Anderson isolates two competing discourses
that have racialized Redfern. The first emerges
from ‘Aboriginal rights’ arguments that position
the suburb at the heart of ‘the Aboriginal com-
munity’, a physical site that symbolically coa-
lesces the multiplicity of indigenous voices
into a ‘pan-Aboriginal struggle against White
Australia’ (1993a: 86). Anderson concentrates
her attention on how this ‘cultural and political
invention’ has come into conflict with racist,
white, constructs of Redfern and Aboriginality
during the early 1970s. With the help of archive
and interview material she shows how ‘[p]oliti-
cians and officials ... drew on an established
(pejorative) set of images of Aboriginality, not
out of any simple “prejudice”, but in order to win
the support of local White residents’ (1993a: 86–7).
This process, Anderson continues, helped ‘con-
struct a negatively racialized Redfern that has
not eroded with time’. Thus Redfern became a
central and disputed category in a socio-spatial
conflict between white and black activists and
sympathizers.
We believe that, however sophisticated its
application, a focus on explicitly racialized
places and peoples unintentionally runs the risk
of normalizing the spatial dominance of the non-
racialized majority. Certain critics have chal-
lenged this dominance from a different direction.
For example, Shaw’s (2000; 2001) recent ethno-
graphic research in the Redfern district of Sydney
takes whiteness as its principal focus:Away from the stark black/white racialised boundary
near The Block [i.e. the Aboriginal identified area of
Redfern], where the space of whiteness absorbs other
ethnicities, whiteness appears to fade into ethnic
neutrality. Away from the Aboriginal ‘other’, whiteness
is not so visible. My observations of the spaces near
The Block lead me to think about how whiteness
strengthens and consolidates against the presence of
The Block. (2001: 8)A parallel development in those countries where
the rural is connoted as white, such as Britain, is
the new attention being given to non-urban
environments. This focus brings into view the
mutually reinforcing relationship between the
racialized urban and the racially unmarked
rural. Urry asserts that the ‘“racialisation” of
the phenomenology of the urban works partly
in England through the contrasting high valua-
tion which is placed upon the English country-
side which is taken to be predominately white’
(1995: 27). It is important to note that this
relationship does not necessarily turn on the pres-
ence or absence of non-white people. Indeed, it
can be detected within visions of the degenerate
and unnatural atmosphere of cities from thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As we
shall now see, the explicit interaction of dis-
courses of class and race within the spatial-racial
logic of this period makes it a particularly reveal-
ing illustration.
As a consequence of the large-scale migration
of rural families to the city that characterized the
late nineteenth century, the British (more espe-
cially the English) working class was often con-
strued to be losing its national and racial
rootedness. ‘Traditional’ rural folk were being
lost to racial degeneracy. In Rural England
(1902) Rider Haggard noted that this migratory
flow ‘can mean nothing less than the progres-
sive deterioration of the race’ (1976: 218). In
The Poor and the Landthe same author con-
trasted the ‘puny pygmies growing from towns
or town bred parents’ with the ‘blood and sinew
of the race’, the ‘robust and intelligent’ country-
man (Haggard, 1905: xix). The racialized con-
trast between urban and rural relied, in part, on
an association of the urban with immigrant
labour. However, the perceived threat of the
urban also drew upon an existing and specifi-
cally English discourse of national and racial
romanticism which placed the essence of
Englishness in ‘the people[s] ... natural breeding
and growing grounds’ (Lord Walsingham,
quoted by Low, 1996: 19), the countryside.
Indeed, the similarities between the stereotypes
of the ‘rosy cheeks’ and ‘healthy complexion’ of
the English peasant and the ‘vigorous’ nature of
bourgeois whiteness are suggestive of Victorian
middle-class writers’ investment in rural nostal-
gia as a kind of origin myth of their own ascen-
dance. This impression is strengthened by the
fact that rural workers in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries tended not to be subject
to horrified explorers but rather to reverential
cultural retrieval. By 1911 folklore studies had
been published on 29 of England’s 40 counties.
Colls’ (1986; see also Howkins, 1986) observa-
tions of the development of ‘folk study’ in the
period draw a direct contrast between the valued
purity of the rural past and the racially degraded
urban present.
Such historical context helps to further under-
mine the fallacy identified by Watt: ‘One aspect
of the importance of the inner-city discourse on
race is that it tends to re-inforce the notion that
racism only spatially occurs where black people
live’ (1998: 688). Watt’s ethnographic study of
the everyday geographies of white, Asian and
black young people living in the ‘commuter belt’
area of the south-east of England illuminates the
severely constricted spatial movement possible
for racialized people within such a ‘non-racialized’
‘all-white’ context. He found that:CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES OF RACIALIZATION 3053029-ch15.qxd 03-10-02 10:54 AM Page 305