ABSTRACT
The editors asked me to write an ‘afterword’ to this exciting collection of essays on the new geographies of race and racism as someone who was involved in an earlier generation of geographical research on this topic. When I edited Race and Racism: Essays in social geography (Jackson 1987), there was comparatively little work on the geography of racism. Twenty years ago, the field was dominated by empirical studies of residential segregation (sometimes referred to rather disparagingly as ‘spatial sociology’) and there was relatively little interaction between social geography and other disciplines such as cultural studies. Social construction theory was still quite novel, though it became the norm within a few short years (Jackson and Penrose 1993), and it was considered politically rather daring to use our academic work to challenge the historically entrenched geographies of race and racism. If categories like race were socially constructed, we argued, then we could no longer simply map and measure pre-given ‘racial’ categories. Our job, instead, must be to trace the specific geographies and histories that had given rise to these racialised categories and to examine their social consequences in terms of what David Sibley (1985) insightfully referred to as ‘geographies of exclusion’. Acknowledging its political salience, the language of ‘race’ had been recuperated in the 1980s (albeit in scare quotes to highlight its contentiousness), having been previously submerged in the politer discourse of ethnicity. Where patterns of ethnic segregation had previously been the focus, addressed through the rather clinical lens of dissimilarity indices and other measures of residential difference, new methods were being introduced to explore the more embodied and politicised aspects of our racialised identities. These included ethnographic fieldwork, studies of visual representation, vexed questions of positionality and a welter of other approaches inspired by a range of post-structuralist theory designed to address the discursive construction of ‘race’.
