New Geographies of Racism: Canadian Urbanization, the Biopolitical, and Racial Capitalism

Many self-described Canadian urban studies scholars have placed limited importance on the role of racism in shaping Canadian urbanization. In many books, even critical ones, the term "racism" does not appear, the issue is treated as only marginally important, and/or race and racism are presented as synonymous with ethnicity and ethnocentric bigotry.¹ What is lost in these accounts is the central tenet that underpins contemporary scholarship on racism, which is that it is a hierarchical system of valuation that is historically and geographically contingent. Moreover, they downplay the significant part that the devaluation of non-whites has played in the Canadian urban context. The presence of non-whites, for instance, even when limited, has had a substantial impact on shaping urban patterns and forms. Still, since the 1990s, some Canadian urban studies scholars have made admirable attempts to explicitly reveal how racism makes a difference.² It is in this latter group that three of the books under review – Evelyn Peters and Chris Andersen's edited collection, Indigenous in the City; Owen Toews' Stolen City; and Ted Rutland's Displacing Blackness – clearly belong. James Tyner's Dead Labor does not, but I have included it here because I believe its theoretical insights should inform future scholarship in the Canadian urban context. All of these books engage in new conceptual and empirical work on racism, and two streams of current research stand out as significant areas of overlap among the books. On the one hand, Indigenous in the City, Stolen City, and Displacing Blackness have an explicit concern for non-white Canadians, specifically urbanized Indigenous and Black Canadians. On the other hand, Stolen City, Displacing Blackness, and Dead Labor are guided by recent theorical modes of political economic inquiry that could be called the biopolitical and/or racial capitalist frameworks.³

Indigenous in the City is an ambitious and valuable collection of chapters that explore a wide range of themes and issues related to Indigenous urbanization in a number of cities in four different Anglo settler-colonial countries in the Global North. It is, I believe, the first and most comprehensive collection of scholarship in this area. Those working on Indigenous urbanization in the Canadian context will certainly be familiar with the work of its two editors, Peters and Andersen. The collection certainly reflects their Canadian expertise and notoriety. Moreover, it is clear that their distinction afforded them the ability to assemble several noteworthy contributions from recognized scholars working in the four different national contexts explored in the collection: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Each national context has three empirical chapters, except Canada, which has seven. The overrepresentation of Canadian cases, is probably a reflection of how the editors' regional expertise informed the book's architecture and genesis, but this does not diminish from the collection's more global importance. The editors do a commendable job at describing each national context by providing strong introductory sections that precede each regional collection of essays. Furthermore, the editors do make some laudable attempts to identify links that exceed these national divisions and overcome the book's Canada-centrism, especially in the conclusion. Given the context of this review essay, I will not dwell on individual contributions in book but instead restrict my comments to the collection's broader aspects.

As the title suggests, Indigenous in the City is about how the process of urbanization recursively transforms Indigenous identities and ways of life. The book is admirable for the attention it brings to the particularities of Indigenous urbanization, certainly a vastly understudied and underappreciated topic. The essays reveal how issues that confront other non-white and/or...