19 - Economic Development: Political Ecologies of Race

Summary

Introduction

Since the early 2010s, feminist economic geography, largely underpinned by feminist political economy (FPE), has emerged to lead renewed feminist geographic scholarly interest in questions of difference. As Werner et al (2017: 1) note, ‘FPE is an approach that understands social difference – including but not limited to gender – to be integral to the functioning of political economic systems and knowledge production processes’. Central to feminist critiques of the ‘masculinist’ tone of economic geography writ large are appeals for ‘emancipatory change’ and a ‘retaining of steely materialism’. While the broader field of feminist geography has long been committed to the role difference plays in geographic knowledge production, renewed attention to difference in the broader subfield of economic geography seems deeply influenced by the emergent subfields of Indigenous and Black geographies. In addition to bringing about important scholarly interrogations of Indigeneity and Blackness, this raises the importance of complicating spatial processes underpinned by capitalist logics and single axis analyses. With this push, there is currently a growing plethora of work that draws on conceptual frames open to multiple logics of power, namely racial capitalism and a reinvigorated adoption of intersectionality. While the latter has long been operationalized by a small group of feminist geographers largely since the 1990s, intersectionality's almost ubiquitous invocation in critical literature appears to have found firm footing in the subfield of feminist geography more broadly and feminist political ecology in particular.

Racial capitalism too is intersectional. Racial capitalism refers to ‘[t] he development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force … racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism’ (Robinson in Melamed, 2015: 77). Which, as Melamed (2015) offers, means that certainly across geographic subfields race and capitalism are tightly woven, and with a concomitant acknowledgement that ‘[c]apitalism is racial capitalism’ (Melamed, 2015: 77). How the term is operationalized, in many cases, seemingly suffers a similar challenge to that of intersectionality, namely an emptying out of race (see Mollett and Faria, 2018).