Landscape and Race in the United States
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Landscape and Race in the United States

Richard Schein, Richard Schein

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Landscape and Race in the United States

Richard Schein, Richard Schein

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About This Book

Landscape and Race in the United States is the definitive volume on racialized landscapes in the United States. Edited by Richard Schein, each essay isgrounded in a particular location but all of the essaysare informed by the theoretical vision that the cultural landscapes of America are infused with race and America's racial divide. While featuring the black/white divide, the book also investigates other social landscapes including Chinatowns, Latino landscapes in the Southwest and white suburban landscapes. The essays are accessible and readable providing historical and contemporary coverage.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2012
ISBN
9781136078101
CHAPTER
1

Race and Landscape in the United States

RICHARD H. SCHEIN

Introduction

This book on race and landscape in the United States begins with a simple image.1 Figure 1.1 presents a portion of a 1903 fire insurance map.2 Fire insurance maps became popular with insurance underwriters in the nineteenth century as a way to write policies without having to visit a site—they record building sizes, construction materials, proximity to water lines and fire hydrants, potentially flammable and combustible materials, and so on. They also carry a wealth of information that is useful beyond fire insurance underwriting—information that is factual even as it might shed light on American social and cultural attitudes extending well beyond a concern for fire in urban settings. This particular map depicts a small portion of the small village of Midway, in central Kentucky. It more specifically shows my house and yard as central, several other adjoining properties, my garage, and an ice house (ICE HO.) that was torn down long ago to make way for a new driveway. I start with my own house for two reasons. The first reason is prosaic, to make the point that this book intends to get the reader thinking about race and the cultural landscape in everyday places, such as one's own backyard. The second reason follows from the first but makes a somewhat broader claim that it is always possible to think about race and the American cultural landscape, even in one's own backyard.
images
Figure 1.1 “Negro Dwg,” or African American residences, are off the map, as indicated by a notation in the margins of this 1903 map from central Kentucky.
The argument begins with the words printed in the map's upper-left-hand corner: “75’ to Negro Dwg” (Seventy-five feet to Negro dwellings). Clearly these words mark the presence of “race” in the landscape. Midway is in Woodford County, the majority of whose population on the eve of the Civil War had been African American, and the vast majority of them had been slaves in this rich, southern agricultural region. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, many of those slaves’ descendants remained, and many of them had moved to town and lived, in 1903, in several small frame dwelling houses just “off the map” to the east, houses that sat next to a railroad line connecting Midway with the county seat. You might imagine this picture of race and landscape—the small African American neighborhood at the edge of (a southern) town was a regular feature of the Reconstruction South, even as that nascent urban residential pattern was solidifying through the aegis of Jim Crow into the kinds of segregated urban settings we can take for granted today. Midway was no exception. By the mid-twentieth century, there were “black” parts of town and “white” parts of town, a distinction that extended even to the one-block-long retail district running along both sides of the railroad track in the middle of town. We can perhaps imagine this scene, even as there is no map evidence (in 1903) of its wholeness—for the so-called Negro dwellings, the residences of African Americans in Midway, were not mapped. I suspect the immediately utilitarian explanation for this absence, marked only by marginal notation, might be that African Americans were not expected to buy insurance. But this only deflects the larger questions of power in the economy (as in why weren't African Americans expected to buy insurance?) and in the landscape (as in why is it necessary to mark “Negro dwellings” even as they are absent from the map proper?). Those questions lead to interrogating the intersection of race and landscape in everyday American places, the first of my reasons for invoking the example. And they entail a certain bringing of race back onto the map—that is, if by race we mean the presence of Negro dwellings. And we often do, for “race” generally is treated as a marker for “people of color.” It is a long-standing practice in American life that those deemed to have race are the ones who seemingly do not fit within the (white) majority.3 Although it certainly is important to bring back to the map the presence of those small, African American neighborhoods as a central feature of Midway's landscape at the turn of the twentieth century, I also want to go a step further and do so through the claim that race already is present on the map, in other, not so obvious ways, even before we note the proximity of “Negro Dwg.”
My house predates the Civil War. I know from the deed record and will books in the local county courthouse that the fellow who “built” the house in 1849 owned at least eight slaves, whom he passed on to his wife after his death shortly after the house was built.4 I suspect that the house was built with slave labor, and I know that there were slaves living in and around the property, certainly during the antebellum period, but also free African Americans lived there well into the twentieth century. A little digging might uncover a wage–labor relationship between the people who used to live in my house and the people who used to live behind it. Here the seemingly common cultural landscape of a small town residential street also is fraught with race—only this time it is the construction of whiteness: construction in the material sense, where the luxury of white privilege in at least one small southern town was built, in part, on the backs of African Americans present, and construction in the metaphorical or theoretical sense in that our very ideas about (the normality of) whiteness depend on, in this case, what Toni Morrison calls an Africanist presence. “Seventy-five feet to Negro dwellings” looks like a cartographic manifestation of Morrison's “dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.” She has challenged a view of the American literary canon as “free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States.” Instead, she supposes an Africanist presence that “shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture … the contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.” To explore this Africanist presence, how it functioned, and what it was for is also to ask, “What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as ‘American’?”5 In short, the whiteness of the map's central scene depended on the race of the off-the-map African Americans.
To bring those African American dwellings back onto the map is to interrogate the place of race in this landscape and is a twofold process, at least. The first part requires the simple acknowledgment that there were African Americans in that place in 1903 and that the full and proper story of the town and its landscape is not complete without their presence. This is conceptually akin to Stuart Hall's plea for the cultural and political need to recover hidden histories (and geographies, I would add) through “the speaking of a past which previously had no language.”6 Hall calls for “a struggle of the margins to come into representation” that seems relevant to the marginalized African Americans on the 1903 map. The second part requires us to realize that even parts of the town not usually associated with race, the seemingly normal landscapes of house and yard, are already coded “white” (in this case). And “whiteness” also is about race. That whiteness, however, is largely (and historically) invisible—at least to the hegemonic readings of race and landscape that presume white to be normal and everything else to be racialized.7 In this sense, then, and following from Toni Morrison, all American landscapes can be seen through a lens of race, all American landscapes are racialized.
Now, up to this point, the example I have employed is firmly grounded in the dynamics of a black–white binary. Partly this stems from the place of the example in the American South, where white–black social relations have determined the social fabric for so long. Without denying the centrality of an Africanist presence in American life, the always racially coded spaces and landscapes of everyday life in America also extend to other formulations of race in its popular forms; that is, beyond a black–white binary to take seriously racial dynamics across the social spectrum. W.E.B. Du Bois once proclaimed that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” and the point to follow here is that in the twenty-first century we are more apt to speak of color lines. But the underlying lesson is the same, and it also is the salient point of the following collection. The essays contained here are meant to get readers to think about the imbrications of race and the American landscape, even as they realize that all American landscapes are imbricated in questions of race. To make that claim, however, requires a brief discussion of the key terms assumed so far: landscape and race.8

Cultural Landscapes and Race

The cultural landscape is both an object of study and a topic for any number of scholarly disciplines and professional practitioners. It is not the point of this volume to debate what Paul Groth and Chris Wilson called “the polyphony of cultural landscape study” or what Donald Meinig called “an attractive, important, and ambiguous term,” even as it is necessary to have some idea of what the cultural landscape is and how it is that we think about cultural landscapes.9 The term as it is most often employed in this volume comes from the tradition of landscape interpretation embedded in the discipline of cultural geography, while also drawing from other sources including anthropology, art history, and landscape architecture.10 The term has historically connoted a prospect or a view upon the built environment, as well as its spatial ordering and material fabric.11 The cultural landscape thus is a material thing, even as it invokes a way of knowing the world, an epistemology that relies in large part on vision. Peirce Lewis wrote of the cultural landscape that it is “our unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears, in tangible, visible form.”12 Because of its qualities as a tangible, visible scene/seen, it follows that not only can we interrogate the historical and geographical dimensions of the landscape as an object in and of itself (as a material thing, or set of things), we also can read and interpret cultural landscapes for what they might tell us more broadly about social worlds of the past. In addition, cultural landscapes are not simply just there as material evidence in the service of observations about human activity. Their very presence, as both material “things” and conceptual framings of the world, makes cultural landscapes constitutive of the processes that created them in the first place—whether through the materiality of the tangible, visible scene or through the symbolic qualities they embed that make them inescapably normative.13 Cultural landscapes are not innocent, and the duplicity of cultural landscapes means that we can, at once, study cultural landscapes as material artifacts, with traceable and documentable empirical histories and geographies, and simultaneously use cultural landscapes to ask questions about societal ideas about and ideals of, in this case, race in American life. We also can interrogate cultural landscapes as constitutive elements of those ideas and ideals. The ultimate goal of the essays in this book is maintaining that tension—between the landscape as a thing and the landscape as an entrée into ideas and ideals, realizing that the two rely on each other. Each of the essays asks the reader to think about a particular cultural landscape, the ideas and ideals it embodies, and, importantly, the tension inherent in the fact that those ideas and ideals, to some extent, rely on the landscape to give them life.
The essays in this volume cohere around ideas about and ideals of race. Race is a complicated and disputed term, with a long history and geography of use and misuse.14 The essays in this volume take the concept of race, as well as racial categories, to be socially and politically constructed. The chapters draw generally from critical race theory an antiessentialist conception of race that nevertheless recognizes, following Cornel West, that “race matters”; that is, we act as if race is an ontological given.15 This book begins by taking as given the “enduring role that race plays … in the very geography of American life.”16 Following Stuart Hall's call to correct the absences of past representation, this might entail simply noting the intersection of race and landscape in descriptive terms—a description of, say, the plantation in American antebellum life, or the historical importance of racial codes in keeping “order” in public space, or the role of the “New Negro Movement” in promoting African American business districts and racial pride, or the “gentleman's agreements” that were put in place to counter the “threat” of Chinatowns in the American West long before the immigration clampdowns of the 1920s. Such descriptions always run the risk of simply reinforcing the very categories and racisms that undergird them. But the stories of life and landscape that relied on racial differentiations were brutally real to many Americans and so deserve to be told. The fear of reifying racial categories is tempered by this volume's ultimate aim to focus on “racialized landscapes,” a concept that draws on Omi and Winant's notion of racial formation, seeking to understand “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.”17 Racial processes take place and racial categories get made, in part, through cultural landscapes. Thus this book also takes as given the enduring role that the very geography of American life plays in understanding race. This book ultimately aims to draw attention to processes of racialization that take place through racialized landscapes.
That is a tall order, of course, and this book represents but a first step in the direction of understanding racialized landscapes. It is a first step that entails, at the very least, identifying and describing the intersections of race and landscape through a variety of empirical foci, through a variety of racial categories, including African American, Creole, white, Asian, Hispanic, and so on. Even as these categories are invoked, it is realized that they are not—even in their social construction or political utility—monolithic, which is to say that to identify someone or to self-identify as white or African American or Chinese is not to succumb to the ecological fallacy, or to assume that all people placed in or identifying with a category speak with one voice, or to presume adherence to a predetermined set of traits and behaviors traceable to the racial distinction employed. In addition, the book's antiessentialist stance as well as its ultimate aim to explore processes of racialization obviates the need to distinguish between race and ethnicity, even though it is possible to trace the differential uses and applications of the terms. It also is important to realize that identity is multiply constituted and that race is not the only axis of social power in people's lives or embedded in and working through everyday cultural landscapes. Gender and class, for example, also are powerfully ever present, and this book's primary focus on race is not meant to preclude other dimensions of identity formation, landscape interpretation, or social analysis. Indeed, individual authors in the following chapters directly engage these other axes of social power as they intersect with race and processe...

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