Cultural Geography

the term ‘black’ has functioned to exclude different

ethnic minority groups from the UK policy

debate, as his example of South Asian subjects

clearly reveals (see Modood, 1988; 1994). This

work demonstrates how particular minority

ethnic groups may not necessarily identify with

the dominant discourses of either racism or anti-

racism, but instead prefer to mobilize around

religious or cultural forms of identity. Moreover,

the implosion of a black/white racial dualism has

also had the effect of laying open to inspection

the category of whiteness. The social geographer

Peach only exaggerated slightly when he

recently declared, ‘If the attempt to impose a

single “black” identity on diverse ethnicities was

a bad fault of the past, in the 1990s, homogenis-

ing “whiteness” is now considered to be worse’

(2000: 621).

Postcolonial writings on cultural syncretism

and hybridity may also be claimed to have pro-

vided a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1990) that trans-

gresses the black/white racial dualism. For Homi

Bhabha, cultural hybridity encourages a radical

proliferation that ‘gives rise to something differ-

ent, something new and unrecognisable, a new

area of negotiation and representation’ (1990:

211). This new ‘third space’ emerges from the

colonial encounter and the more recent historical

processes of globalization, migration and settle-

ment. Kevin Robins notes: ‘Globalisation, as it

dissolves the barriers of distance, makes the

encounter of colonial centre and colonised

periphery immediate and intense’ (1991: 25).

The supposedly new hybrid ethnicities that are

flourishing in many urban areas (Back, 1996) are

the consequence of this postcolonial, globalizing

dynamic. The third space, or what Mary Louise

Pratt has called the ‘contact zone’, may thus be

cast as a space where ‘the spatial and temporal

co-presence of subjects previously separated by

geographic and historical junctures, and whose

trajectories now intersect’ (1992: 7) can come

together. In doing so it gives rise to new, hitherto

unimagined cultural identities that are hybrid

translations of their former antecedents.

However, critics have suggested that the focus

on cultural identity that characterizes these

assessments of contemporary hybridity has been

at the expense of political and social concerns.

For those left unconvinced by the rhetoric of

postmodern possibilities, racism remains a far

more salient site of concern than new ethnicities

(Cohen, 1999). This cautious approach to the

claims associated with Bhabha and other post-

colonial and new ethnicities scholars indicates an

unwillingness to allow discourses of cultural

hybridity to subsume and marginalize the way

racial demarcation and division are reproduced.

Globalization and postmodernism have not led to

the implosion of identifications with nations,

regions or localities. Moreover, the ‘immediate

and intense’ nature of the urban ethnic mix is,

surely, as old as cities themselves: the third space

is a tradition not a novelty. This, in turn, suggests

that, although the established binaries of western

racial discourse may have become suspect, the

collapsing of old distinctions should not be con-

fused with the dawn of a new post-racist era.

A final concern with the new ethnicities

approach remains a geographical tendency for

researchers to focus upon urban areas in devel-

oped countries. This has led some geographers to

write of ‘the hegemonic status of the inner-city

discourse in relation to race and space’ (Watt,

1998: 688), and others to assert that ‘These

geographies are offered as colourful empirical

demonstrations of the cultural cosmopolitan-

ism that is the contemporary Western moment’

(McGuinness, 2000: 225–6). Notwithstanding

these criticisms, research on cultural identities and

new ethnicities has offered some useful insights

into subjectivity and race. However, to counteract

some of the geographical limitations of this work

we will now turn our attention to recent, global

studies on whiteness and white places undertaken

by contemporary social and cultural geographers.

HISTORIES AND GEOGRAPHIES

OF WHITENESS

The most influential group of writers in the field

of what we may tentatively call ‘white studies’

has emerged from a Marxist tradition of histori-

cal scholarship in the US. These new labour

historians have applied their knowledge of the

history of labour movements to understand how

whiteness has become, in the words of Theodore

Allen, ‘the overriding jet-stream that has

governed the flow of American history’ (1994: 22).

As David Roediger has demonstrated in The

Wages of Whiteness (1992) and Towards the

Abolition of Whiteness(1994), social class and

ethnic privilege are mutually enforcing compo-

nents in the historical making of the American

working class. For Roediger whiteness fulfilled

its role as a divisive form of cultural capital that

served to separate established immigrants from

‘new’ immigrants, Irish peoples, southerners,

slaves and those yet to be fully assimilated into

the sacred pantheon of ‘white’ American citizen-

ship. For Roediger, the US has watched unfold

‘The sad drama of immigrants embracing white-

ness while facing the threat of being victimised

as nonwhite’ (1992: 180).

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES OF RACIALIZATION 307

3029-ch15.qxd 03-10-02 10:54 AM Page 307