“The work of a geographer should question and unsettle the
presuppositions about space and geography that underlie the hegemonies of an
unjust world.” –Joel Wainwright, Decolonizing
Development
“Uneven development is social inequality blazoned into the
geographical landscape, and it is simultaneously the exploitation of that
geographical unevenness for certain socially determined ends.” –Neil Smith, Uneven Development
For me, what everything comes down to is uneven development,
especially the spatial distribution of inequality. The multi-scalar
inequalities of our world are profound, saddening, and frightening: from the
profoundly unjust disparities between the United States and Nigeria, to the
vast divisions between Mississippi and California, to the gentrification and
ghettoization of Manhattan, to the superior position a husband wields over his
wife. The social injustice of gratuitous wealth derived from desperate poverty,
while frightening power sits side-by-side cruel oppression lights the fire of passion
that drives my work. Of course economic realities intersect with other
divisions driving us apart, especially race and gender (that’s why in common
everyday English parlance we talk a lot about “socioeconomic inequality.”
Because social divisions are so closely related to economic inequalities, especially
in the United States where race and income are dramatically correlated).
I argue that political-economic structures are the
birthplace of these socially constructed (i.e. imagined but with very real
effects on our everyday life) identities. For example, Mao pretty successfully
eradicated male/female divisions under communism (not saying it’s a good or a
bad thing, but it’s a thing). So if you’re going to put me in a box with a
label on it, I guess that makes me a Marxist. For me, the political-economic
structures, that is capitalism for us in the United States and state socialism
for my dear friends in China, is incredibly influential and, dare I say,
crucial component of shaping our world.
A feminist might disagree with me, saying that the
patriarchy and gender are the most influential factors in shaping our world,
especially in the homes and on individual bodies. A poststructuralist would say
that power comes from below and our world is made up of complex and dynamic
power struggles that cannot be reduced to political-economic structures, but
are realized in multiple, corporeal, discursive, and material ways.
Note that Marx actually has very little to do with communism
or socialism. Just because Stalin and Mao co-opted Marx’s work for their own
state ideological projects, doesn’t mean that Marx would have agreed with them.
Marxist critiques are about the way political-economic and material structures
shape our lives, not about massive state projects that are actually about capital
accumulation and violence.
Also notice I said “shaping our world”, and not “determining.”
Because while I see the world through a Marxist lens—that is, I see
inequalities and power hierarchies driven by money everywhere I go—I recognize
that there are other sites of domination and oppression that sit outside the
state, capital, and labor. If you know anything about me by know, you know I
hate boxes and I hate labels even more.
The structuralist (aka Marxist) versus poststructuralist
divide is a false binary. Poststructuralists draw on Marx too. We cannot and
should not let ourselves be limited by these boxes and labels because in reality
these two theoretical approaches influence and collide with one another. And,
harping back to my previous post, I would argue that perhaps the most
successful academics draw on both, defying the boundaries of one or the other, balancing
their work with one foot in each camp. There are Marxist-feminists too.
Now that being said, I’m not a traditional Marxist, who
would probably argue something about how capitalist social relations determine
everything from culture to identity. I draw on other theorists as well, all of
whom drew on Marx but also challenged him.
Gramsci said that the relationship between economics and
culture was mutually constitutive—there is a constant back and forth creative process
between material realities and ideological constructions where one does not
determine the other, instead they create each other.
Foucault argued that knowledge is power. For him, power was
not about top-down domination, but rather a corporeal, multiple, material,
capillary, productive, and increasingly invisible process of relationships. He argues that w
Lefebvre, probably my favorite theorist of all, said that we
need to move out of the factory and into the cities to understand social relations
to be about the partnership between the state and capital in the production of
space—that is, he argued that the commodification of land, especially in urban
areas, was key to understanding our (very fucked up) world.
Today I will sit in an empty room (with a window, thank God)
for 9 hours. During those 9 hours (technically it is an 8-hour exam with a
1-hour lunch break but anyone who knows me knows I will not be taking a lunch
break), I will answer 2 of the 4 questions my committee has prepared. The exam
is closed-book and closed-note. I will have access to nothing except for a
blank laptop, a pen and paper, and a bibliography. The bibliography is the list
of books and articles I made 8 months ago, the list of publications that I told
my committee I would read in preparation for this day. I need the bibliography
so I can reference authors without having to memorize the publication dates as
well.
The questions will direct me to a single topic, but in
answering the questions I will need to evaluate the previous work in my field (“good,
but missing some important spatial components”), explain how and why geography
is important and should be used more often “spatial relationships are key
always!”), position myself within the major debates in the field (“Marx is
awesome, but feminists are cool too”), make a clear and cohesive argument about
my position (“You can’t deny the power of capitalism because inequality and
uneven development”), and argue about where the field should go in the future (“We
really need to talk more about the spatial relationships of territory, scale,
and colonialism when we talk about nationalism”).
I will do this 3 times over the course of 7 days: first,
political geography. Second, China geography. Third, urban geography.
In preparation for the political geography exam, I’m writing
a manifesto for the incorporation of geographic considerations into the study
of nationalism.
Nationalism is different from other claims because it’s
about identity. It’s personal, emotional, embodied, and violent. Nationalism
involves spatial (i.e. territorial) and temporal (i.e. historical) claims. The
nation manifests a key relationship between people and territory.
The nation is built on material, spatial, and territorial relationships.
The spatial relationships of capitalism are key to understanding the history of
nationalism as a Western construct to accumulate capital and protect private
property. Nationalism is deeply connected to land and control of that land,
which invokes violence to protect the people on that land. Conflict, land, and
territory are deeply connected to nationalism.
While the political and social construction of the nation is
ideological and cultural, it carries with it tangible effects. Nationalism as
ideology brings with it war, violence, and oppression of minorities. Sometimes
the idea of the nation can be inspirational in liberation struggles, but most
of the time the post-colonial nation continues its economically oppressive
relationship with its colonizer, and the ethnic and class divisions set up by
the colonizer continue as the post-liberation nation repeats the cycles of
violence and oppression manifest in nationalist ideology built on territorial
and capital accumulation (read: we need a new system).
The ideology of nationalism is based on modern (i.e.
post-Enlightenment in Europe) ideas of space, time, and money. For example, the
nation is seen as temporally infinite, simultaneously looking back into ancient
territorial claims from the beginning of time, and looking forward into the
progress of modernity. Meanwhile, the space of the nation is seen as homogenous,
static, and fixed—never contested or changing.
The nation built on capital accumulation presents a paradox.
Capital depends on territorial fixity to protect its investments in factories,
roads, bridges, airports, and houses. However, capital is also mobile—it depends
on its ability to move around to find the cheapest prices and extract the
highest profits. The result of this is profound inequalities between the First
World and the Third World—where the Western nations move their factories to
places they can find the cheapest labor. But the nation finds itself in a dilemma.
How can capital protect its investments and deal with overaccumulation (e.g.,
unemployment, empty and expensive houses), while still providing a place for
capital to be mobile, cheaply invest and accrue the highest profits without
leaving the country? The solution is to create divides of inequality within a
single country. This way capital can exploit the poor in the (often) rural parts
of the country, but not leave the country. We see this in the US as many big
corporations are finding their headquarters in South Carolina and Georgia, moving
away from the expensive parts of New York and California. This solution is
called “internal colonialism,” where a country tries to collect many different
peoples under one unified national identity, while dividing them economically
and culturally to create a division of labor. Identity built on difference
(e.g., race and gender) is set up within a single country to exploit the poor
and uneducated creating a paradox of unified diversity (e.g., women all over
the world, people of color in the US, Scots in the UK, Tibetans in China, hill
tribes in Southeast Asia, indigenous peoples in South America).
Of course this happens on multiple scales: global, national,
local. One of the key contributions of geography is to understand the social
construction of scale. First, capital produces social scales to give uneven
development its coherence. Second, capital produces uneven territorial hierarchies
of scale: global>national>local>household>individual. We often see the state as
more powerful than individuals. But actually we know this not to be true.
Individuals defy the state all the time (and vice versa), from jaywalking to drug crime to
protesting to emigrating. Indeed, with the labor and capital mobility of
intensified globalization, we see many cities becoming more powerful than the
countries in which they are located. And the diverse populations in those
cities no longer identifying with a nation. We are moving toward new
definitions of national identity and citizenship. In these examples, we can see
the individual body moving through space as transgressing the global
imaginaries of national power.
There’s a little taste of Marxist theory on nationalism for
you. I could probably write another 10 pages, but I’m going to stop now.
