Political Geography

A Critical Introduction

Sara Smith

• Editorial: Wiley-Blackwell
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119315155
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Géographie humaine

Brings political geography to life—explores key concepts, critical debates, and contemporary research in the field.

Political geography is the study of how power struggles both shape and are shaped by the places in which they occur—the spatial nature of political power. Political Geography: A Critical Introduction helps students understand how power is related to space, place, and territory, illustrating how everyday life and the world of global conflict and nation-states are inextricably intertwined. This timely, engaging textbook weaves critical, postcolonial, and feminist narratives throughout its exploration of key concepts in the discipline.

Accessible to students new to the field, this text offers critical approaches to political geography—including questions of gender, sexuality, race, and difference—and explains central political concepts such as citizenship, security, and territory in a geographic context. Case studies incorporate methodologies that illustrate how political geographers perform research, enabling students to develop a well-rounded critical approach rather than merely focusing on results. Chapters cover topics including the role of nationalism in shaping allegiances, the spatial aspects of social movements and urban politics, the relationship between international relations and security, the effects of non-human actors in politics, and more. Global in scope, this book:

• Highlights a diverse range of globally-oriented issues, such as global inequality, that demonstrate the need for critical political geography
• Demonstrates how critiques of political geography intersect with decolonial, feminist, and queer movements
• Covers the Eurocentric origins of many of the discipline's key concepts
• Integrates advances in political geography theory and firsthand accounts of innovative research from rising scholars in the field
• Explores both intimate stories from everyday life and abstract concepts central to contemporary political geography

Political Geography: A Critical Introduction is an ideal resource for students in political and feminist geography, as well as graduate students and researchers seeking an overview of the discipline.

Chapter 1
Introduction

---

• Space, Place, and Power
• What Is a Critical Introduction?
• What Have We Learned and What Is Next?

---

This book was written inside Carolina Hall, a stately three story brick building at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, in the United States (US) South. With high ceilings, tall windows, and hardwood floors, the building can be a source of delight – a quiet space to stare out at the oak trees, with sunny classrooms where students laugh, debate, take exams, or daydream. It is also a wound that cannot be healed. When I began working here in 2009, the name inscribed in stone above the entrance was not Carolina, it was Saunders. In February 2015, Black students stood on the steps of this building with nooses around their necks, chanting “This is what Saunders would do to me!” in reference to the building’s then‐namesake. William Laurence Saunders had been a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader, as well as a lawyer and Secretary of State (Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina 2010). Saunders’s KKK position was one reason the university honored him with the name in 1920 (as activists discovered through archival research). As you begin to read this book, you might be in an academic building or a campus library. Have you considered the political geography of the little piece of the world that you currently inhabit? What stories might it have to tell you about state power, nations, and difference?

The students on the steps were part of the Real Silent Sam Coalition (RSSC), one in a series of organizations that have worked to bring the university to terms with its white supremacy, in part through analysis of and intervention into the racialized landscape. The RSSC had suggested renaming the building after Zora Neale Hurston, a Black folklorist, playwright, and novelist. Hurston, now hailed as a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, wove ethnographic work with Black people in the US South into plays, short stories, and novels, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston 1937). Hurston had audited a UNC course with playwright Paul Green while teaching at the North Carolina College for Negroes in 1939–1940. She had to attend class off campus: segregation laws prohibited Black students from enrolling in white schools such as UNC, and a white student had registered a complaint (Harvey 2016). The first Black student admitted (after a lawsuit to integrate) was Gwendolyn Harrison Smith in 1951 and she had to struggle to attend even after being admitted (Graham 2017). In 2015, activists like Omololu Babatunde, Blanche Brown, and others, put forward Hurston’s name to celebrate Hurston’s intellect and fearless approach to the barriers in her way, but also in allusion to all the Black scholars who were unable to participate in the life of the university due to the structures of racism (Butler 2014). In May 2015, forced to act and reluctant to take up Hurston’s name, the Board of Trustees renamed the building “Carolina Hall,” but also put a 16‐year moratorium on further building renaming. That summer, the state legislature passed a law requiring their approval of changes to monumental landscapes – likely in reference to the Confederate monuments scattered across the state and in particular to “Silent Sam,” the Confederate memorial on our campus at that time. The name of Hurston still haunts the building in ephemera and conversation, and in the ways that students and faculty refer to the building.

Political geography is the study of how power is spatial: how power struggles both subtle and spectacular are shaped by and shape the places in which they occur. The layers of meaning and experience embedded in the history above demonstrate the approach taken in this book, which is to bring political geography to life by asking us to reflect on how it shapes our life and how we are part of political geography through our daily actions. The experience of the building is intensely personal; for students, faculty, and staff, it is a space of labor (from cleaning toilets to answering email), pleasure, conversation, boredom. For some, it is a place they enter with great pride: UNC draws some of the highest‐achieving students from across the state. Many of these top students are also first generation college students, from economically constrained families, or the first children of immigrants to attend a US institution. Their college years can be a turning point not only for them, but also for their families, who hope this will lead to a new economic status or broader horizons for their children. These students often approach their first classes with great trepidation – writing on anonymous notecards on the first day of class that they feel anxious, excited, or concerned that they may have been admitted by accident.

The place that generates excitement and anxiety for bright‐eyed first year students is also a place where student activists experienced tears, anger, frustration, or indifference. Consider a student who had stood on the steps with a noose around her neck, or one who had smiled and laughed or even sung when students gathered the following week to read Zora Neale Hurston’s writing on those same steps. This student might recall those moments walking through the front doors to class, carrying the tension, anger, or weariness that is the struggle to remain upright in a world seeking to knock you down. At other times (or maybe even in the same moment) they might recall with joy the solidarity of working for change. In conversations with student activists from the RSSC and the Silent Sam Sit‐In (Figure 1.1), what has struck me most is the amount of emotional labor that they had put into this work, at the cost of leisure and pleasure. They keep up with their schoolwork, but skip parties to work for justice. We see then that the building as a place has meaning and political importance that is tied not only to its history, but also to how people experience it and the political actions they take in it: naming, re‐naming, studying, protesting.

Figure 1.1 Students stage a sit‐in at the Confederate Monument in August 2017.

So: why start with this story? With a building and university students – isn’t this a book about political geography? Aren’t we here to learn about world leaders, political economy, war, and military strategy? Of course, the answer is yes, but the premise of this book is that your everyday life and the world of global conflict and nation‐states cannot be separated from one another. Each classroom is both a microcosm of economic processes and gendered and racialized interpersonal dynamics and a potential site of transformation and learning. The story of Hurston Hall is about student activists, but it is also a story about the history of the world that we live in. It is a global story of forced migration through enslavement, the invention of race, and fundamental questions about whose interests are served by the modern creation of the nation‐state. The building’s presence on a lawn named after the US President James Polk, known for territorial expansion through settler colonialism, points to the further layers in this story (to which we will return). The Hurston Hall story is about the critically creative manner in which people come together to transform the world.

University campuses (and even high school campuses) are also places where we witness both economic anxiety and class turmoil, as students work to prepare themselves for an unknown economic future, wondering which major will provide them with job security. These concerns are both everyday and mundane; they are worked out in daily life in interactions between students, parents, faculty, and also tied into formal political structures – in the determination of who attends what schools and whose children attend public institutions versus private schools. In the US, campuses are also sites of activism and discussion about gun violence and the role of young people in shaping political discourse on the topic Globally, young people are also a driving force in shifting conversations on global warming. Political geography gives us tools to think through the complex entanglement between these processes, sites, and the people who navigate them.

Space, Place, and Power

As political geographers, we seek to understand how power is manifest in and through space and place, at scales large and small. Political geography gives us a means to understand the spatial power relations we find on the college campus. We might ask why the once predominantly Black housekeeping department at UNC is now staffed mainly by refugees from Burma and elsewhere in Southeast Asia (Dimpfl 2017; Dimpfl and Smith 2018). We might also ask why most UNC faculty are white, from outside the state, and from middle‐class backgrounds, while the students and staff are both mostly from North Carolina, and comprise a more diverse population, while the students are still not as diverse as the state population. In conversation with theories of feminism, decolonization, and critical approaches to race, political geography also gives us tools to understand why so many syllabi used on college campuses include the writers that they do, and why the racial, ethnic, socioeconomic class and gendered composition of students, staff, and faculty are so different from the makeup of the state and the nation. Perhaps most tantalizingly, in this book, we will think through critical understandings of what makes the relationships between micro‐political interactions and spaces and large‐scale phenomena. In other words, how can people like us try to change the world? As we begin this book, let us consider a few of geography’s key terms.

Space is where things happen in the world. Spaces are political because they have been produced through political processes, and because they reinforce, reinscribe, or destabilize power hierarchies. Spatial relationships or the relationship between spaces, are likewise political – think of the movement of labor mentioned above. Can we untangle that movement from political histories connecting the United States to Southeast Asia? Or from global labor prices? Flows of people or money are never accidental – they are always tied to other political relationships, and we understand these better by understanding the spatial aspect of such relationship – or how these relationships happen through spatial practices. What happens when money flows rapidly into a city for instance? Does it displace the urban poor, as though they were so many branches and leaves swept out to the sea? Does it change the shape of the skyline, with high‐rises reaching up to the sky like spindly plants growing toward the sun? These are the spatial expressions of economic and social process...