Inhuman Matters IV: Modernity, Urbanism, and the Spatial Fix of Whiteness

Chapter 11 examines the organization of social space after the plantation, in the creation of gendered spatial forms and new forms of policing sexuality in service of the capitalization of geopowers and the management of geography. The removal of postemancipation Black subjects from social and juridical space became concomitant with forms of energy extraction, and both involved spatial epistemologies that placed race as a tactic of governance between the plateau and the rift. Historically, this chapter examines how the carceral mine became a profitable model of relation on which to make racial undergrounds that could grow, move, and reproduce. In other words, placing carceral mines in their historic racialized geographies disrupts the narrative of national “progress” that is articulated through architectural infrastructures of iron and steel in industrialization, and demonstrates the white spatial fix of undergrounds for urban development.