Reactionary localism: Authoritarian boundary work and the politics of white secession

Keywords: secession, Atlanta, possessive geographies, whiteness, authoritarianism, racial capitalism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 63

Abstract

In the last several years, in response to the popular irruption of antidemocratic, authoritarian political movements in several of the world’s most powerful liberal states, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have begun to identify those ruptures and sutures which alternately articulate the methodical violence of neoliberal undermining with explosions of reactionary consolidation. In particular, this literature casts into sharp relief the role of fragmentation, reterritorialization, and spatial contestation in (re)producing global geographies of authoritarianism. Despite this renewed interest, what remain relatively unperturbed are the implications of such authoritarian territorial projects at the local scale (recent exceptions include Markley & Allums, 2021). In response, I analyze the proposed City of Buckhead, an elite, white enclave which seeks to secede from the City of Atlanta. Such an exercise of reterritorialization —what I refer to herein as boundary work—is predicated on both the lengthy history of Buckhead as a possessive (Bonds, 2020) territory of racial capitalist accumulation within Atlanta and a conspicuous politics of white futurity (Baldwin, 2012) which imagines authoritarian exclusivity as the ultimate horizon of white freedom in an increasingly non-white metro. The Buckhead imaginary thus represents a compelling expression of racialized, authoritarian space-time at the urban scale.