Theorizing Practice, Visualizing Theory, and Playing by the Rules

Sally Gomaa

continued . . .

Playing by the Rules

An example of this view of spatial arrangement as the manifestation of the distribution of power is Kenrick Ian Grandison's study of how the campuses of Historically Black Colleges and Universities "record through space the African American struggle for higher education and, more generally, the cultural history of race relations in the postbellum South" (1). A study of the campuses of HBCUs like Tuskegee and many others in Alabama reveals that they were generally located in an unattractive section of the town, that they offered their prospective students entrance by way of the "back," and that they were usually built "on the other side of the track" in areas difficult to connect with. Reading these factors in the architecture of HBCUs (as opposed to majority campuses and their paradigm of design) as metaphors for the "place" of the black body in the segregated South provides a "spatial record" of the "subtle day-to-day forms of racial subordination," which may compensate for "the paucity of written records about ordinary or marginalized people" (2).

The study of these campuses does not simply reveal the disadvantaged position of black bodies: this fact is clear even without factoring in a spatial relationship. But the study of these campuses in terms of negotiable, socially-formed spaces suggests the possibility of black agency in places where it was least expected to be found.

So what could have made these properties so attractive to their new [black] owners? First, their relative low cost as abandoned places would have been an advantage for these poorly funded schools, a fact that in itself is significant in a cultural-historical analysis. Second, the acquisition of a marginalized property-or the tolerance of the marginalizing property-would have offered the additional benefit of conveying that these institutions were not willing to transgress the delicate social boundaries of the postbellum South, conveying the impression to local white supremacits that, while their missions were lofty, their proper place at the bottom of society was well understood.

At its most basic and functional level, what these innovators had to achieve was progress under camouflage (9).

Grandison's study of the campuses of HBCUs is thus the study of a subversive movement by which black agency negotiated its "place" on both the micro level (the construction of new premises or the utilization of existing ones) and on the macro level ("building their own civilization").

Another example is Soja's (spatial) story of Los Angeles. For Soja, spatiality is "socially produced, and, like society itself, exists in both substantial forms (concrete spatialities) and as a set of relations between individuals and groups, an 'embodiment' and medium of social life itself" (120). This active role has been obscured by "the physical-mental dualism" which has monopolized historical debate. This dualism is responsible for two illusions about space: (1) the illusion of transparency, (i.e., an anti-essentialist, anti-ontological abstract space), and (2) the illusion of opaqueness, (i.e., a material, concrete space, which is not produced and cannot be read). So how can a coherent theory about space be formulated between these two poles?

Spatiality exists ontologically as a product of a transformation process, but always remains open to further transformation in the context of material life. It is never primordially given or permanently fixed. This may seem obvious when so simply stated, but it is precisely this transformative dynamic, its associated social tensions and contradictions, and its rootedness in active spatial praxis, that has been blocked from critical theoretical consciousness over the past hundred years (122).

This transformative dynamic elucidates the history of Los Angeles and revolutionizes the language of traditional geography.

The massive wave of immigrants and its consequent changes in the economic situation have turned Los Angeles into a contested space where "all that was local becomes increasingly globalized, all that is global becomes increasingly localized" (217). In Los Angeles, the "center" has become the "periphery" because what makes the center and what makes the periphery is not the mere geographical location, but the social forms this location assumes. Similarly, Grandison defines the "bottoms," not as a topographical location, but a social space which denotes the inferiority of its residents regardless of where they are: "The bottoms are where they are, for they are the bottom of society" (6).

  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next Node | Works Cited