Progress in Human Geography 34(4) (2010) pp.

506–512

Critical geography II: articulating race

and radical politics
Jim Glassman*
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, 217–1984 West
Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada

Abstract: Recent work by critical geographers on race has emphasized the social construction of
race and its articulation with other identities and class processes. This report reviews some of this
critical geography literature, focusing especially on discussions of the articulations between race
and radical politics in North American contexts.

Key words: articulation, class, critical geography, gender, race.

I Race and politics: multiple as a major force through which economic

articulations
In a recent article in The Guardian, Naomi
Klein notes that the election of Barak
Obama to the US presidency has ushered in
a putatively ‘post-racial’ era, the reality of
which is betrayed by both ongoing struc-
tural racism and racist outbursts from the US
far right. Klein notes that ‘Even as individual
blacks break the colour barrier in virtually
every field, the correlation between race
and poverty remains deeply entrenched’. Yet
Obama chose to boycott the UN Durban
Review Conference on Racism, a follow-up
to the 2001 Durban conference boycotted by
George W. Bush – a conclave where, among
other things, activists made the connections
between varied forms of oppression with
slogans like ‘Landlessness = racism’. Yet
even as the Obama administration bails out
large banks and refuses to address racism
disadvantage and instability is produced, his
right-wing detractors accuse him of being
politically radical (Klein, 2009).
If nothing else, these farcical proceedings
force us to recognize that we do not live in a
‘post-racial’ era and, furthermore, that there
are many different kinds of politics that can
be articulated through race. Obama’s center-
right backers have wagered that the success
of an individual Black in attaining the pre-
sidency can appease the left-leaning and
substitute for deeper systemic changes in
the racialized US political economy. The far
right resists even this symbolic politics and
the modest reforms Obama has promoted in
fields like health care. For critical geographers,
this sorry state of affairs raises questions
about how race politics has been – and can be
– articulated with projects for more radical
or progressive social change.

*Email: glassman@geog.ubc.ca

© The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: DOI: 10.1177/0309132509351766

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In recognition of the geographical-
historical specificities of race, upon which
critical geographers and critical race theorists
rightly insist, I focus geographically in this
review on writings about race primarily in
North American – and especially US – con-
texts. In a subsequent review I will take up
articulations of race as part of a broader dis-
cussion of critical geographic work on devel-
opment issues outside North America. I
center the discussion by repeatedly drawing
on four recent books that pose the issues in
particularly detailed and useful ways: Ruth
Wilson Gilmore’s Golden gulag: prisons,
surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing
California (2007); Geoff Mann’s Our daily
bread: wages, workers, and the political economy
of the American West (2007); Laura Pulido’s
Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: radical activism
in Los Angeles (2006); and James Tyner’s The
geography of Malcolm X: black radicalism and
the remaking of American space (2006).
The concept of articulation I use here is
one I borrow directly from Gillian Hart, who
herself adopts and adapts it from the work
of Stuart Hall (1980). Hart has put this con-
cept to productive use in much of her recent
work, and provides a concise explanation
of the concept in her book Disabling global-
ization (2002):
The concept of articulation that Hall is using
encompasses both senses of the term –
namely the joining together of different
elements and enunciation, or the production
of meaning through language. In this combined
sense, articulation refers not just to structural
effect. The idea, rather, is that the ‘unities’ con-
structed through practices and processes of
articulation are almost always contradictory,
and must be continually renovated, renewed,
and re-enacted. (Hart, 2002: 28)
This conception of articulation is in many
ways present in previous works by critical
geographers who examine connections
between race, class, gender, imperial power,
sexual orientation, and the like (see, for
example, Pratt, 2004; Wright, 2006). Much
of the work I review here draws on Hall,
Jim Glassman: Critical geography 507
Hart, and the concept of articulation quite
directly, some more indirectly. While the
concept thus runs through my entire review,
I will examine the modalities of articulation
by noting some of the different themes
that critical geographers concerned with
articulation – and related concepts – have
elaborated in their work on race.
II Constructions of race and racial
hierarchies
Critical geographers work within the
schools of social theory that regard race as
a powerful and irreducible social construct
(eg, Hall, 1980; Omi and Winant, 1986;
Gilroy, 1991; 2000). Critical race theory and
the ‘racial economy’ approach thus provide
important foundations for work on race in
critical geography (Wilson, 2009). Pulido,
for example, makes use of Michael Omi
and Howard Winant’s conception of ‘racial
formation’, with its insistence on the pro-
duction and fluidity of racial categories and
hierarchies (Omi and Winant, 1986; Pulido,
2006: 28–31). Mann works from Hall’s obser-
vation that in Britain ‘race is the modality in
which class is lived’ to develop an account of
the ‘historically specific interplay’ between
race and class in the American West and
the ways in which this produces specific
racialized forms of class (Mann, 2007: 9).
Gilmore provocatively and powerfully defines
racism as ‘the state-sanctioned or extra-
legal production and exploitation of group-
differentiated vulnerability to premature
death’ (Gilmore, 2007: 28) – thus flagging
the significance of state power in producing
racial categories and outcomes. Tyner, as he
does throughout his interrogation of Malcolm
X’s writings, voices a perspective on the
social construction of race through Malcolm
himself. As Malcolm put the matter in a
1965 speech:
Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid –
there’s no such thing … These are so-called
anthropological terms that were put together
by anthropologists who were nothing but the
agents of the colonial powers, and they were
508 Progress in Human Geography 34(4)
purposefully given that status, they were
purposely given such scientific positions, in
order that they could come up with definitions
that would justify the European domination
over the Africans and the Asians. (Tyner,
2006: 37)
Critical geographers have also elaborated
arguments that space is produced racially.
Pulido’s study of Los Angeles’ ‘Third World
Left’ in the 1960s and 70s is built around that
city’s site-specific characteristics, since, as
she notes, ‘it is primarily at the regional or
local scale that more nuanced discussions
of the relationship between race and class
emerge’ (Pulido, 2006: 27). Moreover, it
is not merely Los Angeles as a place but Los
Angeles as a network of globalized flows – in
this case of people, including Black, Latino,
Asian, and white migrants who arrived in the
area throughout different periods of history
– that provides the enabling conditions for
the kinds of racial formation Pulido analyzes.
Gilmore connects some of this same Southern
Californian urban specificity to dynamics
within rural California in order to explain the
tremendous expansion of California’s highly
racialized prison population. In particular,
Los Angeles’ racial politics and crisis of rela-
tive ‘surplus labor’ combined with farm crises
and ‘surplus land’ in rural areas to create the
enabling conditions for expansion of prisons
in rural California (Gilmore, 2007: 128–80;
cf. Bonds, 2009). Mann also addresses the
formation of a racialized working class in
California, but in this case he pays special
attention to the formation of white working-
class identity and wage struggles in the early
twentieth-century Northern California
timber industry (Mann, 2007: 81–113).
Central to the geographical-historical
processes within which race is produced,
in these accounts, is the notion that just as
race is not biologically given and is therefore
politically producible in different ways, so
racial hierarchies are not given or simple but
vary within spatially and temporally spe-
cific social processes. Pulido notes that in
the Los Angeles Third World Left, the
social hierarchies that placed Blacks at the
bottom of the racial hierarchy while pro-
viding somewhat greater opportunity for
recent Asian in-migrants also made the
Black Panthers the leading force in framing
struggles for radical change. On the other
hand, when such struggles abated, Black
activists who had been engaged in them were
more likely than either Asians or Latinos to
suffer serious economic and even emotional
difficulties (Pulido, 2006: 218). As Pulido
summarizes the matter, ‘The complicated
racial and class positions of Asian Americans
remind us that class cannot be equated with
race and that racial formation is a dynamic
process’ (p. 233). Likewise, Gilmore outlines
the development of a geographically com-
plex and fluid racial hierarchy in which Blacks
are in some instances lower in the pecking
order than Latinos – eg, where they form
much of the prison population in a town
with large numbers of Mexicanos/Chicanos
(Gilmore, 2007: 128–80) – but in which
Latinos have also come to form the largest
group numerically within California prisons
(p. 111). Mann notes how in an earlier his-
torical period Chinese migrant workers in the
US and Canadian West occupied positions
in the racialized labor hierarchy that were in
many ways as subordinate as those occupied
by Blacks – albeit mediated by different kinds
of social networks (Mann, 2007: 97–98).
III Articulations of race, class, and
gender
It is within such contexts of complex and
fluid racial hierarchies, produced in histor-
ically and geographically specific situations,
that critical geographers have discussed
the articulations of race, class, gender, and
other social identities. Malcolm X’s thinking,
as Tyner notes, lays out some of the basic
terrain. By the end of his life, the enemy for
Malcolm ‘was no longer reducible to skin
color, but rather was a synthesis of structures,
including racism, capitalism, colonialism, and
sexism’ (Tyner, 2006: 34). For Gilmore,
the political economy that produces relative

surpluses of finance capital, land, labor, and
state capacity simultaneously produces the
class differentiation that becomes racial-
ized through both labor force segmentation
and the production of a highly racialized
prison population (Gilmore, 2007: 30–86).
This political economy also produces highly
gendered outcomes, such as a largely male
(and youthful) prison population, which in turn
enables the development of political activ-
ism by mothers that confront the carcereal
state (Gilmore, 2007: 181–240). Moreover,
the gendering of race politics – sometimes
betraying masculinist reactions to racialized
and gendered class oppression – comes in this
context to be a crucial dimension of radical
and labor politics (Pulido, 2006: 180–14;
Tyner, 2006: 95–102; Mann, 2007: 51–79).
Mann summarizes elements of what has
become the prevalent approach among many
critical geographers, expanding on Hall’s
conceptualization of the articulations of
class and race:
Stuart Hall is right … ‘race is the modality
in which class is lived’ hits the nail on the
head – just not hard enough. Race is indeed
a ‘modality in which class is lived’, but it is
not the only one. Gender and citizenship are
also among these modalities, and we may be
able to add to the list … Class is the ground
of working class politics, even if those politics
are neither class conscious nor class-based …
Thus class is all these other politics, culture,
and subject positions. (Mann, 2007: 155–56)
To return for a moment to Hart’s construc-
tion of articulation, what these accounts
of articulations between race, class, and
gender allow is both a deeper appreciation
of the complex linkages between different
forms of oppression and also an appreciation
of how – in specific geographical-historical
contexts – one might be enunciated through
another, eg, class struggle enunciated in
part as a struggle against a highly racialized
carcereal state, or struggle for racial equality
enunciated in part as a struggle against US
imperialism.
Jim Glassman: Critical geography 509
IV Radical political possibility
Approaches that hinge on notions of articu-
lation seem to share a general perspective on
the production of radical political struggles –
namely, such struggles are not merely given
by existing interests, if those can even be
fully defined (Mann, 2007: 144–61), but have
to be constructed from hard-won political
alliances that are themselves complex in
their moorings. As Pulido succinctly puts
the matter, ‘Connections between various
[political] groups are not automatic but must
be articulated’ – a point she drives home
by noting the efforts of the Latino organ-
ization CASA’s ‘efforts to define ethnic
Mexicans as workers, thereby overlooking
real class and legal distinctions’, and the
Asian organization East Wind’s ‘attempt
to forge a pan-Asian American identity’
(Pulido, 2006: 144). Gilmore (2007) provides
an especially detailed account of this pro-
cess in outlining the activities of the prison
activist organization Mothers Reclaiming
Our Children (ROC). Her summary of the
process of political suturing is worth citing in
some detail:
The process of integrating different kinds
of mothers and others into ROC involved
extensive outreach designed to permeate the
social organization of space … The ROCers
easily recognized one another in the spaces
of the criminal justice system. Outside those
areas, how do people resemble each other? If
we are not all Black, and if all activists are not
mothers, and if all prisoners are not (minor)
children, then who are we? Poor people who
work. As a community of purpose, Mothers
ROC acted on the basis of a simple inversion:
we are not poor because our loved ones are
in prison; rather, our loved ones are in prison
because we are poor. It followed that outreach
should target working poor people and their
youth. Class, then, while the context for this
analysis and action, cannot displace or sub-
sume the changing role and definitions of race:
poor people of color have the most loved ones
in prison. As a matter of fact, the primacy of
class is thoroughly gendered: women who
work to support their families and to free their
loved ones encounter one another as laborers
510 Progress in Human Geography 34(4)
with similar triple workdays – job, home,
justice. (Gilmore, 2007: 237)
Perhaps as much as anything else, work by
critical geographers maintains this sense
that political struggles must take race ser-
iously as an irreducible moment in complex
articulation with class, gender, and other
identities – which also means, of course,
taking class, gender, sexual orientation, and
so on as irreducible moments in the pro-
cess. Complexity of identities and interests,
moreover, allows various sutures to be pro-
duced within political struggles, including
building transnational anti-imperial alliances
among different peoples of color, as in
Malcolm X’s project (Tyner, 2006: 132–38),
the ‘revolutionary intercommunalism pro-
moted by Black Panther Huey Newton, as
analyzed by Nik Heynen (Heynen, 2009a:
416), radical alliances among members of a
US ‘Third World Left’, as in Pulido’s account,
and even alliances among prison activists
that cross not only racial lines but lines of ori-
ginal political orientation (eg, radical versus
more conservative), as in Gilmore’s account
of Mothers ROC.
In this context, one particular issue worth
mentioning is how some critical geographers
approach whiteness. For Mann, rather than
running from or around whiteness (eg,
by regarding it as productive of false con-
sciousness), critical geographers need to fully
engage what it enables and constrains (Mann,
2007: 198, note 54). Taking up this kind of
challenge, Rachel Slocum, for example, notes
the possibilities for whiteness producing
progressive forms of food activism. While she
acknowledges that such food activism, exem-
plified by retail food co-ops and farmers’
markets, has produced and been produced in
part by racial privilege (Slocum, 2006), she
also finds that this racialization is nonetheless
open enough to transformation and cross-
racial alliance building that its progressive
potential should not be dismissed but rather
built. Moreover, racialized experiences
such as those of white farmers can in fact
help to impart greater appreciation of the
agro-ecological requirements of a healthy
human life. As she puts the matter, ‘What
white farmers, feminists, and foodies bring
to writing, companion species, foodways,
land care, regionalism and farmers’ markets
is imperfect and inarticulate but also pro-
ductive and part of ethical relating’ (Slocum,
2007: 532).
Many issues regarding radical political
possibilities and the politics of change are
creatively opened – and left generatively
unresolved – by these sutured approaches to
movement-building and mobilization. Such
issues include what kind of change is actually
worth attempting (see, for example, Heynen,
2009b: 189, 198), and crucial matters such as
the role of media in producing specific racial-
ized identities (eg, Sundberg and Kaserman,
2007: 739–40; Rosati, 2007a) as well as
the possibilities for effectively using media in
popular struggles (eg, Rosati, 2007b: 998–99).
V Race, geographic pedagogy, and the
racialization of the professoriate
The possibilities for political transformation
that critical geographers have outlined are
not limited to what happens ‘in the streets’.
A final important space for potentially trans-
formative articulations of racial politics is the
classroom. Malcolm X, on Tyner’s account,
was himself a radical educator and public
intellectual insisting on the necessity of
working to change people’s conceptions of
the world – especially the conceptions that
people of color had of themselves (Tyner,
2006: 39–42, 45–51). In different space-
times, and in a less vocally revolutionary
register, critical geographers have similarly
voiced concerns to transform educational
institutions and pedagogy as a means to
political transformation. The long history of
Geography as handmaiden of colonialism,
combined with the racialized and gendered
political economies of ‘advanced’ capitalist
countries, forms substantial barriers to devel-
opment of either more progressive peda-
gogy or more multicultural faculty and

classrooms. These issues have been con-
sistently raised by critical geographers in
recent years (eg, Peake and Kobayashi, 2002;
Gilmore, 2002; Pulido, 2002), and have come
up for discussion by women geographers of
color, who are still badly underrepresented
within the discipline (eg, Mathani, 2006).
While the issues these geographers raise
do not admit of easy solutions, betraying as
they do the deep tensions of a racialized and
gendered capitalist political economy, the
notion that transformative political change
must be produced through the active suturing
of different social groups and projects at least
suggests that progressive changes at the
sites of critical geography’s production are
not impossible if creative effort is more con-
sistently applied.
Given one of the glaring absences in the
foregoing review, I should note in concluding
that one area where such creative effort
is clearly needed is in application to First
Nations/Native American studies. Not only
are Native groups especially weakly repre-
sented within geographic faculties, but –
notwithstanding much fine geographic work
on histories of First Nations’ relationships
with white colonizers (eg, Braun, 2002;
Harris, 2003) – there is comparatively little
work by geographers on radical struggles of
Native groups such as the American Indian
Movement, a lacuna much in need of redress.
I cannot provide any such redress here, but
in my next review I will examine some ways
in which critical geographers have begun –
among other accomplishments – to construct
accounts of the racialization of develop-
ment, including in cases of contemporary
Native American struggles.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Noel Castree, Don
Mitchell, and Joel Wainwright for sugges-
tions on this article. Any errors are solely my
responsibility.
Jim Glassman: Critical geography 511
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