LITMIR.BIZ

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that the urban scale was undergoing a restructuring process that included a rescaling of state institutions into supra- and subnational forms of governance.¹⁶

      The contested everyday production of regions is critical because they are much more than state-sanctioned territorial units. They also function as spatial ideologies that rely on specific social, political, and economic assumptions. These ideological foundations are necessary because regions “are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, they are our (and others’) constructions.”¹⁷ To create regions, as Julie-Anne Boudreau asserts, “actors deploy spatial imaginaries and practices in their efforts to achieve their political objectives, incrementally producing coherent political spaces.”¹⁸ Regions are therefore “constructed entities, ways of organizing people and place” through political and cultural narratives that link economic forces to everyday spaces.¹⁹ The discursive and material production of regions provides an opportunity to examine how space is imagined, produced, and contested. This combination of ideology, normative discourse, and power is what makes regions such a useful geographic scale through which to interrogate the production of space and race.²⁰

      TERRITORIALITY AND RACE

      When Shougang workers from China took their blowtorches to the old Fontana mill in 1993, they were dismantling part of a blue-collar manufacturing economy that built up many post–World War II U.S. cities. In Southern California military spending drove the region’s incredible post-1940s growth and produced industrial suburbs in Southeast Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.²¹ The region’s expansion continued during the Cold War years of the 1960s and 1970s, when defense spending lured new industries and workers into the region.²² The postwar manufacturing boom had enabled an earlier generation to pursue something called the American Dream. In fact, what it meant to be middle class in Southern California was intricately linked to the production of blue-collar industrial suburbs in cities like Cudahy, Southgate, and Maywood. These suburbs were home to major manufacturing companies, many of which benefited from defense industry government contracts. They were also almost exclusively white and were kept that way by restrictive racial covenants that prevented the sale of homes to nonwhite residents.²³ Deindustrialization, including the Kaiser mill’s dismantling, foretold the end of the Keynesian spatial order that made the United States and California into a global economic powerhouse.

      Something that often gets lost in discussions of regional development is the role that spatial fixing or the place-boundedness of capitalism has played in the production of racialized geographies. The paradox of wanting to erase racially marked bodies while needing their labor has ultimately been resolved through a variety of spatial solutions.²⁴ Work camps and barrios are just two examples of how differentiated space has been deployed to contain and control racialized bodies while at the same time making their labor available for capital. This was certainly the case when Southern California’s war economy needed the labor of Black and Brown bodies but used the racist techniques of segregated homeownership and unequal wage markets to keep them in their place.²⁵

      Southern California’s industrial suburbs were thus enshrined—as a normative idea of what constituted a good life—by a Keynesian spatial regime that was built on racial and class difference. Even though race and space are deeply entangled, the two are often treated as parallel rather than mutually constituted processes. For example, studies that address race often treat space as a container for specific social relationships. Much of the literature on Chicanx and Latinx identity is infused with spatial tropes in which cultural practice is tied to specific spatial scales like the border, the barrio, the home, and the body.²⁶ Some Chicana and Chicano studies scholars have argued that the spatial processes of barrio formation—as a political project of containment—resulted in the production of counterhegemonic cultural practice.²⁷ This shift toward space and culture was deeply influenced by feminist theories of standpoint epistemology and intersectionality.²⁸ Likewise, scholars who study mobility—migration, white flight, diasporas—must all grapple with space as a critical element of their work (even if the focus on mobility suggests that space and place are limiting).²⁹ More recent studies on race have focused on multicultural neighborhoods as spaces of conviviality and exchange.³⁰ These spaces, which were deeply influenced by the enactment and dissolution of racially segregated housing practices, have emerged as places where Asian, Latinx, and Black residents are learning to craft polycultural identities and practices that are not centered in white normative experiences.³¹ All of this scholarship has provided critical insight into the racial state and the spatial techniques deployed by the architects of racialization.

      The intersections between race and space can be traced back to European colonialism, when the imperial spatial logics of capitalist expansion intimately linked a new global order to a morality that dictated the erasure and subjugation of racialized others. Capitalism and imperialism have formed a deadly partnership in which universal assumptions about progress and modernity were tied to white supremacy and manifest destiny, including in the American West. In fact, “modern political-economic architectures” as Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira Da Silva argue, “have been accompanied by a moral text, in which the principles of universality and historicity also sustain the writing of the ‘others of Europe’ (both a colonial and racial other) as entities facing certain and necessary (self-inflicted) obliteration.”³² This deadly moral text is critical for the survival and territorial expansion of global capital. It “asphyxiates” what Henri Lefebvre described as the “historical conditions that gave rise to it, its own (internal) differences, and any such differences that show signs of developing, in order to impose an abstract homogeneity.”³³ Such normative economies are incredibly powerful because they not only define monetary exchanges; they also demarcate those who inhabit a life that is worth living from those who do not. The result has been that global capitalist space has condemned devalued bodies and the spaces they produce to a life of precarity and premature death.³⁴

      Much of the early work on globalization tried to figure out the relationship between highly mobile circuits of capital and the embedded specificities of local places. It made sense to ask what the deeper connections between political economy and space were if we wanted to move beyond the notion that spaces and places were more than just containers for larger (read as more determinative) social processes. If, as geographers and urban planners argued, space still mattered, then it was important to demonstrate how and why.³⁵ As scholars tried to decipher the multiplicity of actors and forces involved in producing something called globalization, a tension emerged between those who focused on the power of global capital to transform local space and those who argued that the local still mattered and that place-based difference was key to the production of a globalized society.³⁶

      Difference is in fact essential to the creation and capitalization of new markets; it allows investors to determine where they should and should not invest.³⁷ This is where universal and abstract models of capitalism fall short. While an abstract model may provide important insights into the relationship between social structures and space, it cannot substitute for a more concrete analysis of how various forces and actors, including gender and race, combine to produce locally specific spatial orders.³⁸ What’s needed is a type of critical inquiry into space that recognizes macroeconomic forces while not glossing over the specificities of places and people. The key is to understand how these specificities are interconnected into a sometimes diffused web of social relations, which means that to understand the logic of global capital, we have to engage with the local specificities of space. This is an important methodological point about the importance of understanding specificity as the embodiment or experience of social processes.³⁹

      Indeed, only by looking at what Katherine Mitchell termed “the specific configurations of differing economic systems within their own geographical and historical contexts” will we grasp the intricate and contingent nature of global capitalism.⁴⁰ The idea that capital has a critical “logic which works in and through specificity” rather than a universal abstract mode provides a theoretical bridge that enables us to traverse the sometimes wide gap between political economy and locally embedded cultural notions of difference and articulation.⁴¹ Social movements provide one way to examine how locally embedded actors confront the

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