularities,