This session explores the unequal and unjust power dynamics and violence inherent in American imperialism, nation building projects, and capital-driven forces. Papers analyze how such regimes produce chronic precarity and “sacrifice zones” through practices of surveillance and carceral governance, gentrification and displacement, and ecological extractivism. Presenters will introduce case studies of survival and meaning-making, shifting intimacies and solidarities, and challenges to secular spatial order. In doing so, they each address distinct racial and socio-economic forms of marginalization across a range of urban geographies.
This paper centers Black religious placemaking as a strategy of survival and meaning-making on the part of members of a Holiness/Pentecostal church in Tivoli Gardens, an inner city community in Kingston Jamaica. It examines the boundaries of belonging and identity amongst the seven subdivisions that constitute Tivoli Gardens, as Tivoli Gardens itself has largely functioned as an extralegal economy governed by a local don, or enforcer supported by the neoliberal Jamaica Labor Party. The process of Black religious placemaking, I argue, is a fraught and agonistic process that entails shifting solidarities within a postcolonial milieu deeply shaped by underdevelopment and American imperialism. These global processes simultaneously create economic and political instability, enacting chronic precarity and heightened stakes of survival. Employment and religious language, framed by evangelical Christian theology authorizes claims to political and spiritual sovereignty. Religious placemaking, then, is an embodied and ideological act of claiming space and authority to secure human flourishing.
This paper examines the 1978 police raid of the West Philadelphia headquarters of MOVE, a Black radical religious organization, as a clash of competing spatial imaginations. Tracing the conflict between the secular spatial imaginary of Philadelphia’s carceral governance and MOVE’s insurgent approach to cultivating sacred space, I demonstrate the secular spatial logic encoded in zoning laws and their carceral enforcement by analyzing MOVE’s metaphysical reordering of urban space as a direct challenge to secular spatial order.
Drawing on geographic approaches to urban consumption, this paper analyzes the margins and centers of halal consumption in Philadelphia. Based on twelve months of ethnographic research and digital mapping of halal businesses, I make two central claims: (1) there are multiple concentrations of halal consumption in the city that are racially, socio-economically, and devotionally distinctive; (2) in addition to Islamic institutions, these concentrations of halal consumption take shape in relation to gentrification, infrastructure, and urban renewal. I focus on two geographies of consumption in Philadelphia—one in West Philadelphia and one in North Philadelphia—as case studies of infrastructure's and urban renewal's effects on halal consumption. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that attention to the everyday urban process that shape Islamic tradition clarifies the anti-Black and capital-driven forces that marginalize enactment of Islamic tradition in Philadelphia, as well as the ways that Muslim sustain devotional practices and forge convivialities across difference.
As organizers and scholars explore the intimacies between Israeli and US nation-building projects, the phrase, “Palestine-Mexico Border” has emerged to capture the way that US and Israel collaborate through militarized surveillance and ecological extractivism to reassert their national borders. Overlooked, particularly in the US context, is how religion and religious space are important technologies and processes that justify and entangle national borders in global context / imperial borders. This paper explores the relationship between Jewish sacred spaces in Southern Arizona, and the intimacies of racio-religious geographies across and between US and Israel border zones.