Colonialisms' Spatiality: Urban Sociology and the Geopolitics of Race

Yannick Coenders, Washington University in St. Louis

The relationship between race and space has been at the heart of urban sociology concerned with race. In myriad ways the field has interrogated the spatial manifestation of racial inequality. Through themes such as housing discrimination, school segregation and urban poverty, racism has been linked implicit and at times explicit to spatial projects in the city such as project development, white flight, bussing and redlining. However, the historical emergence of race in western colonialism reveals that segregation in urban space may be more than just an expression of racial inequality or a mode through which such inequality is reproduced, but that space may be constitutive of race itself. Departing from a corporeal conception of race, a spatial understanding of race that delineates the inherent spatiality of western colonial practice casts the aforementioned spatial projects in a new light. Rather than being the product of already existing racial domination, such spatial projects should be understood as a key site of the reproduction of race itself. Urban sociology has for long described a key aspect of the reproduction of race – segregation, but maintains a distinction between on the one hand an exclusively corporeal understanding of race and on the other hand a conceptualization of space as a container of “race relations.” I argue that the conceptual distinction made between race and space makes us continuously rediscover the "racist implications of spatial projects", instead of regarding the mutual and dialectical construction of race and space as the mode through which race itself is both reproduced and contested. The latter, conceived of in this paper as the geopolitics of race, provides an alternative framework that alters our sociological understanding of the centrality of urban space in the reproduction of race more generally.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 128. Power and Normativity in Society and History I: Race, Politics, and Legitimation