Black studies,crisis,and the social reproduction of capitalist space

Abstract

What is the role of crisis in the racialization of the built environment? Four of the articles in this special issue take up this question and, in the process, reveal how scholarship investigating the racialization of the built environment extends the framework of racial capitalism and underscores potential new directions for scholarship focused on how racialization shapes the commodification, development, and experience of ecologies and the built environment. These papers specifically turn to the concept of the racial-spatial fix to underscore both how Black people are the surplus capitalism tries to “solve” in the short term and how the plundering of Black land and communities is one method capitalists use to resolve crises of surplus. A Black feminist approach to social reproduction has the potential to reveal how both Black Ecologies and the racial-spatial fix are examples of how Blackness and Black people are figured in the social reproduction of racial capitalist society and the roles of gender and sexuality in the management of land in capitalist societies.