Page 9 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

SPATIALITIES OF ‘COMMUNITY’, POWER AND CHANGE 3

chapter in (what it is now increasingly inappropriate to label as) a geography
textbook. There, he comments that ‘place, in short, is one of the key discourses
in the systems of meaning we call culture’ (Hall, 1995:181). Certain forms of
cultural identity, he argues, are imagined through a profound sense of belonging
to a bounded and stable place. Elsewhere, he has argued that other understandings
of identity depend more on notions of global mobility and connection (Hall,
1990). Like many of those working in this field, Hall understands the difference
between these geographies of identity in terms of a cultural politics, in this
instance of ‘race’. Racist discourses construct racialized identities in part by
erecting supposedly impermeable barriers which depend on an essentialist
understanding of difference. One way of challenging that spatialized essentialism
of Same and Other has been to imagine a fluid diaspora of hybridizing cultural
translations (Hall, 1990; Gilroy, 1993; Mercer, 1994). Doreen Massey, in a
parallel argument, has commented that reworking the politics of gender also
means reimagining their geographies: ‘challenging certain of the ways in which
space and place are conceptualized implies also, indeed necessitates, challenging
the currently dominant form of gender definitions and gender relations’ (Massey,
1994:2; see also Deutsche, 1991). The assertion that ‘the spatial and the sexual
constitute one another’ is also being elaborated (Bell and Valentine, 1995:2).
This field of work is diverse. What I want to draw from it is the argument that
particular spatialities are produced by particular discourses of ‘race’, gender,
sexuality and nation (and, by extension, class (Riley, 1988), able-bodiedness, and
so on). Spatialities articulate the particular structures of those axes of identity by
giving them a spatial form. These forms are also articulations of power:
discourse engenders ‘a spatial order [which] organizes an ensemble of
possibilities…and interdictions’ (de Certeau, 1984:98). And because different
articulations of identity exist, intersect and conflict, ‘simultaneously present in
any landscape are multiple enunciations of distinct forms of space’ (Keith and
Pile, 1993:6). It is through such complex discursive ensembles that spaces,
places and landscapes become meaningful in the context of power-ridden social
relations, and why dominant forms of spatiality can be contested.
The politics of one spatial organization of identity have been discussed at
some length recently: those of ‘community’. ‘Community’ has been analysed by
several of the contributors to the ‘spatial-cultural discourse’ as a regressive
understanding of place. According to them, ‘community’ provides a structure for
senses of identity which desire to be stable and harmonious, uniform within and
hostile to what is positioned as without (Carter et al., 1993). Hall (1995:181), for
example, uses Anderson’s (1983) description of nationalism as an ‘imagined
community’ to define that version of nationalism which ‘establishes symbolic
boundaries around a culture, marking off those who belong from those who do
not’. Similarly, Massey (1994:121–2) has criticized certain self-styled
‘communities’ for the ‘seamless coherence and timeless-ness’ with which their
local boundaries are authenticated and essentialized in order to exclude those
designated as outsiders. Both Hall and Massey see such bounded, exclusionary