Document Type
Reconsideration
Abstract
[First paragraph]
David Harvey has challenged Marxist criticism after Marx to think more about space. Harvey reminds us that "through the development of explicit bourgeois strategies of divide and control . . . all manner of class, gender, and other social divisions" are implanted into the "geographical landscape of capitalism" (40). "Divisions such as those between cities and suburbs, between regions as well as between nations cannot be understood as residuals from some ancient order," he writes. "They are actively produced through the differentiating powers of capital accumulation and market structures" (40). Harvey is one of a number of Marxist theorists to note that contemporary capitalism operates by a spatial logic of expansion and penetration, on one hand, and concentration and restriction on the other. From this perspective, the pursuit of Persian Gulf Oil across a war-deployed Iraq, to the highly privatized rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, represent moments of contest over both the spaces of capital and the putatively 'public' sphere where capitalism is lived out by workers, citizens and other subjects. Indeed, in the work of such contemporary thinkers as Gaston Bachelard, Jurgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Henri Lebevre and others, contemporary critical theory has urged us to construct a spatial anatomy of the modern as a means of thinking through notions of public and private spheres, the maintenance of bourgeois hegemony, and taxonomies of race, gender, class and nation.
Repository Citation
Mullen, Bill V.. "Space and Capital in Richard Wright's Native Son and Twelve Million Black Voices." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–9. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss1/32