The Race That Space Makes: The Power of Place in the Colonial Formation of Social Categorizations

Abstract

The author takes a social argument—that spaces can be racialized—and asks whether the directionality of the association between space and race reflects a limitation of extant scholarship and an underlaying commitment to race as a social terminus. In response to David Delany’s 2002 articulation of how race constructs space, the author offers an inversion of this line of thinking. The author argues that the dominant view among social scientists is that space takes the position of a dependent variable whose constitution is predicted on a series of independent variables, including race. An intellectual commitment to questioning the ontological status of race requires, however, a purposeful flip in the typical causal assumptions about the relationship between race and space. Informed by racial formation theory and Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualization of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space, the author argues that racialization is tightly tethered to the production of knowledge about space. Instead of asking how race creates space, the author questions the ontological status of race itself by providing a theoretical argument that racialization is predicated upon understandings of space. Specifically, the author presents theoretical scaffolding that may be used by future researchers to explore how space creates race and racial categories.