Spatializing Blackness

In Rashad Shabazz's Spatializing Blackness, the study of human geography reveals that coercive confinement has rendered urban black Chicago imprisoned across time and space, whether constrained by prison cells or urban projects. In five pithy chapters that read as thought-provoking essays, Shabazz explores how geographies of “carceral power” shape urban Chicago and black masculinity from the Progressive Era to this time of mass incarceration (p. 7). Shabazz argues that space constricts blackness while the power of policing constructs whiteness. Shabazz considers the career of Max Nootbaar, a German-born police captain who monitored black and white sexual relations during the Progressive Era to “shed his ethnic identity and enter whiteness” (p. 15). To make this otherwise-important argument, Shabazz relies on a few newspaper accounts, but he uses few archival sources and does not cite essential works such as Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal (2008) and Sam Mitrani's The Rise of the Chicago Police Department (2013

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Criminology · Ethnic group · Identity (music · Masculinity · Media studies · Newspaper · Power (physics · Prison · Race (biology · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · White (mutation · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Race, History, and American Society