Publication Type
Book Review
Version
submittedVersion
Publication Date
6-2015
Abstract
Frederick Douzet’s account of urban racial politics in Oakland, California attempts to frame the racial geopolitics of California via Yves Lacoste’s geopolitical framework. Suggesting that American political geographers focus too much on international politics, Douzet contends for a return to Lacoste’s classic definition of geopolitics as simply the study of how groups compete for power over territorial space—whether as large as nation-states in an international order or as small as neighbourhoods in cities. Douzet’s study of Oakland thus claims to be about how African Americans in Oakland wrested power from a white oligarchy in the 1970s, only to be faced with the prospect of founding multiracial coalitions in the 1990s due to the increase of Asian and Latino immigration. Yet her book fails to bring the potential of her argument about California’s geopolitics to full realization. Moreover, the work is plagued by Douzet’s seeming unwillingness to cite existing work in American urban studies
Discipline
Religion
Research Areas
Humanities
Publication
Canadian Geographer / Géographe canadien
Volume
59
Issue
2
First Page
e37
Last Page
e38
ISSN
0008-3658
ISBN
9780813932811
Identifier
10.1111/cag.12182
Publisher
Wiley: 24 months
Citation
TSE, Justin Kh.(2015). Review: The color of power: Racial coalitions and political power in Oakland by Frédérick Douzet, translated by George Holoch. Canadian Geographer / Géographe canadien, 59(2), e37-e38.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3138
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12182