Human Geography and the Racialized Landscape

These first four readings largely centered on ideas of race as embedded in our spatial, cultural, and visual understanding of the world. I'm glad that Omi and Winant was the first. Though I had read "Racial Formation" previously, reading it in conjunction with the other three pieces offered a little more understanding. Their theory of racial formation is an alternative to conventional paradigms of race as it is viewed in the U.S. They argue that the state as an institution is inherently racial, just as Lipsitz, Schein, and Rojas argue that space and landscape are structured by racial ideas and ideologies.

I found the Schein article to be the most captivating, not only because I haven't read many studies of the normativity of landscape, but also for its focus on individual and collective perceptions of cultural landscapes. I appreciated Schein's theoretical discussion of landscape as a spatial, visual, AND material way of framing the world. He mentions the ideas of J.B. Jackson (whose humanistic approach is also noted by Rojas), namely that landscape is an organization of space, and to understand it, we must ask who owns, uses, creates, and changes this space. And not only that, but who does it affect? How does the process happen?

The idea of a human geography, imbued with a morality of sorts, is really interesting. Viewing the landscape as it's linked to our identities and "desires," not just for its aesthetic or profitability, shows that it is not just a byproduct of human activity, but as Jackson noted, "capable of providing for social change" (202). Lipsitz also discusses moral geography, exploring the American ideal of pure space and its manifestation in segregated residential areas. He takes on the rise of suburbia as the creation of a “white spatial imaginary.” This is particularly interesting in contrast to Rojas’s study of Latino suburbs in East LA, a different example of the racialization of a particular urban landscape.