Abstract
In pursuit of a critical geography of globality, my essay examines how racial hegemonies are sustained and perpetuated by the ways in which urban spaces inhabited by peoples on the margins of the world economy are imagined, represented, and brought to public visibility. Central to my inquiry is how iconic representations of slum life are produced for a white consumer public. Propelled by fantasies of racial essence, primal bodies, and exotic naturalism, the iconicities of shantytowns and the ghetto are circulated as popular commodity forms throughout Europe's metropolitan centers. In analyzing this process, I identify africanism (spaces of contested black civility, premodern savagery, urban jungle) and tropicalism (naturalized landscapes of color and houses, childlike creativity, and happy workers) as representational codes for how slums as sites of urban dispossession are racially mapped and consumed.
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