A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
What if anti-Asian violence is not reducible to “hate,” and is in fact a persistent, unexceptional presence in the long historical, Civilizational terror-making machine that is the United States?
What comfort is there in knowing that millions of other Asians in the U.S. feel devastating grief for the victims and their families, as well as terror at what could happen to them, their families, and their neighbors?
Islamophobia in India works to enable violence, subjugate, and intimidate Muslims as a threat to the nation, in several different registers — Indian Muslims as suspect citizens; Kashmiri Muslims as emphatically problematic always already terrorist Muslims; Muslim refugees such as Rohingyas as “invasive pests”; and the collective neighboring Muslim nation-state of Pakistan as an existential enemy.
What makes the case in Northwest China unique is that the digital enclosure of Uyghur and Kazakh space also harnesses state power and private textile manufacturers to hold them in place in factories—producing a permanent underclass of ethno-racial minority industrial workers. Rather than banishing populations to human warehousing spaces such as peripheral ghettos or prisons, in this context terror capitalism works to explicitly “reeducate” the population as industrial workers and implement a forced labor regime.
In the clamor of countervailing projects and logics at work in generating contemporary urban inhabitation and operation, what constitutes viable modes of political practice able to navigate the intricate physical and social landscapes of discrepant times and strange spatial juxtapositions?
In Cairo, urbanizing the desert edge is subject to the possibilities of dreaming, becoming, and occupying yet-to-become ‘spaces of maybe’. In Karachi, The massive city brings together a disparate group of people, all differentially positioned, who collectively endure urban uncertainty. In Istanbul, the politics of the maybe converts low-income home buyers and poor segments of the society into long-term debtors and subordinates them to the mechanisms of financial discipline.
The recent rise in anti-Asian violence against all ages and genders in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic has a deep-seated history in US culture, white supremacy, and harmful stereotypes about Asian migrants as carriers of disease and contagion.
Arboleda demonstrates an astounding grasp of parallel debates within Marxist theory in particular and great skill at being able to deftly weave them together into a structure that reads remarkably well given its theoretical scope.
Focusing on industrial products that traverse various sites and spatial scales of work helps grasp not only the racialization characterizing the pandemic’s impact on working populations but also the progressive potential of new aid and solidarity initiatives.