Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
2
Displacing Place Identity
Introducing an Analytics of Participation
KEVIN DURRHEIM, CLINTON RAUTENBACH,
TAMARYN NICHOLSON, AND JOHN DIXON
Recovering Affect from Place Identity
Theconstructionandmanagement ofspacehasbeenanimportantmeansforsecuringso-
cial privilege. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the use of segregation to produce
and maintain racial hierarchy (Cell 1982). The slogan of “separate but equal” was em-
ployed to defend both Jim Crow segregation in the United States and apartheid in South
Africa, but it soon became clear that segregation produced inequality. Pettigrew (1979)
described segregation as the linchpin of inequality, because mutually reinforcing circuits
ofsegregationinhousing,education,andemploymentensuredthatablackunderclassbe-
came locked into a spiral of poverty and social disadvantage, an idea confirmed by Mas-
sey and Denton's (1993) monumental analysis of racial inequality and segregation in the
United States.
Although explicit, government enforced policies of segregation have all but disap-
peared, established patterns of segregation and privilege have been preserved. David
Goldberg (1998) has characterized this new segregation as conservationist, peripherally
organized, and class differentiated because it:
conserves and deepens the hold of segregation historically produced as if it were
inthenatureofthings…[and]isproducedbydoingnothingspecial,nothingbey-
ond being guided by the presumptive laws of the market, the determinations of
the majority's personal preferences (17).
In this model, segregation and privilege are instituted by the enactment of personal
preferences. Private vectors of choice—“the informalities of private preferences
