The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence
The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence

Author: Rasul A Mowatt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1000453294

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The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence exposes the spatial processes of racialising, gendering, and classifying populations through the encoded urban infrastructure – from highways cleaving neighbourhoods to laws and policies fortifying even more unbreachable boundaries. This synthesis of narrative and theory resurrects neglected episodes of state violence and reveals how the built environment continues to enable it today within a range of cities throughout the world. Examples and discussions pull from colonial pasts and presents, of old strategic settlements turned major modern cities in the United States and elsewhere that link to the physical and legal structures concentrating a populace into neighbourhoods that prep them for a lifetime of conscripted and carceral service to the State.

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Author: Rob Nixon

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-06-01

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 067424799X

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“Groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of environmental health and social justice.” —Wold Literature Today The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

World City
World City

Author: Doreen Massey

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-23

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0745654827

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Cities around the world are striving to be 'global'. This book tells the story of one of them, and in so doing raises questions of identity, place and political responsibility that are essential for all cities. World City focuses its account on London, one of the greatest of these global cities. London is a city of delight and of creativity. It also presides over a country increasingly divided between North and South and over a neo-liberal form of globalisation - the deregulation, financialisation and commercialisation of all aspects of life - that is resulting in an evermore unequal world. World City explores how we can understand this complex narrative and asks a question that should be asked of any city: what does this place stand for? Following the implosion within the financial sector, such issues are even more vital. In a new Preface, Doreen Massey addresses these changed times. She argues that, whatever happens, the evidence of this book is that we must not go back to 'business as usual', and she asks whether the financial crisis might open up a space for a deeper rethinking of both our economy and our society.

Demonic Grounds
Demonic Grounds

Author: Katherine McKittrick

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published:

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 145290880X

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In a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women’s geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition. Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs’s attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s philosophies. Central to McKittrick’s argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change. Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women’s studies at Queen’s University.

The Deadly Life of Logistics
The Deadly Life of Logistics

Author: Deborah Cowen

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2014-09-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1452943192

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In a world in which global trade is at risk, where warehouses and airports, shipping lanes and seaports try to guard against the likes of Al Qaeda and Somali pirates, and natural disaster can disrupt the flow of goods, even our “stuff” has a political life. The high stakes of logistics are not surprising, Deborah Cowen reveals, if we understand its genesis in war. In The Deadly Life of Logistics, Cowen traces the art and science of logistics over the last sixty years, from the battlefield to the boardroom and back again. Focusing on choke points such as national borders, zones of piracy, blockades, and cities, she tracks contemporary efforts to keep goods circulating and brings to light the collective violence these efforts produce. She investigates how the old military art of logistics played a critical role in the making of the global economic order—not simply the globalization of production, but the invention of the supply chain and the reorganization of national economies into transnational systems. While reshaping the world of production and distribution, logistics is also actively reconfiguring global maps of security and citizenship, a phenomenon Cowen charts through the rise of supply chain security, with its challenge to long-standing notions of state sovereignty and border management. Though the object of corporate and governmental logistical efforts is commodity supply, The Deadly Life of Logistics demonstrates that they are deeply political—and, considered in the context of the long history of logistics, deeply indebted to the practice of war.

Violent Geographies
Violent Geographies

Author: Derek Gregory

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-18

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1135929068

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"Violent Geographies is essential to understanding how the politics of fear, terror, and violence in being largely hidden geographically can only be exposed in like manner. The 'War on Terror' finally receives the coolly critical analysis its ritual invocation has long required." —John Agnew, Professor of Geography, UCLA "Urgent, passionate and deeply humane, Violent Geographies is uncomfortable but utterly compelling reading. An essential guide to a world splintered and wounded by fear and aggression—this is geography at its most politically engaged, historically sensitive, and intellectually brave." —Ben Highmore, University of Sussex "This is what a ‘public geography’ should be all about: acute analysis of momentous issues of our time in an accessible language. Gregory and Pred have assembled a peerless group of critical geographers whose essays alter conventional understandings of terror, violence, and fear. No mere gazetteer, Violent Geographies shows how place, space and landscape are central components of the real and imagined practices that constitute organised violence past and present. If you thought terror, violence, and fear were the professional preserve of security analysts and foreign affairs experts this book will force you to think again." —Noel Castree, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University "A studied, passionate and moving examination of the way in which the violent logics of the ‘War on Terror’ have so quickly shuttered and reorganized the spaces of this planet on its different scales. From the book emerges a critical new cartography that clearly charts an archipelago of a large multiplicity of ‘wild’ and ‘tamed’ places as well as ‘black holes’ within and between which we all struggle to live." —Eyal Weizman, Director, Goldsmiths College Centre for Research Architecture

Keeping Races in Their Places
Keeping Races in Their Places

Author: Anthony W. Orlando

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13: 100051739X

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"A book perfect for this moment" –Katherine M. O’Regan, Former Assistant Secretary, US Department of Housing and Urban Development More than fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, American cities remain divided along the very same lines that this landmark legislation explicitly outlawed. Keeping Races in Their Places tells the story of these lines—who drew them, why they drew them, where they drew them, and how they continue to circumscribe residents’ opportunities to this very day. Weaving together sophisticated statistical analyses of more than a century’s worth of data with an engaging, accessible narrative that brings the numbers to life, Keeping Races in Their Places exposes the entrenched effects of redlining on American communities. This one-of-a-kind contribution to the real estate and urban economics literature applies the author’s original geographic information systems analyses to historical maps to reveal redlining’s causal role in shaping today’s cities. Spanning the era from the Great Migration to the Great Recession, Keeping Races in Their Places uncovers the roots of the Black-white wealth gap, the subprime lending crisis, and today’s lack of affordable housing in maps created by banks nearly a century ago. Most of all, it offers hope that with the latest scholarly tools we can pinpoint how things went wrong—and what we must do to make them right.

Intimate Enemies
Intimate Enemies

Author: Aaron Bobrow-Strain

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2007-06-27

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0822389525

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Intimate Enemies is the first book to explore conflicts in Chiapas from the perspective of the landed elites, crucial but almost entirely unexamined actors in the state’s violent history. Scholarly discussion of agrarian politics has typically cast landed elites as “bad guys” with predetermined interests and obvious motives. Aaron Bobrow-Strain takes the landowners of Chiapas seriously, asking why coffee planters and cattle ranchers with a long and storied history of violent responses to agrarian conflict reacted to land invasions triggered by the Zapatista Rebellion of 1994 with quiescence and resignation rather than thugs and guns. In the process, he offers a unique ethnographic and historical glimpse into conflicts that have been understood almost exclusively through studies of indigenous people and movements. Weaving together ethnography, archival research, and cultural history, Bobrow-Strain argues that prior to the upheavals of 1994 landowners were already squeezed between increasingly organized indigenous activism and declining political and economic support from the Mexican state. He demonstrates that indigenous mobilizations that began in 1994 challenged not just the economy of estate agriculture but also landowners’ understandings of progress, masculinity, ethnicity, and indigenous docility. By scrutinizing the elites’ responses to land invasions in relation to the cultural politics of race, class, and gender, Bobrow-Strain provides timely insights into policy debates surrounding the recent global resurgence of peasant land reform movements. At the same time, he rethinks key theoretical frameworks that have long guided the study of agrarian politics by engaging political economy and critical human geography’s insights into the production of space. Describing how a carefully defended world of racial privilege, political dominance, and landed monopoly came unglued, Intimate Enemies is a remarkable account of how power works in the countryside.

Tropic of Chaos
Tropic of Chaos

Author: Christian Parenti

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Published: 2011-06-28

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1568586620

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From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism" -- a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

Laundering Black Rage
Laundering Black Rage

Author: Too Black

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-11

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1040014151

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Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits is a spatial and historical critique of the capitalist State that examines how Black Rage—conceived as a constructive and logical response to the conquest of resources, land, and human beings racialized as Black—is cleaned for the unyielding means of White capital. Interlacing political theory with international histories of Black rebellion, it presents a thoughtful challenge to the counterinsurgent tactics of the State that consistently convert Black Rage into a commodity to be bought, sold, and repressed. Laundering Black Rage investigates how the Rage directed at the police murder of George Floyd could be marshalled to funnel the Black Lives Matter movement into corporate advertising and questionable leadership, while increasing the police budgets inside the laundry cities of capital - largely with our consent. Essayist/Performer Too Black and Geographer Rasul A. Mowatt assert Black Rage as a threat to the flow of capital and the established order of things, which must therefore be managed by the process of laundering. Intertwining stories of Black resistance throughout the African diaspora, State building under capitalism, cities as sites of laundering, and the world making of empire, Laundering Black Rage also lays the groundwork for upending the laundering process through an anti-colonial struggle of reverse-laundering conquest. Relevant to studies of race and culture, history, politics, and the built environment, this pathbreaking work is essential reading for scholars and organizers enraged at capitalism and White supremacy laundering their work for nefarious means.