Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis

by Jodi Rios

Overview

Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policymakers, and the general public continue to frame Black precarity as just another racial, cultural, or ethnic conflict that can be solved solely through legal, political, or economic means. Jodi Rios argues that the historical and material production of blackness-as-risk is foundational to the historical and material construction of our society and certainly foundational to the construction and experience of metropolitan space. She also considers how an ethics of lived blackness—living fully and visibly in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erase—can create a powerful counter point to blackness-as-risk.

Using a transdisciplinary methodology, Black Lives and Spatial Matters studies cultural, institutional, and spatial politics of race in North St. Louis County, Missouri, as a set of practices that are intimately connected to each other and to global histories of race and race-making. As such, the book adds important insight into the racialization of metropolitan space and people in the United States. The arguments presented in this book draw from fifteen years of engaged research in North St. Louis County and rely on multiple disciplinary perspectives and local knowledge in order to study relationships between interconnected practices and phenomena.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501750472
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2020
Series:	Police/Worlds: Studies in Security, Crime, and Governance
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jodi Rios is a scholar, designer, and educator whose work is located at the intersection of physical, social, and political space.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Dancing with Death
1. Race and Space
2. Confluence and Contestation
3. Racial States and Local Governance
4. Discursive Regimes and Everyday Practices
5. Politics and Policing in Pagedale
Interlude: A Day in August
6. Queering Protest
7. Ontologies of Resistance
Coda: Archipelagoes of Life

What People are Saying About This

George Lipsitz

"Jodi Rios presents an empirically rich and theoretically astute analysis of the causes and consequences of the Ferguson uprising. This astoundingly original and generative book establishes a new standard of excellence for the study of race, place, and power."

Aimee Meredith Cox

Black Lives and Spatial Matters is essential reading for scholars and students across disciplinary boundaries and research interests. Additionally, this monograph should be required for all elected officials and policy makers as this text is relevant to the lived experiences of residents of localized geographies whether these spaces are labeled urban, suburban, or terrain in between.

George Lipsitz

Jodi Rios presents an empirically rich and theoretically astute analysis of the causes and consequences of the Ferguson uprising. This astoundingly original and generative book establishes a new standard of excellence for the study of race, place, and power.

Andra Greer

Methodologically, Rios brings an interdisciplinary approach to the work behind this book — which should be inviting to readers of all intellectual and scholarly backgrounds. Each perspective contributes something unique and meaningful to the understanding of how blackness as risk and space related to the experiences of many within suburban St. Louis, as well as how blackness as freedom is a distinct practice of imagining what could be – something Rios refers to as transforming from the power over life to the power of life – and is continuously led in particular by those who identify as black women and queer people of color.

Frederick Moten

In Black Lives and Spatial Matters, Jodi Rios intends to understand and acknowledge the scope of antiblackness while attending to the possibility that antiblackness has no scope, can't be counted, and won't be mapped as it howls and blows like the wind of a nonlocal abstraction. Then, the suburbs of St. Louis are everywhere. Then, Rios's extraordinary work—in its careful and rigorous refusal of discipline—bears a general application in all its resonant specificities, which show not only what but also how black life survives.

Editorial Reviews

Overall, in Black Lives and Spatial Matters, Rios has crafted a significant contribution to urban and suburban studies, geography, and broader literatures on Blackness, race, and space. [O]ne of Rios's most meaningful scholarly contributions is to show how intimate knowledge of urban planning and policy are key to unpacking everyday oppression as well as the roots of radical resistance.

Urban Geography

Black Lives and Spatial Matters performs with grace and exacting rigor the skills of audience that planners and civic leaders must develop more fully if we are to participate directly in urgent social challenges of our day. Black Lives and Spatial Matters thus lands on our doorsteps at an opportune moment. It offers a troubling review of epistemic violence and a hopeful performance of freedom and audience skills and introduces us to the Black Lives Matters leaders of North St. Louis County.

Journal of American Planning Association

Black Lives and Spatial Matters performs with grace and exacting rigor the skills of audience that planners and civic leaders must develop more fully if we are to participate directly in urgent social challenges of our day. Black Lives and Spatial Matters thus lands on our doorsteps at an opportune moment. It offers a troubling review of epistemic violence and a hopeful performance of freedom and audience skills and introduces us to the Black Lives Matters leaders of North St. Louis County.

-- "Journal of American Planning Association"

Overall, in Black Lives and Spatial Matters, Rios has crafted a significant contribution to urban and suburban studies, geography, and broader literatures on Blackness, race, and space. [O]ne of Rios's most meaningful scholarly contributions is to show how intimate knowledge of urban planning and policy are key to unpacking everyday oppression as well as the roots of radical resistance.

-- "Urban Geography"

Rios has written a compelling, theoretically sophisticated analysis of predatory policing and the Ferguson protest movement that erupted in the wake of the 2014 police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown... Rios concludes with a brilliant assessment of the queer and trans women who led the Ferguson movement and their relationship with the Black Lives Matter movement.

-- "Choice"

This text is well suited for introductory and graduate-level work in cultural and urban anthropology and would well serve scholars and thinkers with grounding in studies of the carceral state, critical race studies, and human geograpy.

-- "American Anthropologist"

From the Publisher

This text is well suited for introductory and graduate-level work in cultural and urban anthropology and would well serve scholars and thinkers with grounding in studies of the carceral state, critical race studies, and human geograpy.

American Anthropologist

Rios has written a compelling, theoretically sophisticated analysis of predatory policing and the Ferguson protest movement that erupted in the wake of the 2014 police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown... Rios concludes with a brilliant assessment of the queer and trans women who led the Ferguson movement and their relationship with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Choice