“The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category” from Annals of the Association of American Geographers (1987)

Using a nomenclature of colonies, enclaves and ghettos to distinguish among instances of choice and constraint, geographers have shown a long-standing concern for the causes and consequences of urban ethnic segregation. This chapter presents a seminal work on Vancouver’s Chinatown and offers a challenge to this taxonomy of territorial difference by confronting the unexamined concept of race itself. It focuses on the early Chinese settlement in Vancouver, and effectively demonstrates the links among racial ideology, institutional practice, and Chinatown’s vice district reputation. The chapter examines how Europeans’ “imaginative geographies” during the imperial age helped intensify their own cultural identity by heightening their difference from the other cultures. The analysis of Chinatown as a racial and spatial category problematizes the concepts of race and ethnicity, challenging explanations which assume essentialism – the idea that such differences are intrinsic rather than social constructs.