Environment and Planning D

Palmer, Meredith Alberta

doi: 10.1177/0263775820922233pmid: N/A

This article examines the politics of race, indigeneity, and landscape in US American enactments of property. Its substance is the homelands of the Haudenosaunee, now territorialized as upstate New York. The 2005 US Supreme Court case City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation denied the Oneida of the Haudenosaunee the right to expand their sovereignty onto former reservation lands through the purchase of land title. In this article, I follow the genesis of the term “non-Indian character” of an area, first written in the Sherrill decision. In tracing the genealogy of this term, I examine the racial tenets embedded in US land survey tools and discourse of property-making after the Revolutionary War. I then discuss how efforts of the Holland Land Company, New York state agents, and yeoman settlers rendered settler sovereign landscapes through acts of Haudenosaunee dispossession and concepts of Indian inferiority. As Indigenous people continue to challenge US legal concepts of property today, the settler state has reauthorized this framing of Native American sovereignty that is bounded and may only recede territorially. I consider how racist understandings of Indian inferiority maintain land as property, to show how US sovereignty rests territorially on anti-indigenous concepts of race and place.

Getzoff, Joseph F

doi: 10.1177/0263775820911949pmid: N/A

This article examines current manifestations of Zionist political-economy by analyzing discourses that frame Israel as a “Start-Up Nation”—that is, a unique economic achievement that offers a successful business model for the world. By focusing on the 2009 book from the Council of Foreign Relations, Start-Up Nation, this article theorizes “neoliberal Zionism” as a manifestation of Zionism that valorizes specific kinds of neoliberal rationalities in order to garner support for the State of Israel. In particular, neoliberal Zionism produces an entrepreneurial Israeli citizen-subject whose unique cultural attributes derive from compulsory military service and a Zionist past sanitized of conflict with Palestinians. Further, these discourses position this neoliberal Zionist subject as economically out-competing Arabs and Palestinians. At stake is how neoliberalism and exclusionary nationalism potentially mobilize each other and operate as “management” models for other states to adopt.

Elledge, Annie M; Faria, Caroline

doi: 10.1177/0263775820911953pmid: N/A

There is little geographic work on beauty. Yet beauty offers important insights into spatial, geopolitical, and geoeconomic processes. In this article, we attend to the powerful role of beauty labor, norms, and practices in national development. We center the Miss Tourism Uganda beauty pageant, held annually since 2011, and the centerpiece of tourism-based development in Uganda. Designed to attract foreign visitors and investors and to promote a sense of nationalist pride among Ugandans, the pageant-as-development strategy is increasingly mirrored across the neoliberalized Global South. This approach relies on young women’s beauty labor: the work of self-improvement via intimate beauty technologies, and the intellectual work of learning and showcasing a beautiful, idealized, national imaginary. This labor is physically, emotionally, and financially demanding, and is largely unremunerated. Yet, it is lucratively exploited to promote local and international corporate brands, generate tourism revenue, and attract foreign investment. Despite this, pageant participants and organizers find creative and collaborative strategies to navigate these demands. As part of our efforts to fashion a “geographies of beauty”, this article argues that the power of beauty, and specifically the labor of beauty, is central to understanding contemporary tourism-centered development efforts.

Martínez, José Ciro; Sirri, Omar

doi: 10.1177/0263775820919773pmid: N/A

This paper examines bakeries and checkpoints through their relationship to the state and connects considerations of affect with the burgeoning literature on infrastructure. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Amman and Baghdad, we centre routine encounters at these sites and argue that infrastructural engagements ignite energies, desires and sentiments that are deeply implicated in how the state plays out in everyday life. We zoom in on these ordinary affects and unpack the situated histories of rule in which they emerge. In Amman and Baghdad, stately affects work in and through infrastructure, doing so with regularity and intensity, and at specific times and places. The state effect transpires and thrives through these quotidian affective resonances, not just in the realm of ideas and imaginaries.

Tazzioli, Martina; De Genova, Nicholas

doi: 10.1177/0263775820925492pmid: N/A

This article identifies and analyses the tactic of kidnapping migrants that is increasingly deployed by states to disrupt, decelerate, and block migrants’ mobility. Kidnapping, we argue, is one of the political technologies of capture used by state authorities in their efforts to reassert control over migratory movements. This analysis contributes to a new understanding of the politics of border enforcement through strategies aimed at the containment of migration. The article focuses on the U.S.–Mexico border and the European border in the Mediterranean Sea as crucial sites where states have increasingly engaged in heterogenous modes of kidnapping.It also considers migrant struggles against these diverse kidnapping tactics. Through a focus on kidnapping, the article expands how we understand border violence and interrogates accounts of the biopolitics and necropolitics of borders that rely on the overly reductive formula of ‘making live/letting die’. The article concludes by highlighting how the critical examination of kidnapping migrants allows us to trace affinities and partial continuities among various historical modes of racialised subjugation that have affected both contemporary migrants and previously colonised populations.

Gross-Wyrtzen, Leslie

doi: 10.1177/0263775820922243pmid: N/A

This article examines the effects of Morocco’s new, “humane” migration policy that claimed to center human rights and integration over securitized border enforcement. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper demonstrates how the new migration policy expanded rather than dismantled the border regime, respatializing it from the edges of Moroccan territory into cities in the interior. Border respatialization was accomplished through abandonment, theorized not as an absence of government but a technique of governance that targets the racialized poor. Focusing on the experiences of migrants living in two urban spaces—an informal migrant settlement and a working-class neighborhood—this paper illustrates how abandonment limits black migrants’ ability to move and transgress the border, and how these effects have site-specific, as well as racial and gendered dimensions. This analysis underscores how humanitarian migration policy may have changed the modality of border violence, but not its substance.

Sahraoui, Nina

doi: 10.1177/0263775820925487pmid: N/A

Building upon and contributing to a feminist geography of borders, the chosen methodological approach examines women’s bodily experiences at a Southern EUropean border, the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article scrutinises the care interactions unfolding in a Centre for Immigrants between medical humanitarians and women residing there in their position as both migrants and patients. The analysis foregrounds the gendered forms of domination that the care function of the humanitarian border entails. I argue that medical humanitarians are vested with the power to decide over women’s mobility in the name of care on the basis of an entanglement of administrative and medical procedures in this border context. While women are subject to greater humanitarian intervention due to the association of their embodied states with vulnerability, the biopolitical migration management of the border grants medical humanitarians a decision-making authority. The article uncovers how medical humanitarianism, enmeshed in the border regime, yields gendered constraints from practices of immobilisation to imposed practices of mothering. It traces the rationale for these practices to racialised and gendered processes of othering that usher in perceptions of undeservingness and sustain a humanitarian claim for biopolitical responsibility over these women’s mobility.

Penny, Joe

doi: 10.1177/0263775819893685pmid: N/A

In April 2016, 200 people in the London Borough of Lambeth occupied Carnegie Library, forcibly preventing its closure by a local council rolling-out deep austerity measures. The nine-day occupation was a high-point of 15 months of struggle to ‘Defend the Ten’ libraries in Lambeth against an austerity agenda the council sought to smoothly administer. Through an in-depth account of the struggle, this paper tells a story of the occupation foregrounding the protracted process and persistent interventions that led up to it. In doing so, it makes two contributions to critical geographical literatures on post-crisis austerity, responding to calls for rich, processual, and multi-scalar accounts of how austerity measures are downloaded and rolled-out, as well as experienced and resisted in everyday and undecided ways. First, going beyond an account of austerity as a fiscal policy imposed on cities from above, the paper makes visible the everyday spatial violence of austerity that is rolled-out, experienced, and resisted as a slow spoiling of social infrastructure. Second, it makes sense of the ambivalent (post)politics of austerity, developing an account of everyday dissensus to reveal mundane non-evental ruptures and the emergence of demands for real democracy in a context of closure shaped by forces of dispossession.

Gieseking, Jen Jack

doi: 10.1177/0263775820926513pmid: N/A

The path to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) liberation has been narrated through a claim to long-term, propertied territory in the form of urban neighborhoods and bars. However, lesbians and queers fail to retain these spaces over generations, often due to their lesser political and economic power. What then is the lesbian–queer production of urban space in their own words? Drawing on interviews with and archival research about lesbians and queers who lived in New York City from 1983 to 2008, my participants queered the fixed, property-driven neighborhood models of LGBTQ space in producing what I call constellations. Like stars in the sky, contemporary urban lesbians and queers often create and rely on fragmented and fleeting experiences in lesbian–queer places, evoking patterns based on generational, racialized, and classed identities. They are connected by overlapping, embodied paths and stories that bind them over generations and across many identities, like drawing lines between the stars in the sky. This queer feminist contribution to critical urban theory adds to the models of queering and producing urban space–time.

Spruce, Emma

doi: 10.1177/0263775820934819pmid: N/A

This article draws on material from an ethnographic study in the gentrifying/gentrified London neighbourhood of Brixton to analyse the relationship between practices of LGBTQ territorialisation and the politics of neighbourhood change. It proceeds with two interrelated aims: to think critically about the ways in which LGBTQ claims to place-based belonging interact with racialised and classed ideologies of displacement and disciplining, and to explore memory’s significance in framing the relationship between LGBTQ people and place. ‘LGBTQ situated memory’ is thus introduced here as a concept that draws attention to the complex, contradictory and dynamic role that site-specific evocations of the past play in contemporary LGBTQ urban politics. By exploring three memory tropes that emerge in Brixton, I show that LGBTQ situated memory can be used to claim spatialised belonging, negotiate culpability for gentrification and disturb progress narratives. Ultimately this article both calls for, and works towards, an approach to sexual geography that foregrounds multiplicity: a multiplicity of LGBTQ situated histories and – as is reflected in the memories explored – a multiplicity of relationships between LGBTQ people and neighbourhood development.