Spatial Regimes and Racial Formations
Instructor: Dr. Hillary Jenks
Course Content
In all of the courses in this curriculum, we have discussed in one form or another the development of, and relationship between, historically situated forms of socio-political organization and knowledge production. In this class, we will extend that analysis to interconnected, but previously unexamined, realms: the spatial form of the industrial city and the construction of a racial “common sense” in Western nations. We will explore urban space as a realm of social production and reproduction, and race as a socially constructed category of human difference; the emergence of a discursively structured relationship between race and space in the era of industrial capital; and the co-constitutive development of social, legal, and economic technologies of disciplining racialized people in and through space.
We will use our reading of the assigned texts to:
- Acquire a theoretical framework for understanding racial formation as a sociohistorical project linking structure and representation;
- Map a chronological and geographical trajectory of local and global migrations produced by the imperatives of industrial capital;
- Interrogate the “natural” form and structure of the industrial Western city;
- Comprehend the relationship between race and space in 20th century American cities; and
- Recognize the global extension and postindustrial evolution of this relationship.
As always, close reading and textual explication will be key arenas for skill enhancement and components of class discussion.
Required Texts
Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (excerpts)
Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936
Anderson, Vancouver's Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980
Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
Zilberg, "Fools Banished From the Kingdom: Remapping Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador)"