Geographies of Resistance

Michael Keith, Steven Pile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317835516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Until very recently questions of resistance seemed straightforward, addressed in terms of an analysis of power.
This book demonstrates how new, radical geographies of resistance emerge, develop and operate. Radical cultural politics, exemplified by the black, feminist and gay liberation, has developed struggles to turn sites of oppression and discrimination into spaces of resistance. Post-colonial and queer theory have opened up new political spaces. Whether resistance is an act of transgression (crossing borders), opposition (such as constructing barricades), or everyday endurance (staying in place), these are geographies where space is constitutive of the social. Leading contemporary geographers draw on material from around the world, including Israel, Nepal, Canada, Philippines, Australia and Nigeria. Recasting current themes in critical human geography - politics, identity and place - the contributors introduce unexplored notions of resistance, offering exciting insights for those exploring social, cultural, urban, political and development issues in different worlds of change.

1

Introduction

opposition, political identities and spaces of resistance

Steve Pile

A place on the map is also a place in history.

(Rich, 1984: 212)¹

Costumes and witchcraft are precisely what people need to walk happily on the uncertain edge of blurred boundaries.

(Castells, 1983:162)

Introduction: Geography and Resistance

Perhaps the first images that spring to mind when we hear the word ‘resistance’ are of French men and women of the resistance fighting the Nazi occupation, 1939–1945, secretly carrying weapons on bicycles, or listening intently to coded messages on imperfect wirelesses, or lying in wait to blow up armoured trains carrying German troops and weaponry to the front. Then again, these heroics remind us of the barbarity with which the German forces of occupation attempted to suppress the resistance – by massacring villagers, by sending people to the concentration camps, by using vicious forms of torture on prisoners and by intimidating people into informing on friends, relatives, lovers. Or maybe other kinds of resistance are more prominent in our minds, perhaps we think of unemployed people marching to demonstrate their plight, or of the riots that take place in inner cities, or of people tying peace symbols to the barbed wire of military bases, or of a lone man standing in front of a tank as it rolls onwards to Tiananmen Square. Clearly, in these cases, ‘resistance’ stands in implacable opposition to ‘power’: so, ‘power’ is held by an élite, who use oppressive, injurious and contemptible means to secure their control;² meanwhile, ‘resistance’ is the people fighting back in defence of freedom, democracy and humanity. Since resistance opposes power, it hardly seems worth mentioning that acts of resistance take place through specific geographies: in the spaces under the noses of the oppressor, on the streets, outside military bases, and so on; or, further, around specific geographical entities such as the nation, or ‘our land’, or world peace, or the rainforests; or, over other kinds of geographies, such as riots in urban places or revolts by peasants in the countryside or jamming government web sites in cyberspace. There are, somewhat plainly, geographies of resistance.

In a very crude sense, then, resistance could be mapped – partly because it seems to have visible expressions (explosions, marches, riots, graffiti, and so on) and partly because it always takes place. Unfortunately, an exercise in mapping resistance would only capture particular forms of resistance, mobilised through specific forms of geography. Beyond this, the sense that resistance might happen under authority’s nose or outside tightly controlled places implies that resistance might have its own distinct spatialities. This is to say that when geographies of resistance are examined then new questions arise not only about the ways in which resistance is to be understood and about the geographical expressions of identifiable acts of resistance, but also about the ways in which geography makes possible or impossible certain forms of resistance and about the ways in which resistance makes other spaces – other geographies – possible or impossible. This book is attendant, then, to the ways in which resistance uses extant geographies and makes new geographies and to the geographies that make resistance. This in itself unsettles discussions of resistance that see it as the inevitable outcome of domination, since power – whether conceived of as oppression or authority or capacity or even resistance – spread through geography can soon become uneven, fragmentary and inconsistent (see Allen, forthcoming). So, for example, Watts shows (this volume) that uneven development and regional rivalries in Nigeria provoked different and incommensurable responses amongst different groups of people. So, it is not clear where ‘power’ is, or even what it is, since it is working through many spatialised interrelationships – in this case, an oil-centred capitalism, a nation-centred polity arising out of oil and post-colonialism, but also through the Ogoni people’s mobilisation, Muslim ideals and military orders. So, while there are different forms of control that work through distinct geographies, geographies of resistance do not necessarily (or even ever) mirror geographies of domination, as an upside-down or back-to-front or face-down map of the world.

There is – it is argued here – a more troubling effect of thinking through the geographies of resistance, that resistance is ‘uncoupled’ from domination. This is not to say that domination and resistance have nothing to do with one another, but that there are distinct spatialised modalities of control, and that resistance might have its own spatialities – and that this becomes much clearer once domination and resistance are dislocated and understood geographically. The introduction of ‘geography’ into discussions of ‘resistance’ forces reconsideration of the presumption that domination and resistance are locked in some perpetual death dance of control: a dance where domination and resistance hold each other’s hands, each struggling to master the steps of the dance, each anticipating and mirroring the moves of the other, but neither able to let go – for dancers are nothing without the dance. Instead, Geographies of Resistance shows that people are positioned differently in unequal and multiple power relationships, that more and less powerful people are active in the constitution of unfolding relationships of authority, meaning and identity, that these activities are contingent, ambiguous and awkwardly situated, but that resistance seeks to occupy, deploy and create alternative spatialities from those defined though oppression and exploitation. From this perspective, assumptions about the domination/resistance couplet become questionable.

In a sense, this is a plea for recognising that the spatial technologies of domination – such as military occupation or, alternatively, urban planning – need to continually resolve specific spatial problems, such as distance and closeness, inclusion and exclusion, surveillance and position, movement and immobility, communication and knowledge, and so on. This is to say that authority produces space through, for example, cutting it up, differentiating between parcels of space, the use and abuse of borders and markers, the production of scales (from the body, through the region and the nation, to the globe), the control of movement within and across different kinds of boundaries and so on (see Slater, this volume, and Thrift, this volume). Nevertheless, these spatial practices of oppression do not mean that resistance is forever confined to the authorised spaces of domination. Indeed, one of authority’s most insidious effects may well be to confine definitions of resistance to only those that appear to oppose it directly, in the open, where it can be made and seen to fail.

Geographies of Resistance begins with a sense that it is no longer enough to begin stories of resistance with stories of so-called power. From this perspective, resistance becomes a mode through which the symptoms of different power relations are diagnosed and ways are sought to get round them, or live through them, or to change them. For example, Law, this volume, shows how women workers in the sex industry diagnose power relations and seek strategies to manipulate, endure and benefit from them. So, thinking through geographies of resistance involves breaking assumptions as to what constitutes resistance. Now, this does not necessarily mean that resistance becomes ‘anything’ or ‘everywhere’, but precisely that resistance is understood where it takes place, and not through abstract theories which outline the insidious mechanisms, strategies and technologies of domination. Thus, it is no longer sufficient to assume that resistance arises from innate political subjectivities which are opposed to, or marginalised by, oppressive practices; whereby those who benefit from relations of domination act to reproduce them, while the oppressed have a natural interest in over-turning the situation. Instead, resistant political subjectivities are constituted through positions taken up not only in relation to authority – which may well leave people in awkward, ambivalent, down-right contradictory and dangerous places – but also through experiences which are not so quickly labelled ‘power’, such as desire and anger, capacity and ability, happiness and fear, dreaming and forgetting. Nor can resistance be so easily located as existing only in certain spatial practices or places (such as, for example, mobility or the permeability of boundaries or the local) and not others (such as, for example, stasis or the construction of clear boundaries or the global). Each of the authors in Geographies of Resistance takes issue with any presumption that resistance is self-evident, that geography is an inert, fixed, isotropic back-drop to the real stuff of politics and history, and that the relationship between geographies of domination and geographies of resistance is as simple as that between a hammer and a nail.

If this is the basic agenda of the book (and some authors may not agree that it is … just to keep the issues in the air for a bit longer!), then it also useful to map out some key points of debate in discussions of radical politics. Geographers have, for a long time, engaged in production of radical knowledges – from Marxism, through feminism, to post-colonialism and queer theory (to pass only a few places on the map). They have been attendant to the geographies of domination and exploitation and the possibilities of political struggle. What follows is not a review of all radical geographers, nor of all radical geographies, but instead a developing argument about alternative ways of conceptualising geographies of resistance. The story begins, in the section entitled ‘spaces of power and opposition’, with the ways in which radical geographies have been produced through analyses of power, where what is radical is presumed to be the uncovering of the constitution of power relations and the production of space. Resistance, from this perspective, is about mass mobilisation in defence of common interests, where resistance is basically determined by the action: the strike, the march, the formation of community organisations, and so on. For geographers, political mobilisation is commonly seen as embedded in either geographically circumscribed communities (as in the politics of turf) or in spatialised communities (as in the geography of class). Nevertheless, notions of community and their geographies cannot be assumed, nor can their operativeness in resistance – see Rose’s analysis, this volume.

The intentions and meanings of political acts are moreover not straightforward, especially since seemingly subversive actions can be constituted out of, and actively maintain, brutal forms of oppression, while sickeningly sadistic regimes can be grounded in emancipatory values. So, in the second subsection of this introduction, Fanon’s discussion of the changing meanings of the veil during the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria is described in order to show how political identities are constituted through political struggles, and how both subjectivities and struggles are constituted spatially. Frantz Fanon’s analysis has been both praised and condemned, but he nevertheless demonstrates that the spatial technologies of oppression and exploitation can be resisted on grounds which are not exclusively produced through the practices of domination. Further, this analysis shows how political identities are constituted through power relationships and that, as much as resistance seeks to undermine or throw off control over exterior spaces, the interior world is also colonised by hegemonic norms and values. From this perspective, it is possible to recognise that resistance can involve resistance to any kind of change, to progressive and radical politics and to social transformation.

This introduction traces the argument sketched above. First, by looking at a spatiality of resistance understood in terms of those defined by structural power relations; second, by thinking about the ways in which spaces of resistance are distinct from the spaces of domination; finally, by thinking about the distinct spatialities of resistance and by suggesting that resistance may involve spatialities that lie beyond ‘power’ – and it is on these alternative grounds that alternative places on the map are being produced.

Spaces of Power and Opposition

Many radical geographers have sought to contribute to (an understanding of) resistance through their politically informed and committed analyses of the power relations involved in the production of space – combined with often angry and anguished calls to recognise the brutality and cynicism of those in power.³ Exemplary amongst recent writings is David Harvey’s plea for radical politics to address the historical and geographical situatedness of exploitation (Harvey, 1993a). Harvey’s work is an excellent place to begin a discussion of geographies of resistance not only because he asks that radical politics should judge the importance of different kinds of oppression but also because he argues that resistance can only be effective when organised in opposition to only one structure of power relations. Resistance, it seems, comes from being able to recognise the real enemy amongst a frightening array of enemies. In this war, resistance is about taking up one position of opposition – for Harvey, that is a class position in opposition to the hidden injuries of capitalist social relations.

Oppositional positions

On the day after Labor Day in 1991, the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, caught fire. The exits from the factory were locked and, as a result, 25 of the 200 workforce were killed and a further 56 seriously injured (see Harvey, 1993a: 41). For Harvey, this horrific industrial accident revealed much about the harsh labour conditions experienced by workers in the American south. He argues that industrial interests used, and reproduced, inequalities between the countryside and the city by preying on rural poverty in order to provide inexpensive fast food for richer urban workers. Capitalist interests exploited the fact that people in rural areas have little choice of employment, which meant that the labour force was trapped into low wages, accepting poor conditions and was unable or unwilling to fight back. At every turn, the logic of capital investment involved the coldblooded necessity of cutting costs – the ultimate price, in this case, was paid in workers’ lives. From this perspective, this industrial disaster was no stroke of bad luck, but an accident waiting to happen.

What distresses Harvey is that a century of labour activism in North America – which had gained some ground in the defence of its own interests through health and safety legislation – had been openly disregarded by the North Carolina state. Instead, the state not only had ‘the habit of openly touting low wages, a friendly business climate, and “right-to-work” legislation which keeps the unions at bay’, but had also failed to enforce health and safety legislation: so, the plant had not been inspected once in the 11 years that it had been running (pages 42–43). Astonishingly and tragically, according to Harvey, labour conditions in late twentieth-century North America do not differ substantially from Marx’s description of work in late nineteenth-century Europe. Though Harvey does not quote him, Marx’s words are evocative.

As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value … Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour power he has bought from him.

(Marx, 1867: 342)

The equation balances the profits of vampyric capital with the worker’s impoverished, blood-sucked life, and Harvey sorrowfully points out that workers in the Imperial Foods plant were also vulnerable to such exploitation. Only, in this sickening accident-which-was-not-an-accident, capital consumed workers by fire. The reasonable question that Harvey asks concerns what has changed. He begins to look for an answer in the different responses to the Imperial Foods accident and a similar fire which occurred at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, killing 146 workers, in New York in 1911. The fire in New York provoked one of the ‘classic’ acts of labour resistance: 100,000 people marched down one of New York’s most famous streets, Broadway, to protest about working conditions and to demand better protection in the workplace. However, the fire in Hamlet provoked no such protest: no march, no demands, so no greater protection. In both situations, a soulless capitalism defines the conditions under which workers live out their lives, and attempts to take greater and greater control over those lives – unless the workers resist.

Capital strives to valorize itself through sucking the blood of the most vulnerable workforces, wherever these are, though they will be in specific places – whether in an impoverished countryside or destitute/d inner city.⁴ Workforces remain vulnerable where they cannot organise and agitate in defence of their own interest and where alliance cannot be formed with groups sharing those common interests. The question, for Harvey, is what is preventing worker resistance to capitalist blood-sucking. Partly the reason lies in capital’s avoidance of organised labour and tighter regulation in cities but also, significantly, the lack of a political resp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Opposition, political identities and spaces of resistance
• 2. Black Gold, White Heat: State violence, local resistance and the national question in Nigeria
• 3. A Spatiality of Resistances: Theory and practice in Nepal’s Revolution of 1990
• 4. Remapping Resistance: ‘Ground for struggle’ and the politics of place
• 5. Dancing on the Bar: Sex, money and the uneasy politics of third space
• 6. The Still Point: Resistance, expressive embodiment and dance
• 7. Radical Politics out of Place?: The curious case of ACT UP Vancouver
• 8. Rings, Circles and Perverted Justice: Gay judges and moral panic in contemporary Scotland
• 9. Performing Inoperative Community: The space and the resistance of some community arts projects
• 10. Resisting Reconciliation: The secret geographies of (post)colonial Australia
• 11. Identity, Authenticity and Memory in Place-Time
• 12. Local Cultures and Urban Protests
• 13. Spatial Politics/Social Movements: Questions of (b)orders and resistance in global times
• 14. Conclusion: A changing space and a time for change
• Bibliography
• Index