Geopower in public spaces of Darwin, Australia: exploring forces that unsettle phenotypical racism

ABSTRACT

This paper reports the results of ethnographic research conducted in Darwin, a north Australian city with a growing population of Aboriginals and migrant newcomers. It is situated within the emerging literature on race, encounter, and affect and explores how events of phenotypical racism unfold in public spaces of the city. The paper argues that negative affects of hurt, anger, and frustration that saturate places through events of coding, labelling, and judging bodies hypervisible through phenotype have the potential to mutate through attention to forces in a more-than-human world. This paper shows that Elizabeth Grosz's concept of ‘geopower’, a non-human form of power that precedes and exceeds human social relations, provides the possibility to reconfigure anti-racist agendas – bodies of colour not only maintain minimum human dignity but affirm life and learn to live ethically with difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Phenotypical racism
• affect
• encounter
• anti-racism
• geopower
• public spaces

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the residents of Darwin, the Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation, the Multicultural Council of the Northern Territory, and the Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University, for their support. I would like to thank the guest editor, Professor Yin Paradies, and the referees who have given me this opportunity and helped me strengthen this paper considerably.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Long grass' is the tall spear like grass, typical of tropical savannah country, that is becoming less and less visible today with urban development. 'Long Grassers' is a term used to describe those who 'live rough' in Darwin. They are more likely to be Aboriginals who are homeless.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher award (grant number DE130100250, 2013–2015) and an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Fellowship, Deakin University, Melbourne.