Race, Space & Architecture

Domesticating

Suburbanising, compounding, home-making, ghettoising, squatting, gendering, red-lining

Suburban house, hostel, ghetto, favela, gated-enclave, bantustan, village.

The experiences and implications of race-making are profoundly shaped by the places where people live, their forms of housing, and their home-making practices. Central to these practices is the dispossession of land and gendered forms of control: disciplining enforced and enabled through housing and homes. These are recomposed and remade in modes of squatting and the homeplace (hooks) as spaces not reducible to imposed hardships. Domesticating as gendered, classed and racialized, is reproduced across scales ranging from the global displacement of domestic workers, to urban master planning resulting in the enclosing of fortified neighbourhoods, to the construction of suburbs as white spaces and the demarcation within houses of those serving from those served. These spatial typologies include labour hostels as sites for the exploitation of black labour, to new migrant detention centres in Europe and the renewed ghettoising of those deemed ‘other’. These typologies are underpinned by systemic colonial and racial capitalism. Domesticating is therefore necessarily sited within larger processes of land expropriation, the economies of home and practices of displacement across time. Yet this category also recognises that despite imposed structures of racial capital, complex realities are negotiated through enduring forms of intimacy and sustenance.

Film/ fiction/ Visualisations

Anyango Grünewald, Catherine and Taivassalo, Hannele. 2017. Scandorama [Graphic Novel]. Forlaget.

Ba, Miriama. 1981. Une Si Long Lettre / So Long a Letter. London: Heinemann.

Goldblatt, David. 1973. On the Mines [Photographs].

Sembene, Ousmane. 1966. La Noire [Film].

Core Texts

Caldeira, Teresa. 1996. “Fortified Enclaves, the New Urban Segregation”. Public Culture. 8: 303 – 328. 

Harris, Dianne. 2012. Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1 -25.

hooks, bell. 1990. “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance.” Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. 41 – 49.

Ramphele, Mamphela. 1993.“The Contours of Space” A Bed Called Home: Life in the Migrant Labour Hostels of Cape Town. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 15 - 30.