Race and ethnicity II

Abstract

The intimate turn in geography has centralized approaches to race and ethnicity which foreground bodily encounters. The quirky spatialities of intimacy, involving not just proximities but also distancing and borders, operate in racial and ethnic ‘contact zones’. Skin is one of these, and it is central to an understanding of race and ethnicity as arising through bodily encounters in places. Geographic scholarship emphasizing embodied racial and ethnic topics has highlighted processes of approximation, distancing, and bordering in race and ethnicity as lived events. Set within the intimate turn, this work has the potential to inform geographers and geographic scholarship with respect to criticality, the stickiness of place, and visceral geographies. In addition, the need to elucidate further the relationship between race and ethnicity is underscored.

Keywords

body ethnicity intimacy place race skin

I Race, ethnicity, and the intimate turn in geography: a politics of proximities

Human geography is undergoing a turn to the intimate, wherein bodies and encounters figure prominently (Price, forthcoming). Given the centrality of bodies and encounters in their emergence, race and ethnicity are at the forefront of this conversation. Here, I highlight the contributions that geographers have made to conceptualizing and researching race and ethnicity within the intimate turn in geography. Ultimately, the often quirky spatialities of intimacy’s ‘tense and tender ties’ (Stoler, 2006) with respect to race and ethnicity have a productively unsettling potential.

Race and ethnicity are nothing if not intimate. Intimacy develops ‘usually, though not always, between two people as a consequence of love … [and] can also signal the nebulous world of emotions’ (Thien, 2005: 191–192). Beyond these obvious intimacies, what might be termed a ‘politics of proximities’ is at the core of race and ethnicity as lived events. Race and ethnicity emerge and take shape through bodily encounters and attachments that occur in places, lending them a straightforward spatiality. Less obvious spatialities are also at work with respect to the intimacies of race and ethnicity. Tanner, for instance, discusses mixed race author Nella Larsen’s childhood intimacies as emotional, yet notes too their spatialities:

In every dimension of Nella Larsen’s childhood experience – from the act of eating to the place where she slept, from the way she walked to the posture of her mother’s body in relation to her own – race intruded to shape the tangible sensory, and emotional dimensions of her lived space. (Tanner, 2009: 184)

Thus, while proximities (emotional, physical) come most readily to mind, intimacy also engages borders, distances, and processes of distancing, as with the long-distance friendships studied by Thien (2005), the migrant family relations studied by Pratt (2012), or spatially dispersed individuals who form communities through technological interfaces like social networking, as is increasingly the case for diasporic populations (Bernal, 2006; Parham, 2004).

Geographers of race and ethnicity, drawing on various conceptual and theoretical contributions, particularly by Frantz Fanon on postcolonial blackness and Elizabeth Grosz on embodied feminism, but also the work of Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed, and American novelist Nella Larsen, have made exciting inroads into the geographic understanding of race and ethnicity. Geographers of race and ethnicity seem to have made their most solid contributions in understanding race and ethnicity as events arising through bodily interactions, which will be discussed next through foregrounding the spatialities of intimacy. Where geographers can make clearer and more self-conscious contributions – where the unaddressed issues seem to lurk, and where the opportunities for cohering theoretical and research agendas appear most promising – are in at least two areas. First, given the serious and urgent nature of the institutional, economic, political, cultural, and historical asymmetries surrounding questions of race and ethnicity, how can critical agendas be advanced and communities cohered? Second, what do such discussions contribute to broader topics in geographic scholarship? The conclusion returns, albeit briefly, to these questions.

II Skin

Focusing on the physicality of the bodily encounters that give rise to race and ethnicity necessarily foregrounds skin. Skin is ‘the alpha and the omega of racial difference’ (Dixon Gottschild, 2003: 190). Alongside the rich metaphoric associations with skin lies the bare fact that skin is the most visible organ, displaying in human beings wider chromatic variation than any other animal, an ‘exquisite sepia rainbow’ (Jablonski, 2006: 3). In terms of its varied pigmentation intensities across human individuals and groups, as well as the outward physical configurations that it assumes (i.e. phenotype), skin constitutes ‘the locus of social differentiation’ (Ahmed, 2002: 564). Along with gender, phenotype is the first physical characteristic that we see. It is ‘the most obvious way people vary’, and among animals human skin tone variations are the widest (Jablonski, 2006: 94). Skin tone narrates our biological interface with our ancestors and their environments. In addition, individual skins change tone over time and over the surface of the body (Jablonski, 2006). Coinciding with the era of long-distance travel and conquest, from the 15th century onward, differences in skin tone began to be systematically noted in European accounts, to be mapped, and to appear in European languages (Guy-Sheftall, 2002; Iyengar, 2005; Wade, 2004). In many societies today, skin tone constitutes the primary signifier of race (Omi and Winant, 1994). In the USA, skin color has a longstanding and empirically demonstrated bearing on educational and economic attainment, as well as an array of other life chances (Herring et al., 2004).

Power is inscribed as well as resisted on the surface of the skin: ‘Far from being a neutral point of transition between inner and outer body, skin is inscribed with layers of politicized associations’ (Farber, 2006: 247). Skin modification is a cross-cultural practice. ‘Humans expose [skin], cover it, paint it, tattoo it, scar it, and pierce it, telling a unique story about ourselves to those around us’ (Jablonski, 2006: 3). But there is a larger narrative here as well, involving modifications of the body’s surface that are tacitly or overtly racially aware, including tattoos (Price, 2000), skin lightening (Winders et al., 2005), skin darkening (Johnston, 2005; Obrador Pons, 2007), and hair straightening (Wade, 2004). Skin bears traces of wounds – scars, bruises, abrasions – that can result from the racial microaggressions identified by Sue et al. (2007: 271) as ‘brief and common daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities’ that are directed at racialized individuals and groups. Skin also displays the traces of what might be termed racial macroagressions: colonialism, slavery, rape, genocide, and myriad other violent racial encounters. Racialized encounters are forceful, and the body is both locus and result of these encounters. ‘Bodies remember such histories, even when we forget them. Such histories, we might say, surface on the body, or even shape how bodies surface' (Ahmed, 2007: 154; see also Aldama, 2003; Stoler, 2006).

There have been calls by geographers for more attention to the ‘fleshiness of bodies’ (Slocum, 2008: 852), and in particular for analysis of skin (Straughan, 2010). Though there is a very small literature on skin per se by geographers (Dixon and Straughan, 2010; Pile, 2011), these calls intersect with a broader push to centralize the materiality of raced bodies. ‘The physical body of skin, blood, and bones remains other, a “constitutive outside” that is expelled by discourse (“signified as prior”), but has no rhythms and volume of its own’ (Saldanha, 2006: 12, original emphasis). Although phenotype plays a central role in racialized perceptions, race, ethnicity, and racialized bodies tend rather to be discussed as ‘cultural’; that is, in terms of language, representation, performance, and identity, rather than as (at least partially) a straightforwardly embodied and material phenomenon (Tolia-Kelly and Crang, 2010).

Confronting skin in the analysis of race is, however, particularly problematic. Discussion of specific bodies and their varied physical characteristics is avoided partly in deference to political correctness (Jablonski, 2006; Wade, 2004) and in recognition of the historical legacy of phenocentric approaches to race (Tolia-Kelly and Crang, 2010), in addition to the real conceptual and political difficulties of discussing racialized phenotypes without reifying racialized bodies. Thus we tend to ‘flip flop between flawed alternatives: race as a cultural category versus race as a bundle of biological bits’ (Pile, 2011: 28). In addition, racialized phenotype (but most particularly skin) has long been representationally centralized to the point of fetishization (Crawford, 2008). To dwell yet again on skin risks adding another layer to this troubling colonial obsession, which has identified racialization and bodies so closely with each other that the body becomes the ‘only relevant black geographic scale’ (McKittrick and Woods, 2007: 7). A focus on race as embodied and material can be taken as tying race to bodies and enabling space to ‘[act] as a fixing agent, binding bodies to certain places’ (Carter, 2006: 228). This too risks reifying a longstanding practice, whereby black bodies have been ‘historically marked as static or immobilized, and embodied in a way that links them essentially to the landscape’ (Burman, 2007: 186). In other words, there is a danger in fixating on the surface of racialized skin, and thereby entrapping both racialized bodies in space, and subjectivities within racialized bodies. We very much need to find a way to discuss race and ethnicity as events that are importantly manifest by and through phenotype, especially skin, without reifying race, ethnicity, or racialized individuals.

III Intimate spatialities of race and ethnicity

As human bodies interact through touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste, race and ethnicity, along with other dimensions of humanity, surface. These sensory engagements bring us into physical conversation with other humans as well as other living and non-living entities, which are vital to understandings of landscape that emphasize intimate interchanges between human and non-human elements in place (see Crang, 2010; Rose, 2006). Slocum (2008), for instance, conceives of the Minneapolis farmer’s market as comprised of spaces of intimacy among humans and between humans and more-than-human elements. Bodies brush against one another, verbal and economic transactions occur, and food is handled and ingested. Phenotype matters in these intimate encounters, and it is:

recognized in real, everyday interactions and so play[s] a role in what people do. Bodies stare at each other, or are glimpsed or ignored; they are moved or forced to stop; some meander, others stride; giving way and standing ground, they prevent and enable. (Slocum, 2008: 854)

In Swanton’s account, taxi cabs driven by British Pakistanis provide spaces of ‘intercultural intimacy which repeatedly stage encounters and enable the coming together of differently raced bodies’ (Swanton, 2010: 453). Race and ethnicity, then, might be thought of in terms of an event (Saldanha, 2006), an assemblage (Swanton, 2010), or a ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005), whereby racialized and ethnic bodies emerge as such through sensory minglings with other bodies as well as other living and non-living entities (e.g. images, policies, stereotypes).

Touch resides in and on the skin and its exquisite network of receptors. Touch involves physical contact and as such is narrowly intimate – skin is an intimate contact zone. For the visually impaired, touch can conjure the contours of place through a form of proximal knowledge – a drawing-toward through touch, but also a dissolving of the self through touch and an awareness of absence, that together Hetherington (2003) refers to as praesentia. Additionally, and as Dixon and Straughan note:

Touching has the capacity to dissolve boundaries, to make proximate that which was far away, and in doing so not only rearrange our metaphysics of intimacy and distance, but pose a danger to any and all systems of order that rely on distance and segregation. (Dixon and Straughan, 2010: 454)

While neither Hetherington’s nor Dixon and Straughan’s discussions foreground race or ethnicity, the notions they develop – praesentia and the deployment of proximal knowledge, and the approximating gesture of touch which questions boundaries – can readily be applied to understanding race and ethnicity within intimate parameters.

Processes of distanciation and bordering through the intimacy of touch are implicated in the recognition that touch involves vulnerability. Healthy human skins are fairly resilient; however, they are not impervious to damage through touch. Touches come in many forms, including those which are unwelcome or can wound (Aldama, 2003; Dixon and Straughan, 2010; Hetherington, 2003). Having a ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ skin is used metaphorically to great effect precisely because having a literal skin implies the capacity to be wounded. For instance, Ahmed discusses the alignment of human bodies with the ‘body’ of the nation in forming an anti-immigrant narrative in Britain which is framed as ‘soft touch’:

Indeed, the metaphor of ‘soft touch’ suggests that the nation’s borders and defences are like skin; they are soft, weak, porous and easily shaped or even bruised by the proximity of others. It suggests that the nation is made vulnerable to abuse by its very openness to others. (Ahmed, 2004: 2)

Here the ‘others’ in question are racialized immigrants (see also Pratt, 2012; Varsanyi, 2008).

Vulnerability and proximity also come into play with respect to the gaze – a form of vision that can approximate a touch (wanted or unwanted) – and racialized skin. In an oft-quoted line, Fanon (1967 [1952]: 109) recounts the story of waiting for a train, when a white boy pointed to him and said to his mother, ‘Look, a negro!’. Fanon dwells on the meanings of these three words, emphasizing the visibility of racialized epidermis in a white world. The boy’s gaze is a sort of touch, curious but also frightened – a praesentia of sorts that draws Fanon into his orbit and dissolves Fanon’s sense of self. Fanon is rendered visible and vulnerable. ‘On that day, completely dislocated … I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object’ (Fanon, 1967 [1952]: 112).

Racialized privilege and disadvantage can be understood by what is within and out of reach: a politics of approximation. While this may be understood metaphorically, there is a quite literal dimension as well. Fanon’s discussion of his self-consciously fraught process of reaching across the table for a pack of cigarettes, then leaning back to reach the matches, illustrates that:

In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema … A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world – such seems to be the [racial epidermal] schema. (Fanon, 1967 [1952]: 111, original emphasis)

Inhabiting racially marked skin renders an individual hyper-visible, and hyper-aware of that visibility. Writing of her protagonist in Quicksand, author Nella Larsen notes, for instance, that, as a black woman moving in white spaces, Helga Crane ‘inhabits a body that itself functions as a public space’ (Tanner, 2009: 189). This accessibility, afforded by the hyper-visibility of Helga’s dark skin, can be understood as a form of objectification rendered in spatial terms. Racial privilege, on the other hand, comes with an unselfconscious invisibility that allows the body to move and act while the body trails behind (Ahmed, 2007). The racially unmarked body approximates, but is not approximated: it functions as private space. Such an assertion, however, immediately begs a gendered analysis of racialized bodies, privilege, and access (see also Carter, 2006; Puwar, 2004).

Drawing on Fanon’s cigarette vignette, Ahmed (2007: 154) notes that whiteness ‘puts certain things within reach … Race becomes … a question of what is within reach, what is available to perceive and to do “things” with’. One of the ‘things’ that bodies do is move. While there is a great deal of geographic scholarship on the various modalities of bodily movement – walking, cycling, dancing, aeromobility, and automobility – little has focused specifically on race and ethnicity. An exception is Saldanha (2005, 2007), whose work on trance festivals in Goa centralizes the emergence of race from the spatial and temporal orientations of dancing bodies. Racialized tensions between Indian tourists and white ‘Goa freaks’ segregate trance dancers into a night phase ruled by intoxicated Indian males, and a morning phase when white dancers relinquish their self-segregation and the Indians have exhausted themselves. ‘The later the parties, the whiter, both in the morning and in the season. Full house means empty of Indians. It means viscosity guaranteed’ (Saldanha, 2007: 124, original emphasis). In other words, white dancing bodies ‘stick together’ and increase their leverage to make racialized claims to space. In another example, Swanton (2010: 448) conceptualizes the road as a ‘contact zone’ where race materializes ‘in an encounter as swirling affects, memories, and images stick to particular assemblages of skin, car, and road’. In both accounts, skin provides traction amidst mobility, which allows for race to grab hold.

The unchecked mobility of the racialized body is anxiety-provoking (Burman, 2007) and raises alarms (Aldama, 2003) precisely because it challenges the dictates as well as the habits of bordering and distancing. Carter’s (2006) discussion of ‘passing’ – the adoption of a white racial identity by individuals of indeterminate or mixed racial heritage, which he understands as a form of racial trespassing – is particularly germane. Drawing on Larsen’s novel Passing, set in segregated Chicago and Manhattan, Carter notes the freedoms experienced by the phenotypically indeterminate protagonists Irene and Clare as they move across literally and figuratively racially demarcated terrain, yet the constant fear of exposure and expulsion haunts their actions: exposure through recognition by an acquaintance, or by ‘African avatarism’ wherein ancestry surfaces on the bodies of progeny. ‘Sometimes the body will give you away; sometimes it “pops out”’ (Carter, 2006: 239). Thus, while bodies and spaces are not as fixed to preconfigured notions of blackness and whiteness as we might think, Passing underscores that intimacies both narrow (friendship, marriage, the birth of children) and broad (recognition by an acquaintance, a collision in the street) always threaten to snap spaces – and the bodies that inhabit them – back into habitual patterns.

IV Sticky geographies

Geographers of race and ethnicity are making important contributions to understanding these as material and bodily events that involve intimacies both narrow and broad, and to highlight their associated spatialities which operate in expected as well as unexpected ways. Approximation, distancing, touches that both materialize and dissolve – in all of these, skin is a binding factor. In the introduction, I suggested that inroads remain to be made in the development of critical agendas around race and ethnicity, and the articulation of how the notions developed here inform larger discussions in geography. I now turn briefly to these issues.

Though much has been made lately over ‘criticality’ in geography as a scholarly and political stance (Blomley, 2006), the intimate turn has highlighted potential shifts in the boundaries of what counts as political subject matter in the first place, and how human geographers might engage in activities and alliances beyond and within the academy in order to highlight, contest, and rework asymmetrical power relations. Perhaps criticality is best understood as a horizon of sorts whose parameters are decided situationally rather than following a predetermined narrative arc. This lends an element of indeterminacy to criticality, meaning that progressive politics and scholarship (here, with respect to race and ethnicity) can take the form of coalitions built, collectivities produced, crowds catalyzed, memory cohered, witness borne, hope generated, and alternative futures envisioned. Yet there is always the possibility, too, of regression, disappointment, and failure (see also Berlant, 2000). Guthman’s (2008) account of white student disappointment upon encountering a lack of resonance concerning their well-intentioned efforts to provide ‘good food’ to residents of black neighborhoods is illustrative here. Yet, as Guthman and others (Ahmed, 2002; Gibson-Graham, 2008) note, the sorts of approximations needed to build community are achieved through recognizing and accepting distances – becoming hopeful (Anderson, 2006) – and putting them to work politically.

Geographers have long noted that the physicality of the built environment involves a degree of ‘stickiness’ or fixity that is not necessarily in synch with its more fluid elements: economic, but also political, demographic, and environmental. Such stickiness can lead to conflicts but also to dialogues, opportunities, and transformations – a variant of the sociospatial dialectic. Place emerges from the bodily interplay of circulation and stickiness – ‘bodies become viscous, slow down, get into certain habits, into certain collectivities, like city, social stratum, or racial formation’ (Saldanha, 2006: 19). Here I have suggested that racial and ethnic ‘contact zones’ – roads, farmer’s markets, neighborhoods, taxis, dance floors, human skins – provide traction for the emergence of race and ethnicity. Connections, understandings, and interruptions of racial and ethnic formations can occur in such zones. Yet the viscosity of contact zones can become inhibitorily sticky, entrapping racialized bodies, fixing them in space, excluding or immobilizing them. Viscosity is thus not solely a negative force against which our anti-racist energies must be cultivated (Saldanha, 2006), but it can also result in a transformative stretching of the boundaries of racial and ethnic contact zones. Becoming stuck can provide an opening for the transgressive, transformative potentials of a body. In other words, stickiness can be disruptive and, therefore, potentially productive.

Emplaced bodies develop rhythms, habits, and attachments which shape embodied places. Places are defined by their margins, and the boundaries of places are delimited racially through habit, ‘choice’, and inertia at least as much as through edict. Places ‘acquire the ‘skin’ of the bodies that inhabit them … White bodies gather, and cohere to form the edges of such [white] spaces’ (Ahmed, 2007: 157), and ‘black people live in spaces that constitute them as they in turn constitute it’ (Carter, 2006: 228). The edges of spaces – borders – constitute zones where the authority of a place is both most in question and the most heavily exerted. Sticking and circulation can reshape (‘stretch’, ‘contract’, ‘redraw’, ‘soften’, ‘dissolve’, ‘suture’, or ‘harden’) the boundaries – the skins – of places. Thus the racially marked skins of place are, like the skins of people, ‘a register of the body’s margins’ (Farber, 2006: 247), and they are zones of contact and contradiction – they are quirky, if you will – having to do with distancing and bordering as well as approximating and merging.

Thus a first contribution of geographic work on the intimate spatialities of race and ethnicity concerns place; the second concerns the notion of viscerality (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010). Beyond simply being ‘about’ bodies, race is visceral. Race involves blood and guts, both metaphorically and literally: the one drop of ‘colored’ blood it takes to make one black and the laws stemming from blood-based hypodescent formulas policing touch, visibility, and movements of all sorts; the forceful histories of race played out on and through human bodies; the role of specific body parts – brain, bones, heart – thought to determine intellectual and physical capabilities; and the mysterious corporeal interiorities of the human soul, nature, and morality.

Finally, the relationship of race and ethnicity to each other merits further examination. Rather than constituting distinct subject positions, it may be productive to view race and ethnicity as plastic with relation to each other. Yet geographers of race and ethnic geographers have by and large failed to engage substantively beyond scattered interpersonal connections. Perhaps this explains my frequent recourse to `race' in this article, as opposed to `race and ethnicity' together. However, this conversation matters because, among other things, the status of new immigrants from Latin America and Asia as ethnic or as racialized – as potential citizens or as expendable – is uncertain. The resulting threat of interrogation, incarceration, and deportation that hovers over racialized immigrants constitutes an example of the stickiness associated with borders and other contact zones such as airports and embassies. The discourse of terror has tightened the skins of places through the recoding of formerly ‘ethnic’ bodies as racialized: namely the assertion that ‘Muslims are the new niggers of this globalizing racial americanization’ (Goldberg, 2004: 9). In sum, critical geographers are poised to connect insights arising from the geographical study of race with those emerging from geographic scholarship on ethnicity.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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