Abstract: Gender, labor and race historians have made a strong case for space as a social construct. A Foucauldian framework of analysis of space has allowed historians to reveal histories of the subaltern, which are otherwise often ignored. Interactions in space are social relations, as individuals relate to the space around them in response to other individuals and societal norms. Even so, the materiality of space cannot be understated, as the built space impacts how those interactions are produced and unfold. The consideration of the materiality of space as an additional layer to social space, make spatial history a more effective and illuminating methodological approach.
Introduction: lthough historian Leif Jerram has criticized historians for overusing imagined space, stating that space is the material physicality of location, gender, labour, and race, historians have used space as a social construct to successfully unearth otherwise hidden transcripts of power relations and resistance [1]. Rather than looking at ‘imagined space’ as in competition with ‘built space,’ a layered definition of space must be adopted. As Sewell has argued, space is imagined, experienced, and built [2]. Discursive imagined space can be defined as the ways in which individuals understand their environment, while experienced space is the ‘material interactions between people and their environment.’[2] Finally, the built environment can be defined as the physical structures that occupy spaces [2]. These overlapping layers must be examined through a social constructivist Foucauldian lens, as space is fundamentally interlinked with the production and reproduction of ‘economic, political, and cultural power,’ and the reaction of those in power and of the subaltern to that power [3]. This relationship of space with power means that ‘spatial relations are social relations’ [4]. The extent to which spatial theory has effectively been applied by labour, gender, and race relations historians must be examined to establish its use in the discipline of history.
References
[1] Jerram, Leif. “Space: A Useless Historical Category for Historical Analysis.” History and Theory 52 (2013) p. 400-419.
[2] Sewell in R. Percy, ‘Picket Lines and Parades: Labour and Urban Space in Early Twentieth-Century London and Chicago’, Urban History, 41/4 (2013), p. 457.
[3] Percy, Ruth. “Picket Lines and Parades: Labour and Urban Space in Early Twentieth-Century London and Chicago.” Urban History 41 (2014): 456-477.
[4] Lefebvre, Henri. “Space: Social Product and Use Value.” In State, Space, World: Selected Essays, edited by N. Brenner and S. Elden, translated by J. W. Freiberg, 185-195. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
[5] Herod, Andrew. “From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor’s Spatial Fix and the Geography of Capitalism.” Antipode 29 (1997): 1-31.
[6] Remus, Emily A. Remus, Tippling Ladies and the Making of Consumer Culture: Gender and Public Space in Fin-de-Siècle Chicago (2014).
[7] R. Kelley, “‘We are not what we seem’: Rethinking black working-class opposition in the Jim Crow South” (1993) p. 99.
[8] Kruse, Kevin M. “The Politics of Race and Public Space: Desegregation, Privatization, and the Tax Revolt in America.” Journal of Urban History 31 (2005): 610-633.
[9] Butler, J. 'Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street' http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en.