(Sīˈtĭng) is a methodology for researching and writing about dispossession.

(Sīˈtĭng) is a methodology for researching and writing about dispossession — a way of locating (siting), seeing (sighting), and discussing (citing) dispossession in an urban setting. It draws from news reports and popular narratives, rhetoric, visions (mapping, plans, statements), and visual culture (maps, advertisements, murals, architecture). It interrogates dispossession as a social process and discourse produced and reproduced in the built environment. (Sīˈtĭng) is what Sarah Keenan calls “holding up”— rather than purely spatial, it is a relation of belonging that defines and controls settler space through social processes, structures and networks.[i]

The site is the location of dispossession. It is property. Because property is a concept, the site is also a discourse between transnational movements (“mobilization”) and local concerns (“specificity”).[ii] The site is the built environment — architecture and landscape — as a “refection of the social interests of those who construct it.”[iii] It reflects power relations (i.e. “conflicts between different social actors”), but is also a medium through which power flows, a space of discipline and self-discipline.[iv] The site is sight: the ability or right to envision the city and the visual products of authoritative imaginaries (maps, landscapes, architecture, public art).[v] Sight is aesthetic, both the “sensible” (as in self-evident, natural) and “sensible” (as registered by the senses).[vi] It is spectacle and surveillance, a field of vision in which discipline takes place.[vii] Citation is an approach to academic discourse committed to theory generated by the dispossessed and research grounded in particular sites/sights, even when it’s inconvenient, messy, or contradictory. I cite the visual and spatial history of a particular location to reveal what Robert Nichols calls “misapprehensions” of dispossession and to pause what Iyko Day calls “the

moving spirit of settler colonialism” in order to provide a study of simultaneous and relational dispossessions. Settler colonialism, Day writes, “is transnational but distinctly national, similar but definitely not the same, repetitive but without a predictable rhythm, structural but highly susceptible to change, everywhere but hard to isolate.”[viii] As discussed in the introduction, the moving spirit of settler colonialism deploys similar tools of dispossession across subjectivities, but each deployment is predicated on the fiction of white property/possession.[ix] In response to the conditions of dispossession, Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Chandan Reddy, and Jodi Melamed call for analyses “quite literally situated in relation to and from the land but without precluding movement, multiplicity, multi directionality, transversals, and other elementary or material currents of water and air.”[x] This “grounded relationality” is what I call “(sīˈtĭng)” — a method, as well as a methodology, for bringing theory to the ground, understanding dispossession as “a perpetually incomplete project” continually asserting and adapting “the terms of value and belonging.”[xi]

The site, the sight, and the cite overlap, compound, and create one another. (Sīˈtĭng) is ideological. Ideology, Stuart Hall explains, concerns the ways in which “ideas of different kinds grip the minds of masses, and thereby become a ‘material force.’”[xii] It is “historical, not a natural or universal or spontaneous form of popular thinking” secured by and through prejudice, what Gramsci called “common sense.”[xiii] Yet, as Barbara Fields shows, ideology is “best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence, through which people make rough sense of … social reality.”[xiv] It is the interpretation of social relations, produced and reproduced collectively “in all the varied forms … collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, business ….”[xv] It must be “constantly created and verified in social life” in order to survive as a “material force.”[xvi] Colonization is an ideology of progress and possession, expressed today through financialization and debt, absorbing Hall’s assertion the prevailing logic of ideology, today, is neoliberalism, vis-à-vis “the market”: “[T]he market experience is the most immediate, daily, and universal experience of the economic system for everyone…. We see, in the ‘free choice’ of the market, the material symbol of the more abstract freedoms: or in the self-interest and intrinsic competitiveness of market advantage the ‘representation’ of something natural, normal, and universal about human nature itself.”[xvii]

(Sīˈtĭng) is ideological and discursive. Discourse, Michel Foucault writes, “an institutional incitement to speak … and to do so more and more, a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.”[xviii] Silence is “an integral part of the strategies” of discourse. Not merely “the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name,” silence is determined by “the different ways of not saying … how those who can and those who cannot speak … are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required.”[xix] The silences are the “counterpart of other discourses … that were interlocking, hierarchized, and all highly articulated around a cluster of power relations.”[xx] Discourse is a multiplicity of discourses operating in different institutions and dispersing from those centers into diverse forms and complex deployments.[xxi]

In this dissertation, white possession secures its place through ideological and discursive constructions of the built environment, a social relation involving space, place, landscape, and vision in a peripatetic disciplinary structure. Foucault defines the “two main images” of discipline as the “discipline-blockade” and the “discipline-mechanism.”[xxii] The former is “the enclosed institution, established on edges of society, turned inwards toward negative functions, such as the prison, the school, the factory, and the hospital. The latter is “a functional mechanism,” a subtle coercion for a society to come — “a lighter, more rapid, more effective exercise of power.”[xxiii] Though Foucault suggests a movement from the blockade to the mechanism, from “a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance,” I understand discipline as surveillance and, as I explain below, spectacle (the overwhelming, and therefore pacifying circulation of an image or representation). Though I read discipline through institutional policies and practices, I do not identify discipline with those institutions. Rather, I identify it, with Foucault, as “a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of applications, [and] targets” given material force by ideology and discourse.[xxiv]

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[i] Sarah Keenan, Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging (London: Routledge, 2016), 7.

[ii] Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 8, 166.

[iii] Andrew Herod in Elizabeth Esch, “Whitened and Enlightened: The Ford Motor Company and Racial engineering in the Brazilian Amazon” in Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities. Oliver J Dinius and Angela Vergara, eds. (University of Georgia Press, 2011), 92.

[iv] Andrew Herod, “Social Engineering Through Spatial Engineering: Company Towns and the Geographical Imagination” in Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities. Oliver J Dinius and Angela Vergara, eds. (University of Georgia Press, 2011), 22.

[v] Herod, “Social Engineering,” 22, 27 (emphasis added); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2-3.

[vi] Jacques Rancière and Steven Corcoran, Dissensus. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 139.

[vii] Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 6, 16.

[viii] Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 17.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Jodi A Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy, eds. “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities,” Social Text 36, no. 2 (2018), 11.

[xi] Ibid., 2.

[xii] Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds.  (London: Routledge, 1996), 27.

[xiii] Ibid., 43.

[xiv] Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America” in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Fields, Karen E, and Barbara Jeanne Fields, eds. (London: Verso, 2012), 110; Hall, “The Problem of Ideology,” 27

[xv] Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology,” 110.

[xvi] Hall, “The Problem of Ideology,” 21.

[xvii] Ibid., 38.

[xviii] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 18.

[xix] Ibid, 27.

[xx] Ibid. 30.

[xxi] Ibid, 33-34.

[xxii] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 209.

[xxiii] Ibid.

[xxiv] Ibid., 215.