Flesh, Metal, Road: Tracing the Machinic Geographies of Race

Abstract

By approaching the road as a contact zone, I develop novel insights into the turbulent multiculture of a northern mill town in England. Through a montage of encounters with taxis and ‘flash’ cars on the streets of Keighley, West Yorkshire, I illustrate how social differentiation is performed on the road as human difference is sorted and judged through assemblages of flesh, metal, and road. I develop recent debates on the social construction of race, arguing for a perspective that foregrounds what race does in social interaction. And so I offer a reconsideration of race as a technology of differentiation at work in interaction that is allied to what I call the ‘racism of assemblages’, which traces how loose racial summaries distributed across bodies, things, and spaces become the basis for perception, judgment, and action. In the process, I also assemble perspectives on multiculture from below, which disrupt talk of segregation and ‘parallel lives' in northern mill towns, and question arguments that more interaction and community cohesion are the answer to living with difference.